A Rambling and (Potentially) Rewarding Discourse
by Nancy J. Ashmore
Well , it was an exciting couple of weeks.
I went to: Santa Rosa, California; Cumberland Island, one of the Golden Islands off the coast of Georgia; Cochise County Arizona; up and down the East Coast, from Richmond, Virginia, to a mental hospital in New York City; Blewer County, Texas; Toronto, Canada; Malta; 11th century Kyoto and northern Japan; Boulder, Colorado; and Hollywood, circa 2018.
In the way of modern couples, my husband Ken, the creator of this illustrious publication, spent most of his time in London, as you will read elsewhere.
We were reading, of course.
Our corporeal entities, in the meantime traveled to Montana and Wyoming, where we reacquainted our 12-year-old son, David, with some very special people, i.e., my 72-year-old mother, Jo Ashmore (AKA Jo Montana), and 83-year-old stepfather, Stephen "The Mad Russian" Zirko, who live in Billings and West Yellowstone when they're not basking in the warmth of snow-free Honolulu.
Lest you think I spent my entire vacation with my head buried in one book or another, I want to report that I also...
We met in 1967 at a summer program at the University of North Dakota -- where one weekend we chanced to attend the movie Fahrenheit 451, in which bibliophiles memorize books to preserve them for future generations. I decided I would memorize Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. Kiki was trying to decide between Gone with the Wind and Dr. Zhivago. (From this you may draw the obvious conclusions regarding the relative capacities of our intellects.) She also introduced me to Star Trek and gave me a copy of Mao's "little red book" and of Les Miserables. (For all of the above, I thank her profusely.)
I'm not given much to analysis of what I read -- which is why I decided to major in Asian history at Carleton instead of English. I discovered I much preferred to read books than to think about them -- a tendency I will try to overcome in the following remarks.
I have assessed the list sufficiently to discover that they have a common theme: all are written by women and feature women protagonists.
Upon further reflection, I discover a second thread: in one way or another they all remind me of my remarkable mother.
What follows is a synopsis of the books I consumed during the last two weeks in July -- along with something you may not have expected to encounter: details about the woman who oversaw my upbringing in Williston, N.D., where my late father toiled as a petroleum geologist and she worked as a special education teacher.
I've thrown in these colorful digressions (for which you will undoubtedly be grateful, but which you can choose to skip over) because it's extremely unlikely that I will craft another submission for Reading until we win the next big Powerball jackpot and retire to a book-filled log home in the West. I wanted to take this singular opportunity pay tribute to the person who introduced me to the adventures of reading -- and (as you will see) so much more. Thanks, Mom.
Mother Nature by Sarah Andrews [Death count: two; violence, low to moderate -- as murder mysteries go.]
Mother Nature features Em Hansen, "a feisty geologist who finds that the biggest environmental hazard is... murder." This is the third Em Hansen mystery, following in the footsteps of Tensleep (the first and still my favorite) and A Fall in Denver. Hansen has left Denver, where the oil boom has gone bust, and is working in northern California for an environmental firm that oversees the yanking of leaking underground storage tanks.
She's taken the place of the daughter of one of the U.S. Senators from California, a young geologist found by the side of a busy road with her mangled bicycle and fingerprints on her neck. Senator Pinchon (faithfully attended by his aide Curt Murbles) has commissioned her to find the truth behind the young woman's death.
As usual, Andrews tells her tale well -- educating the reader thoroughly about flood plains but not without providing some witty word play: "Nobody would joke about being named Murbles," she writes early on. "It sounded too much like a fart in a bathtub."
At the same time, Hansen is trying to ignore another enigma: her recently widowed mother, who's seeking to reconnect with the daughter she went to great lengths, even alcoholism, never to know.
It's a complex and engaging mystery that Hansen risks death to solve -- but I have a professional quibble: I wish the type in the paperback were larger and darker.
