March 30, Wednesday evening -- Reading John Le Carré

On a gorgeous evening, weather unequaled in many days, waiting -- not in the rain -- at the bus stop
and reading A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré, which she found at her late mother-in-law's house.

She'd always thought her mother-in-law only read books like Middle March or War and Peace or Brother's Karamazov -- her husband's father was a Russian scholar -- but, there was a shelf of John Le Carré books at the house, so she picked one up and is loving it. Luckily, there are more to read after this one.

Lately she's been reading The New Yorker, Vogue, or Cosmopolitan, but her favorite books are Jane Eyre and Little, Big, a beautiful story about an ordinary man who falls and love with a woman and goes to live with her and her family in a big, crazy house and the family, by the way, is related to faeries. It's by John Crowley and received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1982.

She just ordered the new illustrated edition of Little, Big. The original edition, which was also illustrated, didn't portray the faeries in the way that the author had envisioned. The new book will.

When she moved to San Francisco Gray Davis was governor and he was encouraging everyone to read The Grapes of Wrath...it was an anniversary of the book (which was published in 1939). She thought, my mother never liked Steinbeck, I think I'll read him, so she did and then she read East of Eden and others, too.

I said I'd like to read The Grapes of Wrath again, too. You should, she said, the dialog will blow you away and, she said, -- responding to a remark I'd made about reading too many depressing books lately -- watch out, it'll make you cry.

What have you read lately that made you cry?

(in the background of this picture you can see someone holding their iPad....I wonder if they're reading a book.)