It's been a long time and reading of late

It's been so long since I've posted that I've nearly forgotten how this works!  Good to see that Blogger is still here and that it works in much the same way that I remember.  Clearly, I have some revising to do.  Yesterday I was so taken with toggling between preview and edit that forgot to save.  So my lovely post disappeared.  My fault, not Blogger's, although it would have been nice to have had it ask me if I wanted to save.  (Sort of like Zen, the computer in Blake's 7--a sci fi show I loved but haven't been able to find on DVD.

Been reading a great deal in the last year.  Two neighbors have given me good recommendations and I have found some on my own.  The librarian who pulls books for me for the SOS program finds more for me from time to time.

Recently I read Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers. Absolutely wonderful book set in Babylonia at the time of the Fall of Jerusalem, it is the story of the siege of Masada.  Strong women characters, a totally different way of life and history that I had not read before, made this one of the most absorbing novels I have ever read.  Will be a television mini-series soon with one of my favorite actors, Cote de Pablo.

Maggie Anton's novels Rav Hisda's daughters take place in the same Mediterranean world a couple of hundred years later.  So far I have only read the first one and I think the second may be in the tote under the table waiting for me to read very soon.  Again they feature strong women characters and open up time, place and Jewish culture so that they are marvelously different from novels set in modern times.

As a student, I majored in medieval history, so Maggie Anton's Rashi's Daughters, were particularly absorbing for they gave me a look at the Middle Ages from a Jewish perspective, set as they are in medieval Troyes.

Highest recommendations for all of these books from a reader who reads too much! Can there be such a thing?  (If I would spend half the number of hours in the day that I spend reading, writing.... I won't go there.)

So this is a kind of test post, to see if I can get it right this time. (And I found the one I thought was lost!  Google gets more points.)