Why, you may ask, did this remind me of my dear old mater? Perhaps because she, too, was a geologist -- though women geologists in 1947 largely were fated to sit behind secretarial desks rather than on oil wells, as my father did. And, the gods know, I have been tempted to kill her on more than one occasion (mostly during my adolescence, I'm happy to report, and infrequently since then). In addition to being a earnest environmentalist and incorrigible activist, Mom is also the sort of person who delights in words like "murbles." Which may explain why I shared that image with my family and the three of us traipsed through Yellowstone giggling about the many "murbling" geysers there. (Can you think of a better explanation for their distinctive smell?)
Endangered Species, an Anna Pigeon mystery by Nevada Barr [Death count, three; violence, low to moderate]
National Park Ranger and fire fighter Anna Pigeon has been posted to Cumberland Island off the Georgia Coast for a 21-day fire watch. The annual migration of loggerhead turtles to lay eggs on the island enlivens the first few days. The monotony of their duties, however, soon has Pigeon and her male colleagues wishing that something, anything would happen. Their wish is granted, in the form of a fire spawned by the crash of a drug interdiction plane. The two passengers are dead. Pigeon, as usual, is drawn into the investigation -- and compounds the difficulties of solving it by refusing to report several attacks: a blow to the head that leaves her with a slight concussion and an evening downwind of a burning patch of controlled substances that leaves her with red eyes and the munchies.
Barr doesn't advance the evolution of Pigeon's character further in this book -- other than having her make some idiotic decisions about events on the island -- but does provide further insights into her psychiatrist sister, Molly, based in Manhattan, and her lover, Frederick Stanton, an FBI agent living in Chicago with whom she'd worked on a couple of earlier homicides. When Pigeon asks him to investigate death threats that her sister has received, she brings the two of them together for the first time -- with interesting results.
The Anna Pigeon books continue to intrigue me, though Firestorm remains my favorite to date. I look forward to the next one, though when it will appear it remains to be seen. The jacket blurb said that Barr, a former ranger who now lives in Mississippi, is now at work on a novel.
In addition to being a geologist, environmentalist, and avid outdoors person, Mom is a master teacher. She once said that her ideal profession would have been serving as a ranger -- had the U.S. Forest Service been enlightened enough in the 1950s to hire women as rangers. At age 9, I got a personal demonstration of how good she would have been. We were camping on the shores of the Yellowstone River on a friend's ranch when in the middle of the night the Quake of 1959 (7.8 on the Richter scale) dumped 80 million tons of rock on a campground in the nearby park, killing 28 campers. Mom and Dad woke up, but their three offspring slept through in all, rocked in the arms of the earth. (Okay, Mary, you woke up -- momentarily.) As the oldest I was aware the next morning that something pretty serious had happened. Always one to recognize a "teachable moment," Mom took the opportunity to provide us all with lessons on earthquakes and aftershocks that were both practical and comforting. The national parks' loss was definitely our gain.
Rattlesnake Crossing, the sixth Joanna Brady mystery by J.A. Jance [Death count, five+; violence, moderate+] Born in South Dakota and brought up in Arizona, Jance now lives in Seattle, where her J.P. Beaumont series (also excellent) takes place. She sets her stories about Joanna Brady in Cochise County, Arizona. Brady has been sheriff, an elected position, since the murder of her husband, the previous sheriff. A former secretary at an insurance firm, in the year since she became sheriff she has earned the grudging respect of her deputies -- primarily by abiding by the same rules to which she makes them adhere. Her daughter is off with her in-laws at a family reunion; her mother is on an Alaskan honeymoon with the county coroner, with whom she eloped; and her incipient boyfriend, Butch, is trying to spend some time alone with Joanna -- multiple homicides, an irascible substitute coroner, and the illness of her best friend's adopted daughter permitting.
Who's been shooting irrigation pumps, cows, and the occasional woman in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is it the former NASCAR racer? One of the German tourists pretending to be Indians at the resort the racer runs with his sister, Crow Woman? The delinquent son of the police chief of a neighboring town? Or someone else?
