NYC to Bach's Suite in C

The combination of long haul flights and fiction helped me knock a couple other novels off my list.  It can be a hard decision of which book to be married to for nine hours, through turbulence and calm skies,  dinner and breakfast, ignoring all movies, until you hit the tarmac.

The Overdue Life of Amy Byler by Kelly Harms drew me in with what I thought was a letter to her Mom but was instead the prelude to Chapter One.  When I started Chapter Two, I re-started the book and then read, well, until the seat belt sign came off for the final time.  It was a fun read about mom-ing, friendships, dating, reading, with a few journal entries (in the form of letters) thrown in.  Amy, our main character, who is Mom and librarian, has a hard jolt that eventually works its way into a blessing and a "Momspringa".  I liked Amy's parenting style, her awkwardness in adjusting to time way from her kids, and her capacity for forgiveness.  The kids were a-ok too.

I tried four other books before I settled into Everything You Are by Kerry Anne King.   I enjoyed this book enough to keep reading but I didn't fall in love with it.  I really liked the characters and their hardened edges, but I had a hard time accepting the thread that binds several of them together:  the acceptance of a lifelong commitment to play an instrument or dire consequences if you stop.  There certainly were no shortage of tragic events in the novel and throughout them all, I was rooting for Braden Healey and his daughter, Allie.  I also wanted Ophelia MacPhee (Phee) to find her happiness.  In this way, King's novel was a success for me.

I am not sure if I will stay the course of fiction or swing back to non-fiction for a bit.  As always, if you have any recommendations for my book list, please send them my way.  Happy reading!

Worth the Weight

After a series of nonfiction and memoirs, I had forgotten what a sheer pleasure a good novel is to read.  I had started The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish one Friday morning.  With the hot, humid weather, I did not have a strong urge to be outside other than that which was necessary, so I read.

I read and I remembered my childhood summers, spent plowing through books with my mom asking me each day, "don't you want to go outside?"  The answer was almost always "no" and I worked through my booklist.

The Weight of Ink lends itself to long spells of reading and procrastinating all which is non-essential.  I am not normally a fan of titles which jump from one time period to the other, but after a few chapters, this style really did move quite seamless with the noted change of vocabulary for the events of the 1600s.  Reading electronically was also a treat as a definition was just a moment away when needed.  When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about reading.  And now, that I've finished, I want to go back and read it again for the things I have missed.  (I'm relatively certain that I have never wanted to read an historical fiction book twice.)

My last history class was a few years decades ago and even then, I am not sure we covered more than "there was a plague in London" as the teacher tried to cover 100s of years in days or weeks.  Ester, our protagonist, is wonderful, as are the other characters in her household:  Rabbi Mendes and Rivka.  In present day, Helen and the Patricias are magnificent.  I was moved with all the characters at one point or another.  Their strengths, hesitations, and failings are displayed without judgement or applause, leaving the reader to cheer or sigh.

The Q&A included with my copy was also great insight into the story's beginnings and the amount of effort that Kadish put into research was really extraordinary, which lends to the book's heft as a "thinking novel".  I would definitely recommend it for your reading list!