A blue snack.....and Booktalk on a Sunday 19

Yesterday I had an early lunch in town with Marta. We had planned a late dinner in the garden, and in the afternoon I was starving. I decided to make myself a light snack. The ruccola is ripening in the herb garden and I picked the first leaves of the season. In the fridge I had some cherry tomatos and a mozzarella, and I also had a piece of dry bread which I toasted. I filled a small ceramic bowl with olive oil, an old glass with lime and tapped water, and a glass bought in Prague last summer with white wine. Then carried it all out to the blue table where I sat down with a stack of books. (More photos from the snack are over in The Blue Café)

The Blue Table is a perfect place for reading, and I bring out piles of books. Not that I read them all, but it feels so good to have them there. Like old friends. I can pick up one and read from the first to the last page, another one just for a page or two, a third for the good feeling of words I have read before and know by heart, another one for its pictures........and my diary for writing down bits and pieces of what is on my mind.

Here are a few of the books from my current pile:

Findings by Kathleen Jamie. I found this book in the travel book section at a bookshop in Newcastle a couple of weeks ago. Women travel writers always interest me, and this one looked very good. Which it also is :-) Katleen Jamie, who lives in Scotland, has collected essays written from her travels in Scotland , the Orkney islands and the Hebrides. She has just the perfect eye for details in nature which I love so much.

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King. Merisi recommended this book in a comment last Sunday when I metioned I needed some good litterature after Pillars of the Earth. We are going to spend a week in Rome in July, I already had this book in my shelves - a good choice. Being fiction it can be a bit boring at times, but mostly I love to learn more about the historical facts from old Rome.

As you know I read with a pen just as much as with my eyes, and here is something I found quite interesting and of course underlined. (the topic is about Michelangelo's wish to build a bridge over Bosphorous, linking Europe and Asia) Michelangelo no doubt got the idea for this project from Leonardo da Vinci, who had written to the Sultan several years earlier with a proposal to build a bridge linking Europe with Asia. Neither bridge was ever built. The Sultan rejected Leodardo's design as unrealistic, but in 2001 the artist Vebjørn Sand constructed a scale-down 220-foot-long version of the bridge to span a Norwegian motorway, proving the design would have worked.

I have several Gertrude Jekyll books, but I have already told you about those, and then I have Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa Lee. I got this book from a friend some days ago, and know this will be My Read of this summer. I will be travelling down to Oslo with the night train tonight, and with this book in my purse I don't mind if I don't get to sleep much.

Happy reading Sunday. Now I am on my way out to have breakfast at the Blue Table.