Escaping a Few Pages at a Time

Over the holiday I finally started a real book. Actually re-started. I had already read the opening chapters of Kafka on the Shore a while back and was really intrigued, but the hard cover book is too much to lug around.

It's such a nice luxury to lie in bed and read from a nice fat book instead of off a screen. Now that I'm back to work there's less time to slip away into Haruki Murakami's strange tale but I'm trying to get in a couple of pages when I can and clear my mind in this fictional escape.

What are you reading now? Do you have a favorite author or book that transports you from the everyday?

Sunflower Heaven

In her book Seventh Heaven, Alice Hoffman tells the story of a divorcee who flees the city for 1960's Long Island with her two young boys. Frustrated by the upkeep of the overrun 1/4 acre she inherited from the former owners, she turns her backyard into a sunflower field. While this dismays her neighbors, I love the idea and the book. I'm trying my own sunflower garden this year, albeit a slightly more contained version. Here's a wonderful example of a sunflower garden from Wouter Ten Broek. Check out his sunflower prints if planting seems too much of a hassle.