It’s a beautiful, warm day. I went out to get a Pansie photo; I hope to get a couple of new flowers this weekend.

My writing will be chaotic today, as a Farm Journal should be; I’m heading to the Mansion for Meditation Class and Saratoga for a regularly scheduled pulmonologist visit. I’ve got to stop and pick up my new tinted glasses, prescribed to help me deal with bright lights and bright sun.

I am supposed to rest in between somewhere and tonight; our friends Ian McCrae and Margaret Waterson are coming for dinner. Jamie is still taking apart and repairing the roof, and we’re hired a young Amish friend to come and help us tear down the ugly plastic South wall window of the Pole Barn and replace it with wood.

It is going to be a wild day for most of the day. I’m ready for the weekend.

When recovering from something, I always focus on two or three great books and read them – I sometimes jump from one to another; it helps me to heal. I know two are beautiful books, and I’m eager to read the third.

I found an original copy of my all-time favorite author – Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wonderful novel  Autumn Of The Patriarch. I’m almost halfway done with another remarkable story, Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, a brilliant chronicle of family inspired by Little Women, written by American Novelist Louisa May Alcott’.

Little Women is a coming-of-age novel initially published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters and centers on their passage from childhood to womanhood. This novel is very different but it also focuses on family.

There are four sisters in Hello Beautiful, along with a mysterious and troubled man named William. It’s a brilliant book.

I’m eager to read Mariana Enriquez’s long-awaited novel, Our Share Of Night.

Enriquez is said to be the next Marquez, the greatest writer in South America today, which is good enough for me.

This story is full of lost souls and demons,  mystical and fantastical, and very long in the best Latin American tradition. Her book has some of the most potent reviews I’ve ever read, three of them call it a masterpiece, and it won the Booker Prize in England.

I don’t need to explain Autumn Of The Patriarch; it is one of the best novels ever written and my all-time favorite book; I was lucky to get a first edition, battered but intact, online with the original cover.

The novel is more than 500 pages long (you can pick it out above from the photo). These books will keep me resting and quiet at different times of the day and help me heal quickly. These are all books I can’t put down and will stay up all night reading.

I’ll check in later when I can.