Birthday books

This past Bank Holiday I entered the realms of the thirty-somethings (waves to Aliya and Matt Curran). Along with a nice novel rejection, I also got a couple of books. Two more dissimilar tomes it would be hard to find. The first, which I am reading at home, and only on sunny days, is Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, filled to the brim, Veggiebox fans, with jams, curly kale, potatoes, meat puddings, pig-socks, roly-poly's, stews, honey, berries and other rural delights; the second book was Russell Hoban's The Bat Tattoo, which is resolutely urban and so far--I'm at the halfway mark--is firecracking with brilliance, but is a bit scanty on the food front. There's a fair amount of alcohol though: Jack Daniels, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir. For anyone that hasn't read him, Hoban's post-millennial work puts me in mind of Jonathan Carroll, only without the talking dogs.