...to take us to lands away", said Emily Dickinson. I am a great fan of Emily. She can express the profound in so few words, which is a rare gift. Talking of books, my 'sister' who lives in St Paul-Minneapolis reminded me in an email that I had failed to post the list of books my bookclub had chosen in February and which I had promised in a previous blog post. We have now had our March get-together and I am reminded again to share our latest reading. In February we chose: Ghost by Robert Harris; Homecomings by Bernard Mendel and The book thief by Martin Zusak. This month it was the latest Ian McEwan novel (who wrote Atonement). I am currently reading The Quiet Girl by Peter Hoeg (who wrote Miss Smilla's Sense of Snow). It is rather a strange read so I am being seriously challenged. And this week my finds from the university library's New Books shelf were: The book of lost things (Don't you love that title!) by John Connolly; The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davis and The song before it is sung (That title!!) by Justin Cartwright. The beauty of being university staff is that our loans only have to be returned by September, unless someone else requests them. So these treasures can remain on my To be read shelf until I am ready.
My favourite recent read was Missing Mom by Joyce Carol Oates, who seems to produce another amazing book every year. Books about mothers and daughers and the complexities of their relationships resonate with me. Most of us vacillate between wanting to be like our mothers or wanting to be the exact opposite. I love the way the narrator in the novel came to appreciate her mother and her quirky ways after her death and how she discovered that the most ordinary mom has actually had the most extraordinary life.
