6/23/2007

Reading Saving the World, by Julia Alvarez. It's about the lives of two women, one of whom is an author who stays home to finish a novel while her husband is off in the Dominican Republic working to, as the title suggests, save the world. The other woman is the subject of the first woman's novel, a spinster sent to look after a group of young boys carrying live smallpox vaccine, traveling around to Spain's American colonies in 1803. It's good, she says.

What she looks for in a book is something absorbing that sweeps you away from thoughts about work and life.

A good book she's read recently, that she read in a day--Water for Elephants, a story set in the Depression era, about a young man who skips town when his parents die unexpectedly in an auto accident, in order to avoid the debt they accrued sending him to veterinary school. He hops a train to get out of town and, by chance, the train is a circus train and he is able to care for the animals. The book was a gift from her sister.

A book she's gifted to her sister--The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being, by Hale Dwoskin. Her sister had mentioned that she was having problems letting go and this book was all about that. At first she thought it was too simplistic to work, but she started reading it on the plane, going through the thought processes that it suggested and suddenly she was crying. Maybe it wasn't too simple to work, she decided, and recommends reading it in private.

Other good books--Kissing in Manhattan, by David Schickler, a collection of short stories that are all intertwined and have elements of magic, like in Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel.

Something she's read again and again--Time Enough for Love, by Robert Heinlein. The main character is Lazarus Long who's been alive for hundreds of years so he's a very interesting character. And a rascal. Women, she says, love rascals.