Lindsay

Totally agree Chimera - the Miep Gies book (although shadow written) was just excellent too. And easier to relate to as an adult - though having read Anne's diary when I was about her age it will always be very special to me.

Recently read (not as many as usual as I've been on a bit of a history and other non-fiction bender the past few months): The Coffee Trader - David Liss Couples - John Updike The Mulberry Empire - Philip Hensher Periodic Table- Primo Levi (not exactly fiction, sadly, but I felt it like that) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens I Married a Communist - Philip Roth Brightness Falls - Jay McInerny Terrorism - John Updike The Accidental - Ali Smith The Blue Flower - Penelope Fitzgerald Bleak House - Charles Dickens Cutting Timber - Thomas Bernhard Tinker Tailor - John Le Carre Changing Places - David Lodge Pretty random selection but then I am a very random reader......

haha maybe that's right. I sit at a dry, dull desk all day with no more exciting smells than post its and paperclips so the perfume bits were more exciting for me!

I thought this was much more a sensory book than one about characters. Agree there is not much to like about the main character but I think if you stop trying to empathise and approach the book by letting the amazing descriptions carry you back to a different place and time you may get more out of it. Worked for me!

Did anyone mention Jay McInerny? Very interesting zeitgeist stuff from the 1980s to post 9/11. Also John Updike - Terrorist, a relatively recent one, is very good.

Persuasion Moby Dick Anna Karenina

Janet it means "Work Makes Free" - a particularly cruel irony at Auschwitz which ultimately became primarily a death camp. Although a minority of those who were sent there were put into the camp to work the conditions were so bad that their life expectancy was very short. Primo Levi's "If this is a Man" is the best account of this.

For anyone who lives within reasonable travel distance of London I would heartily recommend Birkbeck College - part of the University of London specialising in adult education. I attend just once a week for a seminar but get full use of their excellent library and other facilities and a better relationship with other students than you get from distance learning. The teaching is great. And since I'm also rather cheekily using my very first post to make recommendations, I would also urge anyone who's enjoyed Regeneration to continue with the other two books in the trilogy - the closing sequence of the final one, when the action shifts for the first time to the front line in France is one of the most moving things I have ever read - mainly because of all that has gone before. Lindsay