Back in business

For a while I wasn’t able to gauge my mood and understand what appealed to me. Then there was the happy news that I was going on vacation, then the unbearably disappointing news that it had to be canceled. Nothing was working. While work continued to be slow, I picked up Ken Follett’s A Place Called Freedom. It gave my brain cells something to keep going on.

Last week I was browsing the library shelf and found The Club Dumas, looked worth a shot. What a mistake! Something about an original manuscript being stolen, people dying, people chasing people; while sounded like the kind of stuff to keep me engaged the reality was far from it. It was a drag! While I never bothered to envision, my understanding was that literary people could also have some fun. An author portrays characters in several different ways; mysterious can be one of them. But when you start writing about them and I fail to get a mental picture of this dude then we got problems.

So frustrated I asked a friend for help. The thing to keep in mind, I told her was, I wanted mindless reading. No heavy stories about spirituality, philosophy or the like. Simple reading where my brain feels excited but is the least bit burdened. She recommended Memoirs of a Geisha. Somehow the whole geisha thing never interested me. So we moved on. The Red Tent, she then sends me a link for. Now, she was talking!

At lunch, I went across to the Mid-Manhattan library and feeling cautious (in case The Red Tent is also a disappointment), picked up 2 more books – The Witch of Portobello, Paulo Coelho and Fall of Giants, Ken Follett. At some point lasy yearI started to read the Fall of Giants but was too distracted and gave my copy away as an X’mas present.

So I think I am going to start with The Red Tent. Its historical fiction picked up straight from the Bible. Conspiracy! I love it!! It’s the story of someone named Dinah and about her rape. In the Bible, she doesn’t say anything about it but in The Red Tent she “finds her voice”.

The book was first published in 1997 and only due to word of mouth became a phenomenal success. So for now, I’ll go enjoy the marvelous sun and what looks like a fight for justice by Dinah.