If books were chocolate, the last one I read - Stoner - would be three crisp, snappy squares of bitter Valrhona to be nibbled on and savoured.

And this one would be an over-large bar of Galaxy, consumed in naive belief that calories don't count if you gobble it fast enough.

It was a pleasant, quick read that will linger in my mind at least until I start thinking about putting tonight's dinner on. On the face of it, it's a charming idea, an epistolary love affair between a young, married poet living on a croft on Skye and an impetuous young American lad who becomes an ambulance driver in WW1.

But I didn't believe in them, didn't believe in their voices, especially hers, didn't believe even in the mechanics of the story, ie that her poetry would have made anything like enough money for her to go gadding off to Paris and London hotels. Would a crofter's daughter in 1913, who had never left Skye, ask someone if they had started writing the Great American Novel?

Perhaps this is best left to American readers. It's an American author, an American publisher - and, as Cornflower said when she reviewed it, many readers won't be troubled by the niggles. Jessica Brockmole, who comes from the Midwest, spent a week on the Isle of Skye and started scribbling notes in the car on the way home. Maybe I'm being mean. I wouldn't have bothered reviewing it, except I'm tied to my desk waiting for someone to come out of a meeting.

It started when a couple of people came up to me on the beach last weekend - then somebody else mentioned it as I wandered past the beach-huts with the book in my hand - even the waitress in the cafe said, 'Oh, you're reading that book.' The waiting list for Stoner at the library is as long as your arm and I can't remember when there was such buzz about a book that was worth reading. As opposed to hype about Fifty Shades of JK Rowling.
I'm not sure whether it was Bryan Appleyard or Ian McEwan who got in first but the consensus is that this is the 'greatest novel you have never read.'  It is quiet, spare, restrained, the story of one man's life of heartbreaking insignificance and humanity. Stoner is a Missouri farm boy who goes to agricultural college where he discovers the power of literature when he hears his professor reading Shakespeare's sonnet 73.

This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, 
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.  

Stoner becomes a professor. He endures a disappointing marriage, he fails his daughter, he loves deeply  and then love slips through his fingers. Nothing happens to him and yet he lives a life of quiet integrity.

Was it the greatest novel I'd never read? It has been echoing in my mind all week, reminding me of Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, and there was something in its tone that also made me think of The Professor's House by Willa Cather. One of those novels that makes you realise that this is why you read. Trouble is ... when a book is this good, what do you read next?

Getting next year's WWI commemorations off to an early start, I enjoyed BBC2's drama The Wipers Times, coming soon, based on the satirical magazine that was the Private Eye of the trenches. (Click on the image to read the text.)

Sue has been writing about lovely, colourful Ladybird Books which set me reminiscing about the reading books we had when I was at school. We started on the Radiant Way ... Run, run to mother ... mother wearing a dress that might have been in fashion c1934. Even at four, we were aware that these books had seen better days. So had the dirty Plasticene. 

 And then we progressed to Dick and Dora, and Fluff and Nip.

After which, an unendurably long time later, the Good Readers were promoted to a grubby copy of Blue Skies. Just like this one.

By which time I was thoroughly bored and disappointed with school. Only 12 more years to go ...

It's many, many years since I read Bonjour Tristesse when I was a student, very taken with the idea of international best-sellers written by 18-year-old authors.
I don't recall that I particularly enjoyed it as a novel and I'd never seen the 1958 film until this morning.
I do enjoy the illicit treat of going to the cinema in the afternoon, but it seems even naughtier clutching your first cup of coffee in the morning when you haven't done any work at all.
From the first shots of monochrome Paris and Jean Seberg's pixie-crop haircut and fabulous LBD by Givenchy, I knew I was absolutely going to love every minute. Diamonds by Cartier, handbags by Hermès, Juliette Greco ...
And then glorious Technicolor on the Riviera with decadent David Niven in short-shorts and a highly inappropriate relationship with his 17-year-old daughter. Not to mention the much younger girlfriend who gets dropped 'like a hot lobster' when her lobster-red sunburn starts peeling, then returns with an all-over tan to break Deborah Kerr's heart.
Louche, luscious and irresistible.

With two minutes to choose a book as I ran for a bus that I really didn't want to miss yesterday morning, I grabbed one that couldn't have been more perfect - because the heroine's name is Dahlia, and I was off to Wisley where I saw some splendid specimens in the dahlia trials. Dahlia trials sound wonderfully cheering, don't you think ... here's Bishop of Llandaff in the lead, but Lismore Willie is on his tail and Alva's Doris,  the favourite, doesn't like the going today ...

And, yes, I realise I got off the wrong foot by starting with a picture of echinacea but they were splendid, too. 

I ate my sandwiches in the orchard under a nut tree and gasped in admiration over fuzzy peaches and the fattest blackberries I've ever seen (there was a blackberry trial, too) and shiny aubergines ...

And borders that zinged with colour. A perfect day in a perfect garden.

The Music Lesson, Royal Collection 

It was a lovely end to the day to stroll into the National Gallery at 8pm and happen upon a concert of early music at this small but very lovely exhibition.
I was too late for a seat but listened as I wandered around looking at the paintings.
I do find that at a small exhibition, I look more intently ... at the ultramarine seat of the chair, that exquisite jug, the detail of the man's cane and the delicate paintstrokes that make his bandolier. When you peer closely - and I'd never have worked this out for myself - you can see that there is also ultramarine in the leaded lights of the windows.
And, not in this painting, but I love the blue and white Delft tiles skirting the edges of some of the rooms.
There is a fascinating display at the end of the exhibition about Vermeer's paint and techniques and I only wished that I could have had it as a leaflet in my hand - because I was backwards and forwards checking details of the paintings.

There are only four Vermeers, five if you count one that looks very dodgy. And as almost all the paintings have been drawn from the National Gallery's own collection  - with the exception of the Queen's Vermeer and the one from Kenwood - you can normally see them any time you like without having to pay to get in.