In between the cooking and the calming, the caring and the crabbing, I read. Women authors, mostly. Fiction almost entirely.
Right now, I’m reading Louise Erdrich‘s Four Souls. She writes with the cadence and imagery of her Native American people. I’ve read just about everything she’s written because she transports me into the hearts and minds of individuals who wind up inhabiting my thoughts long, long after I’ve closed the covers. She’s the widow of another Native American author, Michael Dorris, who committed suicide. I’ve not read any of his stuff.
Lately I’ve taken to browsing the “new fiction” section at my public library. The book I found there and read before Eldrich’s is The Problem with Murmur Lee by Connie Mae Fowler. I recommended it to a friend but she said that she just couldn’t get into it. Thought it was too fragmented. I, however, loved it — wonderfully quirky over-the edge characters and a equally quirky story line that kept me curious, even after I learned what Murmur Lee’s “problem” was.
But the best new book of all that I’ve read lately is Queen of Dreams by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. It’s a story about mother and daughter difficulties, about cultural identity, about the burdens of “gifts” others don’t understand, about healing family rifts. It’s a story that spirals up so that it ends where it begins except at another place. I will have to read more of this Indian writer.
In between the searching and swearing, the sighing and sleeping, I read. And read. And read.