The trip to Texas was successful in that I was able to completely relax and just spend time with my mom in a focused way that has happened for many years. Being the people we are, some of that time was spent companionably sitting and reading not-very-important novels. Here is a brief list of what I've been reading lately.
I did however, finish Nightwoods before I left. I thought it was an excellent novel. The main characters are really rather modest people, seemingly minor characters, the kind of people who are often overlooked or ignored, or who are just too often dismissed. But as in life there is more to each character than meets the eye, if only one is willing to take time to see what lies underneath the surface. Frazier reveals his characters, along with the setting, slowly and resonantly and you come to know them and care about some of them much in the way you would people you have met and gotten to know over time. It is a novel of character: of loss, of love, of courage. The prose can be lush or flinty as necessary, but it is never overdone. Highly recommended.
On the flight to Texas I read Diane Mott Davidson's Crunch Time, the newest in the series about the exploits of caterer Goldy Schulz. It was enjoyable enough, but it didn't seem quite as humerous in its exploits of Goldy's fellow citizens as I remember the early novels being, or perhaps I just enjoyed Goldy's comments about her fellow Episcopalians. Goldy reminded me of a Virginia Cary Hudson wanna-be, without ever quite pulling it off.
On the flight home I read Stuart Woods' Grass Roots. This was the first Will Lee novel I have read, although I have encountered Lee in several of Woods' other novels. It was actually a bit more compelling than I expected, although some parts of the story line did seem incredibly far-fetched, and I enjoyed reading it. It took me a little longer than my other weekend-reading, perhaps it was a bit more absorbing, and I finished it up yesterday afternoon. I would say it was better than most of what I have read recently from Woods, but then it is not that new, and I just noticed that it was written 20 years ago, so that may be the explanation right there, but perhaps I will read some of the other Will Lee novels when I get my next entertainment itch.
Over the weekend I indulged in even lighter fluff, fluffy birthday visit reading: Hotel Vendome and Happy Birthday by Danielle Steel. Both perfectly nice and entertaining though repetitive and predictable, mostly read in snatches here and there, and they were perfectly well suited for that.
And that leaves me with a book I actually read back in January, but never wrote about here, The Cry of the Go Away Bird by Andrea Eames. This was another book with powerfully evocative prose and I wish I had written about it earlier, when I remembered the details more clearly. It had been recommended to me as a good coming-of-age novel, and I suppose it is, but it did not really strike me very strongly in that sense, even though it is a powerful novel about a young girl whose world is being ripped apart as she is growing up. But I didn't see Elise, the main character as really growing up in this novel. She is a young girl trying to come to terms with a world she does not understand, and although that is a part of the coming-of-age theme, Elise is still a girl here, a girl with moments of profound wisdom, the kind of sharp wisdom girls have when they are on the cusp of verging into adulthood, and which they all too often loose. When Elise leaves Africa she is still in the midst of this process of trying to find understanding and she is still a girl in waiting. I do think this is one of the strengths of the novel. One gets the sense of it being a remininscense, as if it is being told by an older Elise, looking back on her younger self, looking back with yearning and sadness and love.
