This bronchitis has taken its toll and the mega-strength antibiotics which have finally seen it off have extracted most of the fizz and buzz out of me so that I have felt like something flattened against the pavement. I have slept for England during the last few days but today I felt like reading a good book. And of course my general state of irritability meant that nothing would do. Then I remembered Richard Russo. I had never read any and various people had told me that I must, so I bought two or three, more or less at random and this morning, picked up NOBODY`S FOOL. It is exactly right. I have a taste for novels about small-town America, ditto films. Russo writes with wonderful empathy and wit which is never scouring about the inhabitants of New Bath, which has given way in popularity and importance to somewhere called Schuyler Springs and is now generally faded and fading more. The characters are what make the book. There is plot but it ambles and you are not reading it as you read a thriller. It is a warm book but it is not sentimental, easy to read but  extremely well written, sharp where it needs to be but ultimately firmly on the side of the small people.

I will be reading more of Richard Russo though I think he is someone to be taken occasionally, not a book-after-book read. If you have not yet tried him, do. If he is already your best friend, forgive me but isn`t it good to find a brand new-to-you writer with a row of as yet unread books to which to look forward ?