Wire creatures and recent reading

Do look at these wonderful wire sculptures by Laura Antebi here.  Scroll through the website for the pics. You will instantly desire one. I can't remember who highlighted her work recently but thank you.

Recent reading
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1940 Pulitzer prize) Moving, interesting and eminently worthwhile, but, while I admire his prose and wonderful descriptions, I found the novel tough going at times because of all the transliterated Mid-western dialect, and, of course, the sad story. You’ve probably read it but if you haven’t here’s a blurb. “Set during the Great Depression, it traces the migration of a desperately poor Oklahoma farming family to California and their subsequent hardships. The work did much to publicize the injustices of migrant labour.” I only hope that the Joads’ terrible struggles don’t have any resonance with immigrant workers in Europe today.

A major contrast: to my surprise I enjoyed Rosamunde Pilcher’s Winter Solstice much more the second time I read it. Almost nothing happened but there’s an excellent description of a lovely town in the NE corner of Scotland. I liked her comfortable characters too.

Before that, another, more demanding world: I reread Kasuo Ishiguro’s intriguing novel When We Were Orphans. Here’s a blurb for this one: "Christopher Banks has dedicated his life to detective work but behind his successes lies one unsolved mystery: the disappearance of his parents when he was a small boy living in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Moving between England and China in the inter-war period, the book encompasses the turbulence and political anxieties of the time and the crumbling certainties of a Britain deeply involved in the opium trade in the East." He’s a fascinating writer but I never exactly believe in Ishiguro’s strange characters – they seem to be more of medium for examining moral dilemmas than real people.