It's well worth reading to find out, though I'd recommend starting at the beginning, with Desert Heat, if you haven't met Joanna Brady before. You'll enjoy the evolution of this very human character.
The Official J. A. Jance Web Site
Of course, another important part of the duties of a park ranger is the enforcement of regulations in the park. Take my word for it, Mom would have made an excellent cop. It was impossible to get away with anything under her eagle eye -- so we never even tried (or so we led her to believe).
Point of Origin by Patricia Cornwell [Death count, at least 27; violence, extreme]
Cornwell's books about Kay Scarpetta, Virginia's chief medical examiner, are growing more and more gruesome. This one is a "gripping story that transcends the genre to examine the dark side of the human soul."
Scarpetta is pitted this time against "an audacious and wily killer who uses fire to mask his crimes" and against an old foe, Carrie Grethen, the psychopath who seduced Scarpetta's computer-genius niece and ruined her future in the FBI. Lucy is making a new career with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which investigates when churches or businesses burn. But Carrie has just escaped from a mental hospital in New York and is bent on revenge against Lucy, Kay, and Kay's lover, retired FBI guy Benton Wesley.
As usual, this book by the former pathologist-turned-novelist is full of graphic medical detail. It makes death very real -- more so than I can handle if I want to continue reading murder mysteries. I could skip the Scarpetta books -- and miss some fascinating characters and plots. Instead I fast forward through the nasty bits -- something I recommend for other squeamish souls who aren't fanatical about reading every word of a tome.
The Official Patricia Cornwell Web Site
The daughter of a nurse who served in the trenches during World War I, Mom has always been interested in things medical and scientific. She once volunteered as the lab assistant of a local pathologist researching the role of the pineal gland in brain activity -- that was the perfectly logical explanation for the rat brains in formaldehyde found in the refrigerator and on the counters in our kitchen.
She also hooked several of her children up with another pathologist, who supervised our science fair projects on everything from dog spit to bird poop. Honest: I won an Aerospace Medicine award from the U.S. Air Force for my pioneering study on "The Types and Drug Sensitivities of Bacteria and Fungi Found in Animal Feces." (This led, naturally enough, to my career in public relations.)
Unspeakable by Sandra Brown [Death count, at least five; violence, high]
Sandra Brown, the jacket says, is the author of more than 30 best sellers in the past eight years, including Fat Tuesday. This is the first book I've read by her and I don't know if I'll pick up another. Unspeakable is dark, but with fewer gruesome details than Cornwell's book. And while it competently depicts what takes place when "a powerful psychotic killer returns to his hometown, where a desperate woman -- deaf and alone on an isolated Texas ranch with her young son -- becomes a pawn in his game of payback and revenge," it was not compelling enough to warrant a second visit. Or am I just making snooty assumptions about the work of someone churns out 400-page books more frequently than I publish the alumni magazine of St. Olaf College -- all 48 pages of it?
The Sandra Brown Official Web Site
The connections with Mom are a little more tenuous here, you'll be happy to know -- though the threatened woman is, as Mom once was, entranced by the art of photography. And what I learned from Mom's work as a teacher of the mentally handicapped made me more sympathetic to the retarded albino psycho sidekick than he probably deserved.
The Maltese Goddess, an archaeological mystery by Lyn Hamilton [Death count, three or four, including one bad guy; violence, low to moderate]
Lara McClintock, co-owner of a Toronto antiquities store, travels to Malta to arrange the furnishings in the home of a client, a noted Canadian architect born on the island. Much to her consternation, a sideboard she unpacks contains the body of her client, dead of a stab wound.
