Bookworm

Did I tell you I'm a bookworm? I have been from a small child. I rarely read anything intellectual, unless it's the newspaper. I always nod off though, reading newspapers, so I more often get my news off TV or radio.

My favourite reads are always who-dun-its! Before we came to live in this tiny house I had hundreds of books of one sort or another but I had to give most of them away; except the cookery books, and there I had to draw the line! I wish now that I had tried harder to find space to keep them all. There was everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, all of Thomas Hardy and Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Whimsey series, many by Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, PD James.

There were others too, not connected with crime (you're breathing a sigh of relief, I can hear you!). I had all the James Herriot Vet books, 'Bless me Father books (remember that series on TV?). All of them were paperbacks but I loved each one and they all went to our local Hospice shop. Just today I was talking on the phone with a friend who was telling me that another friend of hers had just bought all of Agatha Christie's work - in paperback - FROM THE HOSPICE SHOP!!!!!!! Grrr.

I have been reading a lot of Patricia Cornwell's books this past year. I love her Kay Scarpetta character. Although each book is a story in its own right, there is a theme running through them all of her main characters' lives. If you don't read them in the order they are published - and I didn't to start with - you start to wonder how and why a regular character is as he is. So you have plenty to think about: Scarpetta, her family, her colleagues, her job (she's a forensic pathologist),the plot. I would rate her as one of the best writers around. If you like that kind of thing.

Strangely, in spite of the TV costume dramas that abound at present, I have never in my life read a Jane Austen novel. Maybe that 'in spite of'' ought to be 'because of'': it's just that I generally do not like these TV adaptations. They get in the way of my imagination. So-and-so doesn't look how I thought and, while I wouldn't presume to foist my imaginings on the rest of the nation, they do take precedence in my head. One day I may wish to read Austen and I don't want her descriptions sullied by the art of the screenplay writer. OK?

What I'm reading at the moment though is Ruth Rendell's latest Inspector Wexford mystery, "Not in the Flesh". Wexford really is the architypal bumbling plod! He's lovely! Whoever cast that role to George Baker got it exactly right. I wouldn't like him to be after me, much too clever. Sometimes Ruth Rendell's books take a while to get down to business and there bloodthirsty me will be, wondering when it's all going to kick off. Not with this one though. Straight in there! Great bedtime reading.

I expect I shall give it away so if anyone wants it please let me know. I can post it to you.