Hi everyone, How I miss it when I don't get to the computer to write about what I'm reading. I feel as though I'm personally letting you down. Then I say, Sally, are you crazy? Does anyone really wait to see what you have to say next? Well, we'll find out. Now that I'm participating in Nanowrimo it seems that all I do is spew words out. The question is, will they ever amount to anything?
Don had the cleverest idea for a mystery novel revolving around the various disparate members of the library staff and their quirky associates. I'm sorry to confess that my imagination just doesn't work that way. My nanowrimo novel is simply writing what I know and putting a "spin" on it. Just call me James Frey. I'm writing about my life but in the third person so that it'll sound like fiction. What a cop out. The question is, as Don just asked me, if there are only X amount of hours a day, how many do I want to devote to reading for pleasure, how many must I devote to reading for Library Journal (which is also my great pleasure) and how many can I devote to being with my friends, exercising, working, the list goes on and on. Is this what they mean by "the horns of a dilemma?"
Sing Them Home is the novel that I'm totally engrossed in right now. I had planned to read it but am listening instead and, though it requires, once again, a great expenditure of time, I think it's just wonderful! Andrea and I fell in love with Stephanie Kallos several years ago when she came out with her first book Broken For You. She is such an imaginative writer with an amazing sense of people and character development. http://www.stephaniekallos.com/
Reading her memo on the website, she says she was taught that a writer must love the reader and I might add that she certainly loves her characters too. They may be deeply troubled but redeemable, they may also be remarkably normal and then do something so off the wall that you simply pull back in awe. But no matter what, they are oh so real.
Her new book is difficult to describe but I've learned some things I never knew about Nebraska and Wales and who knew how many Welshmen settled in Nebraska? Or that their funeral rites seem to mimic those of the Jewish faith? In Emlyn Springs, the dead are very much a part of the picture, observing those they've left behind and commenting among themselves. The Jones family has folks on both side of the divide. We hear from Hope, who is assumed dead after she and her youngest daughter Bonnie were swept up by a tornado, through years of diary entries in which she examines her life married to Llewelyn Jones, small town family doctor, father also to Larken and Gaelan.
Another narrator is Viney Kloss, Hope's best friend, the doctor's nurse and long time companion, who took over the raising of Hope's children and the care and feeding of Llewelyn after Hope's disappearance. The adult children are glorious characters, so prickly, so different from eachother that it's difficult to believe that they could truly be related by blood - much like my own family and, I'm sure, many others who won't admit it.
If you enjoy long, langorous, reads that suck you in and people that you understand, empathize with and maybe even know, if you believe in serendipity and that things happen for a reason, if you loved Richard Russo's Empire Falls or Bridge of Sighs, then you might want to try this book on for size.
On my mp3? Lisa See's Shanghai Girls. I can't say that I'm enamoured yet but will keep you posted. On to my novel!
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