From the title you might expect that the key to the mystery is an object akin to the Maltese Falcon of movie fame. Actually the relationship to things archaeological is much broader, encompassing the entire island, "an ancient land of Goddess worship" that later hosted the Knights of Malta (also known as the Knights of St. John and the Knights of Hospitaller, they were crusaders driven from the Holy Land in the 15th century) and Napoleon. Each chapter begins with a message from the Goddess, and a visiting teacher from England is assigned to communicate to the reader a synopsis of Goddess studies based on the scholarly work of Marija Gimbutas (The Civilization of the Goddess) and Cristina Biaggi (Habitations of the Great Goddess).
I found the book interesting enough to consider someday exploring Hamilton's first adventure, The Xibalba Murders, set in Mexico.
Mother created and hands out key rings in the likeness of a female bird deity 4000 B.C. Printed on one side are the words "I am woman. I render peace, justice, love" and on the other is written "Just do something." A Unitarian lay minister, Mom would probably enjoy the opening words of this book:
"I am at the beginning as I am at the end. I am the sacred circle, spinner of the web of space and time. I am the Cosmic 'And': life and death, order and chaos, eternal and finite. I am Earth and all things of it."
Of Death and Black Rivers by Ann Woodward. [Death count, five plus; violence, very mannered]
This "mystery of ancient Japan" is set in Kyoto at the beginning of the 11th century and toward the end of the Heian Period. The subtle investigations and deductions of Lady Aoi, a relatively young, widowed lady-in-waiting to the Emperor's sister-in-law, provide quite a change of pace from the previous works.
Woodward does a masterful job of transporting the reader to a world where noble women entertain their husbands' visitors from behind screens of bamboo that prevent their being seen, where the arrangements of kimono layers (as many as 11) send eloquent messages, where affairs of state are conducted in poetry. To this world comes the Dark Warrior of the North, a territorial governor who has waged a successful campaign against the indigenous Ezo peoples, regarded by most in the Japanese capital as a hairy and crude race of barbarians. Lady Aoi, who was "unusual in her society, because of the masculine nature of her education" (she had been taught Chinese and is a skilled healer), reflects privately that "any people so alien physically could easily become enemies" given the human propensity to justify hostility and mistreatment on the basis of difference.
Governor Miura must now fend off the demands of the Minister of the Treasury for greater revenues from his territory. In the time that is left over, however, he manages to seduce another of the ladies-in-waiting and steal her away to ramshackle house in a lowly quarter of the city. This will never do: Lady Aoi is assigned to regularize things -- by turning the habitation into a place fitting for a woman of noble birth. While doing so, she learns things that may explain the sudden deaths of two successive ministers of the treasury -- and the governor's former tutor.
A fine addition to the mystery catalog of Avon Books, which also publishes Jance, Cornwell, Barr, and Faye Kellerman (the LAPD meets Orthodox Judaism ), which I also have read, but passed over this time in favor of Lady Aoi and the prospect of a much lower body count. It follows The Exile Way, in which Aoi debuted. I'm going to look for it.
Another review of Of Death and Black Rivers from BookBytes
I credit my mother for the delight I derive from things Asian. It started when she took me to the only Chinese restaurant in Billings to enhance a grade school unit on China. Midway she introduced me to the works of Pearl Buck. It culminated in her persuading me to spend an entire year in Japan instead of the summer program I had signed up for: "What are you going to learn in eight weeks?" she demanded, even though sending her first born off to a country she knew primarily as a World War II adversary must have been agonizing.
She was right (as usual). I would have only scratched the surface in eight weeks. I probably wouldn't have ended up working as an editor at the Japanese Consulate in New York City. And I definitely wouldn't have appreciated as fully the rich details in this book. (Did you know, by the way, that Lady Murasaki's book The Tale of Genji, written during the Heian Period, is regarded by many as the world's first novel?)
