The sun is shining, the birds are singing and my roses are blooming! In the chicken run, peace and joy (mainly) reign. Daisy and Fluffy now positively like Speckle and no longer positively dislike Frosty; nobody has been chased for a while and languid communal dust baths are a frequent occurrence. Excitingly, Speckle and Frosty have started laying eggs. Their eggs are still quite small, here is one beside one of Fluffy’s productions:
Clara, as you see, is very busy. (Actually, if anyone has some advice on what to do with cats who over-groom, please give it! Her poor tummy is getting quite bald.)
Anyway, it’s definitely time for the May edition of What Shall Helen Read?, and this month we’re travelling back to the 1980s. Here are the candidates:
Oscar and Lucinda, by Peter Carey – a young Australian heiress bets an Anglican vicar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement called Bellingen.
Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth – set in the fourteenth century, a group of travelling players stops in a village and stages a play based on a local murder: the killer has already been found but through the play it becomes clear that the facts don’t fit and that someone else is responsible.
Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavić – this is difficult to describe but it consists of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopaedias, each based on one of the Abrahamic religions; in the introduction the author explains there is no chronology and that it is like a mirror, you will get from it what you put into it, for ‘you cannot get more out of the truth than you put into it’.
The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick – this novella describes the march of three characters to a Nazi concentration camp and their internment there.
What should I read? Have you read any of these?