Started with Loose Canon edited by Damian Thompson - a portrait of Brian Brindley. One of the characters of the 1970's General Synod. I'm not sure that the book helps you understand Brindley better but there some wonderful details - like faxing huge documents of &'s just for the fonts.. owned a cat called Judith with Holofernes the poodle. I regret I never visited Holy Trinity when I lived in Reading though in some respects I'm sure I would have hated the experience!
Then I picked up David Mason's The Piano Tuner in the local Oxfam shop, as I read I wondered whether this was too Maughamish - innocent colonial seduced by a woman and the spirit of the East but I think the ending convinced me that this was not quite so! Daniel Mason, spent a year studying malaria on the Thai-Myanmar border.
Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) by Jean-Dominique Bauby - read this in French though I could have done with taking a dictionary with us! I mean to re-read it with the aid of one! Bauby was editor of Elle and suffered a stroke which led to 'locked in syndrome' and the book was dictated using one eyelid. Reflections on the ordinary from an extraordinary situation. I talked about it briefly in my sermon this morning and a few minutes later there was a butterfly fluttering right in front of me as I talked - unfortunately I wasn't alert enough to link it to the book I'd just described, or wonder if a diving bell was about to descend from the ceiling a la Tom and Jerry!
The final book was Sunetra Gupta's The Glassblower's Breath - the author divides her time between writing and researching infections diseases - maybe you see the unconscious pattern of book selection here!? I've not finished it yet and am still trying to work out whether or not I can handle the - to me - rather off putting style! An Australian site has a transcript of her talking about her writing style
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