Bellwether by Connie Willis. [Death count, none -- only human foibles are skewered in this humorous science fiction offering]
Willis has won more Hugo and Nebular awards than any other science fiction author. I became a fan after reading Doomsday Book, a novel of time travel set in England just after the Norman invasion that was a gift to me from stepdaughter Dr. Kris Wedding. Bellwether is set in Boulder, Colorado, in the very near future and displays Willis' trademark wit and inventiveness as she explores the relationship between science, pop culture, and "the arcane secrets of the heart."
Protagonist Sandra Foster studies fads -- from Barbie dolls to the grunge look -- trying to describe how they start and what they mean. Bennett O'Reilly is a fashion-oblivious chaos theorist studying monkey group behavior. Both work at HiTek Corporation in trendy Boulder. When a Dilbertesque set of management decisions and an incompetent "interdepartmental communications liaison" prevent O'Reilly from getting the money he needs to buy his monkeys, Foster helps him procure a flock of sheep -- which give her unexpected insight into the nature of fads such as hair bobbing (1920s), diorama wigs (1750-60), and coffeehouses (1450-1554).
This one goes next to Kris, who will enjoy, I think, Willis' musings on the sometime capricious nature of discovery -- from a bathtub and an apple that precipitated important scientific ruminations to Alex Fleming's realization that the mold on a contaminated culture had killed the bacteria thereon. Not to mention her notes on the scientific fad of mesmerism (1778-84), which resulted from new discoveries about magnetism, the property at the base of Kris' research in MRI.
Book lovers will also appreciate the literacy campaign that Foster embarks upon. Having discovered that the local library is de-accessioning books that haven't been checked out in a year in order to make room for multiple copies of Danielle Steele and Stephen King and books on angels and on fairies, she makes it her personal crusade to check such fat clothbound favorites as The Complete Works of Robert Browning, The Wizard of Oz, and, on one outing, The Red Badge of Courage, How Green Was My Valley, and The Color Purple. (I never was able to follow through on my post-Fahrenheit 451 goal of memorizing Through the Looking Glass -- this seems much more attainable.)
In addition to regularly asking me if I would jump off a bridge if "everyone else were doing it," Mom trained me to apply a scientific sensibility to much of popular wisdom -- from religion to politics to parenting.
She was also never one to worry over much about things that nobody ever did -- to my constant embarrassment. Witness the time she drove backwards halfway across Williston (after an inopportune remark from one of her children, who shall remain nameless, when she backed up a half a block to reach the corner at which she had intended to turn). According to legend, in the process she even crossed a state highway (I wouldn't know; I was cowering in the back seat, pretending I didn't know her.).
I, of course, vowed that I would never do such heinous things to my children -- a promise that I recalled when David, a toddler, asked me why I had to be "so silly." My first instinct was to apologize. Then I bowed to the inevitable and replied, "Honey, get used to it. It's going to happen a lot." As he enters his teens, it almost certainly will (I remember being embarrassed that my mother hummed as she walked in public), though I promise not to greet him at the airport carrying a full-grown giant sunflower with the dirt still clinging to its roots -- as my mother did when sister Mary returned from an adventurous AFS year in Germany. Embarrassment builds character, Dave. Live with it.
Mother is also the originator of a prize-winning program at Williston High School. Galvanized by the book Future Shock (see, there was a book in there after all), she convinced fellow teacher Larry Larson to propose to the principal that they teach a course on Future Studies. The proposal was approved -- though she was not allowed to teach it, not having certification in social studies! She coached Larson and the other teacher assigned to teach the class, and 25 years later, the course (and Larson) are still going strong: he's just been awarded a $25,000 Christa MacAuliffe award to enhance the technology the course uses. The program is probably unique in North Dakota -- maybe even in the country -- among public schools.
Remake, also by Connie Willis. [Death count, none -- unless you count the reported death of creativity in the opening chapters]
I, for one, really didn't get too bent out of shape when Ted Turner decided to broadcast "colorized" versions of the collection of classic black and white movies he owned. Hmmm. Might even make them more accessible to the masses, I thought. But what if....
