LONESOME DOVE
About a year ago when I was feeling hopeless one morning, a sentence about a horse appeared in my brain, and later that day when Phil asked what I was doing for the weekend, I said "writing a western novel." Everyone was very pleased with this joke, and though I only ever wrote a few paragraphs of my own western, I have started reading some by other people.
This is one of my grampa Beikmann's favorite books. I can clearly hear him saying its title, and I think he sometimes quotes one of the main characters. While reading it, I often heard him saying Gus's lines.
I love the comfort and the challenge of reading a gigantic book. This one's 858 pages. At first I was annoyed that the only character I related to was sort of pathetic, and the treatment of all the female characters in the first half is appalling. But eventually I became fond of the asshole cowboys and the stoic cowboys and the wise and mysterious not-white cowboys, and in the second half, Clara in Nebraska. Two of the best days of 2015 so far have been the two rain days where school was cancelled and I rolled around in bed with this book all morning, sleepy and sheepish and content. Uva uvam vivendo varia fit. | |
SEASCAPE
Whitney and her brother like this book. She gave me a copy a few months ago, and I finally read it last weekend. On Saturday morning I woke up early feeling despondent, wanted to distract myself but didn't want to read any of the things on my kindle, so I grabbed this from my pile of physical books and got back in bed and read it in an hour and a half. It's a play that starts out boring (in a good way!) and then suddenly becomes very weird. I loved it and I read it at the right time. Thanks Whitney.
other books I read this month:
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