The Lure of Books and Unplanned Naps on Days Like This

With my paperwork pile finally conquered, I've worked hard these last several days on maintaining this current state of up-to-dateness. No charge receipt has gone unfiled, no bill unpaid, no mail unopened.

With gray skies and pouring rain and my time thus cleared to work on projects, to finally put into albums those photos going back to 2002 or to play downstairs with my glass, I've chosen the luxury of picking up a new novel and falling asleep while reading it. The projects will wait. Softly drifting into an unplanned nap is oh-so-enticing.

Another of my authors has fallen off my must read list. December Wedding is the eighth book by Anita Shreve that I've read and possibly the last. Her competence is unfailing, yet I found myself bored with her characters and their problematic lives. Was it that in all cases new love was purchased at the price of marital fidelity? Perhaps this contributed to it. I lost much respect for Barbara Walters when she disclosed her affair with a black married man. It was decades ago and she said that people back then would have judged her harshly while today people were more understanding of such things. I had the sense that she was focusing more on his race than his marital status.


I think I've come to a point where I want more from a novel than even a competent author such as Anita Shreve chooses to deliver. I like a sense of history and of place and of culture, particularly those that differ from my own. One of these days I'll write about some of my favorite books. There are so many wonderful ones. I'll be reading Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns next. I found his first novel, The Kite Runner, to be compelling, but a bit too brutal for me. With this book, I'll discover if Hosseini will be added to my GLA.*

*GLA stands for Grocery List Authors, those authors who I like so much that I'd even read their grocery list (once). I'd previously referred to them as my laundry list authors, but have since realized that I don't know what a laundry list is. I believe Margaret Atwood used the term in a lecture I attended. She described herself as such an author for many people, saying that she could get away with this only once.