Valentine’s Day has come and gone and with any luck, you have a TBR pile next to your favorite chair to read as the weather continues to keep us guessing for the next couple of months.
A good friend sent the above wonderful cartoon* to me and I’ve mentally attached a book to almost every panel.
I must say, I’ve never mistaken a book for a hat, and with my third book just published and the fourth and final book in the Lord and Lady Crosswick Mystery series well underway, I am not desperately trying to write a book ... knock on wood!
Oddly, the book I tried so hard to like and the book I somehow own three copies of are one and the same, lol. (For the record, the book is A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. So many people love this book I feel like there’s something I’m just not seeing, so if you’ve read it and liked it, I’d love to hear from you!)
There are too many books I couldn’t put down for me to name just one.
The book I remember bringing to the beach in 1970 was Jonathan Livingston Seagull, where I read it in an afternoon and my not-yet-mature prefrontal cortex led me to believe that I had just read a masterpiece. Ah, blissful youth.
So many writers and their works changed my life—some in small ways and some profoundly—but the book that opened the world to me was Heidi by Johanna Spyri. My grandmother gave it to me when I was seven and when I finished the last chapter, I knew I would not stay in my little corner of Idaho, but, like Heidi, I would explore new places and people and find my place in worlds I never imagined existed. Heidi was the key that unlocked the rest of my life.
You never know what a book will do. My fondest hope is that my books will bring a smile to someone's lips, keep someone guessing, make someone laugh out loud, and I always hope my books will cause at least a few readers to say, “Well, I didn’t see that coming!”
Cheers and Santé,