‘Tis, which had been sitting on my bookshelf for about a year, perhaps longer. I have so many books sitting impatiently, waiting for me to read them, that my head spins when it comes time to pick out a new book. I end up closing my eyes and doing the whole "Eenie-meenie-miney-mo" thing. The current plan is to read a book I’ve had for a long time before I can read one of the ones I got for Christmas or my birthday. Old – new – old – new. It would work well, except that I finish a book and get sidetracked by magazines, and then can’t remember whether I read an old one or a new one. I also keep a book in the downstairs bathroom (what, like you don’t read in the bathroom?). I recently read Rebecca, which I had amazingly enough never had to read in high school (I liked it a lot; it holds up well all these years later) and this morning I finished off a Harlequin Romance. Shaddup, I like a good Harlequin from time to time. My "bathroom books", as I call them, come from a different pile of books entirely. They come from the two shelves in the library that hold the books I brought with me from Rhode Island 4 1/2 years ago. I brought them with me because I hadn’t read them yet. And a lot of them are Harlequins. I wouldn’t want a steady diet of Harlequins, but reading one every few months is enjoyable. They’re like total mind candy, and you can always count on a happy ending. It appears I’ve gone a bit astray from where I meant to go… Anyway, I kind of liked ‘Tis, although I was a little leery of it since Pamie ended up throwing it across the room when she read it (go further down the page and read her review of Hannibal; it’s dead-on). What bugged me the most, though, is that he spends a great majority of ‘Tis talking about one woman and how much he loved her at first, and then after several years he married her (why, Frank? You don’t sound like you love her; WHY DID YOU MARRY HER?), and some years later they divorced and yadda yadda yadda. The book ends in Ireland, as he and his brothers are scattering their mother’s ashes (thus we come full circle to Angela’s ashes), and we never hear a single word about the woman he’s currently married to, the woman to whom the book is dedicated. I wanted to hear about her, wanted to learn their love story, and he never wrote one single word about her. Maybe he was just setting me up for book number three. —–]]>
02/19/2001