It’s Sunday so there is cake.Merlin Jobst- Best Boldest Coffee Cake- For Jamie Oliver.In true Sunday style half the cake has gone off on its travels. Tomorrow another quarter will go on its way.This Sunday the cake accompanies books.I’ve been invited to share 7 books I enjoy on Facebook. No explanations, no reviews. Then I invite 7 friends to do the same.It just seems a bit sad not to share my reasons so I’m doing it here and I can pop a link on Facebook.In no particular order.This is a recent read , all the action takes place on one New Year’s Eve. But the narrative covers almost 60 years of New York History and the personal story of Lilian Boxfish. It was a page turner yet the subject matter was poetry, advertising and the life of a business woman. Hardly normal page turning material.I love words. I’ve owned this book since 1972, it’s preferable to on line thesaurus searching.Like the Thesaurus this book is never far from my bedside. 5 minutes or 5 hours can be lost between it’s covers. My favourite diarist in this brilliant book is Alan Bennett.New York by Edward Rutherford. The same city as Lilian Boxfish but this time the history is counted in centuries. As a reader I was kept on the edge of my seat/bed/sunlounger by the way history turned and altered not by planning or intention but by coincidence, missed encounters or wicked intent.Colour theory and the history of colour are some of my favourite subjects to read about when I might get interrupted. This book always accompanied my on- call nights in a London Hospital . It didn’t always get a lot of attention.Blood and Sugar , a story of Deptford that taught me so much and explained why the historical architecture of Deptford is so outrageously and shamefully grand. I use the word outrageous and shame deliberately but this is a great piece of historical fiction.

Another tale of London set in part just 50 yards from the London Hospital where the Colour Book accompanied me in my On- calls. A great read about a prostitute and her ‘ protector’ and the characters around them, it has a curious end which is tidied up by a subsequent collection of short stories