I'm in the middle of enforced belt- tightening (direct result of too much enjoyment it seems to me, and therefore VERY unfair) so last week, in desperate need of entertainment but unable to indulge in new reading matter, I splurged £5 on 5 books in the Red Cross shop and felt very pleased with myself for a nice tight clean and varied collection. The weekend weather was grim (still is), just right for reading and I dug into what I hoped would be a light, fluffy, feel-good chic-lit 'The Friday Night Knitting Club' by Kate Jacob. I was disappointed - dismally and depressingly. Not expecting great literature I forgave her the cliche phrases but couldn't forgive the cliche characters, for instance the Scottish grannie who was everything an American dreams a grannie living in Scotland should be and of course isn't. In that is same episode the word 'compact' arrived three times in three paragraphs. I suppose it's the polite New Yorker's way of saying small and a bit pokey.

None of this would have been especially serious - after all it's chic-lit not Virginia Woolf - but the story began to drag and I wondered what she was going to fill in the remaining pages with when suddenly the main character found she had cancer, advanced, and I thought 'Oh THAT'S how she's filling out the pages...' It felt like an afterthought. The tale was thereafter depressing, had spurious messages and a flagging, ineffectual attempt at a positive denouement, but was definitely not what I had signed up for, to use a cliche myself.

Rather strangely, Kate Jacob's book was published the same year as Joanna Trollope's 'Friday Nights' which has a similar theme. It isn't in the same league!

Feeling very gloomy, and still seeing nothing on TV worth watching, I reached for a third time into my little cache.

Kate Moss wrote 'The Labrynth' I couldn't get into that but thought she had something so the short novel (started life as a novella
apparently) set in modern times but also in Cathar country looked interestingly spooky. I miscalculated again. Cathars, as I should know by
now, came to very unpleasant ends and don't lend themselves to lighthearted literature. Much much better written than the Knitting Club it
was still too sad for my mood, which by now needed lifting out of the Slough and above the grey skies outside, thank you.

In desperation I reached for a third, Rose Tremain, the tale of an East European immigrant and his attempts to find work in England so he can send money back to his mother and daughter. It is as harsh and worrying as reading about such hard lives must be, shows British society in the shamefully hollow, celebrity-loving careless light it deserves, but her style makes it unsentimental reading with flashes of humour and human kindnesses that off-set the tragedies. Not too bad for the spirits and at least offers some food for the soul.

Still two more to go, one of which is by a new Swedish crime-writer. In the end I will return to crime. It's safe!