10 sleeps to go

I haven't started packing yet, but I DID shift my summer clothes into 'storage' as it is now quite cold, although lovely when the sun is out: 4 deg C overnight and 14-19 deg C during the day.

Fortunately, all the bookings are completed - the final train bookings were made in April (they couldn't be done earlier) and Man in Seat61 and I had the occasional correspondence regarding the vagaries of the Hungarian Rail ticketing system.

Autumn has settled in (although somewhat late this year I think) and the colours are lovely although fading fast.

I am still trying to complete my pre-trip reading. It's been an eclectic batch but all have provided an interesting backdrop to the countries we plan on visiting. I was quite proud that I got through Michener's Poland, a massive read but incredibly interesting: it chronicles three interconnected Polish families across eight centuries.

Am now embarking on The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal. I have tried reading this a couple of times but now re-start in the hope that I can make some headway with it. The author is a renowned ceramicist; he became the fifth generation to inherit a small and exquisite collection of netsuke and, entranced by their beauty and mystery, he traces the story of his family through the story of the collection. His family are the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty centered in Odessa, Vienna and Paris. It ought to be interesting but I have been finding it hard to get into.

I have just finished Life Begins on Friday by Romanian writer Ioana Pârvulescu. This book won her the EU Prize for Literature and is set in Bucharest in the last 13 days of 1897, taking one on an almost whimsical  journey back in time as it connects up a series of characters in an attempt to solve a puzzle. It has been a slow but nevertheless interesting read with some lovely descriptions.

On my i-pad I read Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker, set in Romania and it was indeed an enchanting story about the author's living there side by side with the country people, including a relationship with a gypsy girl. Quite a story!

Darkness and Company by Sigitas Parulskis was a very 'dark' read about the complicity of many of the author's countrymen in the darkest chapter of Lithuania's recent history in which 94% of its Jewish population perished. Not a book I can say I 'enjoyed' but engrossing just the same.

Finally, Entanglement by a Polish writer, Zygmunt Miłoszewski, was an engrossing 'who-dunnit' (set in Warsaw) about a search for a killer that unearths another murder that took place twenty years earlier, before the fall of Communism.