Carol Rutz is a former colleague of Nancy's, a literary scholar, and a teacher who helps Carleton students write better.
We saw each other at Carleton when I was on a panel at the beginning of the school year.
I was there representing high schools everywhere in trying to explain to Carleton faculty
why first year students often have great difficulty during that first academic term. (No, I did
not discuss my own very difficult first term almost 40 years ago.) I don't know how much
new information I had to offer, but seeing Carol elicited this set of recommendations.

Hey, Ken. As promised a couple of weeks ago, I'll offer some thoughts about some books I've read recently. Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones is getting a lot of attention for its premise: a 14-year-old kidnap/murder victim observes what happens to her friends, family, and murderer after her death. The story presents some intriguing ideas about the nature of heaven and the attractive notion of blurred boundaries between the living and the dead. After a while, though, I thought it was losing steam as life on earth progressed and the dead girl remained a 14-year-old who was undergoing a different kind of development as a dead person. (The narrator makes lots of references to what she's ready to face or consider, according to her [presumably olderãor deader?] companions in heaven.) Perhaps the author agreed that things were sagging a bit, for toward the end, she begins to violate the rules she established early in the book. For me, at least, it was difficult to know whether, for example, the dead can physically appear to the living. Early in the book we hear about "contact" in terms of vague tactile sensation, but by the end, contact takes on other sensory forms. As a whole, therefore, I thought the book failed to keep faith with readers. Nevertheless, it provides a way to examine the effects of trauma on those left behind. It may also help some find comfort as they grieve for loved ones. If Alice Sebold is right, the dead miss us, too, and they regret being stymied in time while we continue to grow and change. James Lasdun's The Horned Man is a short, Kafkaesque novel about an academic who suspects he's being watched or possibly stalked by a person with criminal intent. It's a smart, provocative first person narrative that is well paced and genuinely creepy. I'll just say that a person well versed in 19th-century American prose or Alfred Hitchcock films will not be surprised at many of the twists and turns. However, the story sustains the reader well, and the attending shivers are pleasantly disturbing. If you know what I mean. Re-reading department: I recently read Frank Herbert's Dune for the first time in about 30 years. I remembered the mood of the bookãthe stark desert landscape, the technology for recovering one's person body moisture, and the cleverness of the charactersãand none of the plot details. The second reading crystallized my respect for the book as a political, religious, and ecological allegory. The politics resembleãand probably inspiredãthe Star Wars scripts, complete with all the conventional intrigue, mystique, betrayal, swordplay, and deeply guarded secretsãincluding lineage of key characters. What sets Dune apart is the ecological project, which is also deeply political. Given the belated concern in our times for water resources, water rights, and related issues, Dune can be read as a forecast of the difficultiesãand the violenceãthat could be ahead for earthlings. Now I'm wrapping up a re-reading of The Hobbit, which is as good as ever. I hope to charge through the whole Ring trilogy before the next film comes out.

Carol, thank you for the thoughts.
Sebold's book sounds like an intriguing premise. But I'm more likely to look up
Lasdun's thriller. I suspect Dune is the most relevant of these books,
but judging from the voting, the elected ones of 2002, and the policies emanating
from Washington, DC, most people seem to perceive ecological problems and Dune as being fictional.