It's the Hollywood of the future, where live action films are a thing of the past. Thanks to computers, Hollywood has become the ultimate recycler. Sylvester Stallone can replace Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur, and when Scarlett O'Hara says, "But, Rhett, I love you," Clark Gable can reply "Frankly, my dearăI love you, too!" and crush her in his arms for a happy ending.
Nothing new is being created -- to the dismay of a starry-eyed young woman who wants to dance in the movies and a jaded "hackate" in love with the movies. He's been hired to eliminate from films all evidence of addictive substances such as alcohol and drugs (smoking has already been purged). Imagine A Philadelphia Story without sherry, martinis, cocktails, drunken declarations of love, and hangovers; Arsenic and Old Lace without the elderberry wine, Silence of the Lambs without "a nice Chianti," and the cantina scene in Star Wars with aliens sipping cups of cocoa.
And then, the woman he loves but has lost starts turning up in the chorus lines of un-edited versions of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the nightclub scene at the opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Were those rumors about the discovery of time travel well-founded after all? This one's a little more shallow, but I enjoyed the premise -- and the trip down movie memory lane.
A Connie Willis Homage Page
A Connie Willis interview with Omni Magazine
A final digression (I promise) on my upbringing, literary and otherwise. Remember -- if you are old enough -- the summers of your childhood. Summers before satellite dishes (before satellites, for that matter!) and VCRs and laptop computers connected to the Internet and loaded with digitized card games. Summers when you played games of Solitaire with actual cards (which had the advantages of being even more compact than a Powerbook and more susceptible to manual relocation of the cards and thus to cheating).
My summers were largely spent in a dusty town of 12,000 smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, a town with one TV station -- KUMV-TV, Channel 8, which broadcast more snow on average than a North Dakota winter and where the most frequent offering seemed to be something called: Please Stand By -- We Are Unable to Continue This Program Due to Technical Difficulties Beyond Our Control.
I spent most of the summers of my teen years, as I recall, saying "I'm bored" in a whine that irritated even me. What I wouldn't give to have one of those lazy, hazy summers again! I'd probably resort to the same remedy I did then -- when I stretched out on a towel, slathered in baby oil and courting melanoma, and read mountains of books, from piles of sci fi (Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs -- no, not Tarzan! Thuvia, Maid of Mars! , complete with a cover featuring a buxom blonde in the arms of an incredible hunk -- and Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein) to the mysteries of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Ellery Queen. (This time round, of course, I'd be slathered in sunblock 45.)
On occasion, usually at the instigation of my mother, but sometimes by happenstance, I read a book that required more neurons than those occupied by mysteries and trips to Mars. It began with The Yearling, the 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winner that she read out loud to us along the Yellowstone River, the words of Marjorie Rawlings accompanied by the sound of raindrops splatting on the roof of our green Coleman tent and by the ineffable smell of pine and wet sage. It was followed years later by books about girl detectives (Nancy Drew, of course) and about nurses (Sue Barton and Cherry Ames) and the sentimental works of Gene Stratton Porter and Zane Grey (both brought to my attention by Dad) and then by books like Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Territorial Imperative, and Kon-Tiki.
It wasn't always easy to find intellectual challenge in Williston. Mom did her best to remedy that -- and not just for her own children. Even before she originated the Future Studies course, she incited the local chapter of the AAUW to sponsor a film series based on literature. As a result, the kids of Williston were treated to such classics as Little Women and Captains Courageous and David Copperfield (complete with an unretouched W.C. Fields in the character of Mister Micawber). More than one of the popcorn munchers in attendance was enticed in this manner to read additional books by Alcott, Kipling, and Dickens.
I was reminded of what a gift this was while watching our own David during this trip to Montana and Grandma Jo. He gobbled up the Narnia books I threw in my backpack at the last moment. Then Mom pointed him at her collection of Patrick McManus books, and he started whinnying his way through tales of deer strapped to bicycles and skinny-dipping in water that was "somewhere between damn cold and ice" and how a boy growing up in the wilds of northern Idaho was spurred to literacy (and a hilarious rafting adventure) by the persistent teacher who handed him a copy of Huckleberry Finn.
