If you check my sidebar, I read 5, 5 novels this month. I haven't read this many novels in a month for a long time. There were a few years recently past where I doubt I read 5 books a year much less just novels. It was taking it to the outer limits of what my eyes could cope with. There was a whole day this last week where focus deserted me entirely but I read 5 novels.
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant Good book. Bible stories, with a modern woman's take on the place of women in ancient societies. Not a bad sort of fun.
In Another Light by Andrew Grieg. Good book, though there is something a wee bit grating between the two stories being told in tandem (father's and sons). Perhaps the tension was meant to be like that.
The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys. An absolutely lyrical read. This is the one I'll reread right away I think there is much more to catch that I just couldn't absorb the first time. It is one of those books that should be read slowly, one bite at a time so her written pictures get a chance to flower in your brain.
New York by Edward Rutherford. I was at Costco. The book was at Costco. It fell into my cart. I love how he writes his stories, a history of place through its people, through families stories. This was a found book, and an accidental choice, not planned or listed but wonderful all the same.
And lastly, The Arrival. We were discussing graphic novels at the library. I have reservations about them as 'books' and whether they should be counted as reading. They are very popular and populist and it was time I read one. It is another way to tell a story and it is sharing stories, not the reading of books that has been with mankind throughout the millennia.
FrazzledKnitter said to start with a first rate book and suggested this one. The more time you spend in the Arrival, the deeper you come to understand an immigrant's experience of submersion in a utterly foreign landscape. It gives you an inkling of how it must feel to be surrounded by world so foreign that you don't have even the shorthand to imagine it.
This one is going to stay with me, popping into my thoughts at odd moments. Reading the story demanded I go somewhere else to get something out of the story. For a little while, as I made my way through its pages, I was the immigrant, who didn't understand what was going on around me.
I'm still not sure if the experience of graphic novels is reading. Its seems more a new way, a unique way of sharing a story. That said, till they count it as something else, though, I'm quite content to count it among my novels read.
It was a great month, and I am thrilled with my total, but it's kind of nice that I can get back to whatever strikes my fancy. I have a small pile of what strikes my fancy waiting for me. It like knitting. Just a little everyday and you can accomplish unbelievable things.
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