Writer's Karma: Read and Share
Music I'm listening to: Duran Duran's The Chauffeur. (Oh, what a crush I had on Nick Rhodes...)
I've been on an Indian novel kick lately. (To clarify, Asian Indian.) That's one thing that attracted me to my agent—she mentioned M. M. Kaye on her first website. I had just started reading Kaye's wonderful The Far Pavilions after loving John Shors' Beneath a Marble Sky: A Novel of the Taj Mahal.
The current tome on my nightstand (and I do mean tome!) is Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. If I'd realized it was almost 1500 pages long, I probably wouldn't have ordered it. Now I'm glad I didn't see that in the Amazon fine print. I find myself taking this novel downstairs to read during lunch, keeping it open as I brush my teeth, and falling asleep with it late at night. While it doesn't have the bullet pace of some other novels I've read lately, it's full of the quiet moments of truth in people's lives—the contradictions in character, the changes of direction and mind from one moment to the next. I still have 1150 pages to go, and I look forward to every one of them.
If you've read any books you'd like others to know about—ones that floated you into another life or culture without thought of the clock, tell someone. Or tell the whole world. Think of it as karma, as paying it forward. We're writers, but we write because we love books. So do a good deed for other writers by shouting your reading pleasures to one and all.
I've been on an Indian novel kick lately. (To clarify, Asian Indian.) That's one thing that attracted me to my agent—she mentioned M. M. Kaye on her first website. I had just started reading Kaye's wonderful The Far Pavilions after loving John Shors' Beneath a Marble Sky: A Novel of the Taj Mahal.
The current tome on my nightstand (and I do mean tome!) is Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. If I'd realized it was almost 1500 pages long, I probably wouldn't have ordered it. Now I'm glad I didn't see that in the Amazon fine print. I find myself taking this novel downstairs to read during lunch, keeping it open as I brush my teeth, and falling asleep with it late at night. While it doesn't have the bullet pace of some other novels I've read lately, it's full of the quiet moments of truth in people's lives—the contradictions in character, the changes of direction and mind from one moment to the next. I still have 1150 pages to go, and I look forward to every one of them.
If you've read any books you'd like others to know about—ones that floated you into another life or culture without thought of the clock, tell someone. Or tell the whole world. Think of it as karma, as paying it forward. We're writers, but we write because we love books. So do a good deed for other writers by shouting your reading pleasures to one and all.
posted by Katey Coffing, Ph.D. | 1:12 PM
1 Comments:
Yes! I adored Gabaldon's Outlander. I stopped reading that series somewhere around book four, I'm sad to report, but I remember badgering friends to take me to Culloden the last time I visited the U.K. They couldn't figure out why an American would be so interested—but they'd never read Outlander!
Anne McCaffrey's Pern books have an honored place on my shelves. They sucked me in from the first page. It was ages ago when I found them—seventh grade—but I still remember the thrill.
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