Taking time out for his own adventures in the water (the fishing trip with grandma and an epic misadventure with his mother in the Firehole -- we were carried by the current over a treacherous waterfall that must have been at least two feet high, an event which I am urging him to commit to paper in McManus style... whereupon it will rival Niagara in height), David is back at the books, as I write this. He's reading I, Robot, by Asimov, to be followed by a series by Patricia Wrede on dragons and more of the works of McManus -- which have him guffawing so hard that he claims to have sprained his laughing muscles. One account (maybe the one about the invention of the "modified stationary panic"?) left him twitching and so breathless that I was mentally reviewing my CPR lessons. All I can say is, what a way to go.
Thanks, Mom, and all the other teachers, formal and informal who abetted my reading addiction. I promise: I'm going to keep passing it on.
And finally -- don't you feel like you just listened to one of those six-hour speeches for which Fidel Castro is famous? -- my thanks to my partners-in-crime, sisters Susan Ashmore Mosiman and Mary Anne Ashmore, who accompanied me on those trips to the Carnegie Library in Williston, first pulling a little red wagon and then on our fat-tired bicycles. (It was a mile to the library -- literally -- and I seem to remember it was uphill both ways, even though we lived on the prairie. But nothing deterred us from weekly visits, not even the blizzards or the rabid coyotes snapping at our heels. I'm going to try to remember that the next time I groan about having to park the van in a space on the far side of the lot -- which is less than ten blocks from our home.)
Susan, by the way, achieved fame as a freshman by turning an assignment on "My Favorite High School Subject" into an essay on "Why I Hate English Class." When my mother visited her distraught English teacher, she agreed that perhaps Suzie could have been more diplomatic about her opinions. She then suggested to Miss Dietz (who required her students to memorize the Dewey Decimal System as an aid to using the library) that perhaps the solution was to find a way to encourage Susan to enjoy English. Dietz suggested that perhaps Susan should read more...
After a pause, Mom said, "Hmmm. She's reading 15 books a week now. How many do you think she should read?"
I'm sure Suzie would still read 15 books a week if the management of her household and two active boys would allow it. She's done the next best thing -- she's infected Keith and Charlie with our love of reading, aided by our baby sister, another addict.
In high school Mary Anne was sometimes accused of having a native language other than English -- or any other known tongue. Ah well, the girl who confused words like "Mormon" and "moron" is now the woman who closes $1.2 billion deals at the Chicago bank where she is a vice president. She is also the person who supplies her nephews with an endless supply of reading material and to whom I am indebted for the hard cover editions of Rattlesnake Crossing, Point of Origin, and Unspeakable -- as well as a constant stream of the paperbacks chosen by Oprah's Book Club. (Buy stock in Barnes and Noble -- until Mary takes early retirement, they are assured of land office business!)
Thanks to you, too, gentle reader, for accompanying me on this ramble through literature and life. I now return to my background role as this fine publication's unofficial proofreader -- though I AM tempted to trot out my thoughts on some other new sci fi, including Sherri Tepper's latest, Family Tree. (That would give me the opportunity to contradict my spouse's opinions of her book, The Gate to Women's Country.) Or maybe a series on mysteries with Asian themes or ...
On second thought, no. I have earned my asterisk for the next five years! Now it's your turn!
P.S. (Did I hear a groan?) Also read in the waning days of July, but not reported due to a belated attack of literary discretion: Dead in the Water by Dana Stabenow (Kate Shugak, an investigator for the Anchorage D.A., returns to her Aleut roots in far northern Alaska) and By Evil Means by Sandra West Powell (featuring Billings P.I. Phoebe Siegel, "tough as barbed wire and just as tightly strung"). Read on!
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