No, I did not read Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here, though I’m sure that some time I should. (It sounds kind of harrowing but maybe that’s just me.)
I just hit a little rough patch. Does this ever happen to you? Distress piles up and all you want to do is Get Away to some place where someone else has problems you don’t really believe in, and anyway they’re going to get solved in a couple of hundred pages. For me that place is always a book. Always a book I’ve read before: this is no time for experimentation. It’s more of an emergency; you might say I was reading frantically. The way I justify this is thinking that I am keeping my conscious mind busy and out of trouble with these comforting plots while some heavy lifting occurs in the unconscious part of my mind.
So in the last week and change I read:
Catherine Gaskin, The Property of a Gentleman
Dick Francis, Enquiry
Dick Francis, Comeback
Michael Gilbert, The Country House Burglar
Jane Aiken Hodge, Watch the Wall, My Darling
Old friends all (in several cases, I had to tape the covers back onto the crumbling pages). And I’m feeling much better, now, thank you.
