Waiting for the White Blood Cells

I've gone from zero to having some white blood cells since the weekend. I'm nowhere near the normal level yet, but slowly getting there. The doctors say if my white blood cound keeps going up, they'll let me out here in the next few days.

In the meantime, I've had lots of reading time sitting in my sunny south-facing window, Bothe oncology out patient waiting room and the lounge on 5 South have small collections of donated paperbacks, mostly the typical Danielle Steele/James Patterson type. However, I've read two really interesting books serendipitously found there: The Fox Boy, in which the author investigates and recounts the life of a Maori boy aducted by white European New Zealanders in the 1860s. With the focus, the book becomes a much larger story of the relatiohship between whites and Maoris so you learn quite a bit of New Zealand history.

My other find was Rudy Wiebe's "The Blue Mountains of China" - one of his early novels. It looks at the Russion Mennonite experience from 1929 whentheir farms and property were taken to become collectives, to the late 1960s. The interesing part is the structure - with different chapters from the perspective of different charaters, some related and some nterconnected as time goes on.

Now I'm reading Michael Ondaatje's "Divisadero", and dipping into Garrison Keillor's "Good Poesm" collection.

I'm getting Harvey to tpye and post this for me.

Wendy