After a burst of vacation/travel reading, I slowed down
mid-August. Read much of Chris Bohjalian's The Sandcastle Girls for book club, but then couldn’t
attend the meeting, as I had some family
conflicts that arose. Sandcastle was a mediocre reading experience
for me – another historical novel that seemed to try hard to teach –and in this
case impress with violence. The story of slaughter of Armenians by Turks, and
the events at Gallipoli, need to be told an retold, but this telling didn’t
engage me.
I started Niall
Williams The History of the Rain, but haven’t made great progress.
It isn’t the book; it’s me. I do best when I have long
stretches of reading time or a deadline, and lately I’ve chopped my
reading into such short, unsatisfying segments that I’m frustrated. The damn internet – and all the news sites I
visit -- get in the way of good novels.
I confess to a near-obsession with
checking in on the corruption case of our former Governor Bob McDonnell and his
wife Maureen. The melodrama and
trashiness of the testimony have had me hooked. The case has gone to the jury, so I'll soon be done with it.
I work today, but
tomorrow may devote a couple of hours
to Rain, and hope to create enough flow to propel me. So far, it’s a lovely, lyrical book, with
multiple mid-narrative interruptions in the telling, all the more reason to
read it without my own digressions to add to its own.
The internet often distracts me from good reading too. I hope History of Rain hooks you.
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