Better sleeping (or calmer books!)

Thanks to all of you for the comments and encouragement after the first post the other day. I'm continuing to feel a little stronger every day, enjoying all the extra food that the steroids force (!) me to eat, and trying to fit in a little light exercise each day. Newcastle's win over Everton today didn't do the spirit any harm either!!

One of the main side-effects of the steroids is that I don't sleep right through the night, so I'm getting plenty of midnight reading done. The thing I've had to improve though, is the intensity of my reading material. I was in the middle of 'Angela's Ashes' when I went into hospital and stupidly continued to read it in the first few days post-surgery.

It's an excellent book, telling the moving story of Frank McCourt's childhood during 1930s and 1940s Limerick, Ireland. Much of the narrative focuses on the day-to-day struggle of the family to find sufficient food and clothing, especially as Frank's father was an alcoholic who either couldn't hold down a job or drank his wages on the way home each week. The problem for me was that my mind was not the most settled and I had a number of weird dream sequences of wanting to go back in time to give food and clothes to the McCourt children or wanting to create some kind of home for them here on the lake. It was all very bizarre and probably not ideal recovery reading.

Next up was Lance Armstrong's outstanding autobiography 'It's not about the bike', chronicling his comeback from testicular cancer at the age of 25 and his subsequent seven tour-de-France wins. It's an incredibly inspiring story and I took a lot of positive energy and ideas from it, but again, I'm not sure it was the most settled reading for my sleeplesss nights.

So, last night, armed with a saucer of lavender oil and a copy of Elizabeth Hay's 'Late Nights on Air', I enjoyed a much more settled sleep. It's a novel set in a radio station in the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife and, although it sounds odd, the words just seemed to fall off the page into my mind, without making a sound.

I guess I'll work on this for the next couple of nights, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. All other calming book recommendations warmly received.