We have a rainy day on tap for today. The Carolina wren was hanging out on the porch a lot yesterday, singing away. I saw him in front of the house at one point, but I don’t think he ever went in. So I have no idea if they’re just hanging out here or planning on nesting. I checked the blog posts that I wrote at this time last year and they didn’t start nesting until the end of April.
Fingers crossed
No sign of the bear today. Boy, was he magnificent!
Daydreaming Imogen. Doesn’t she have gorgeous lashes and eyelids?
For the second time in a week, I made the decision to stop reading a book. I do this very rarely, but in both cases, I had no choice. The first book just didn’t click with me and I knew it within about 20 pages. The second was a mystery about a book forger which had very good reviews. It was not well written – it was clunky, overwritten, with similes and metaphors that were labored. Frankly, it needed a strong editor.
This morning, I got up and was determined to read it first thing, when I’m most receptive to words on a page. I still found myself rolling my eyes repeatedly, putting it down, trying again, and then…even though I was 100 pages in, I couldn’t take it anymore.
Fini.
A lot of people have told me I should write a book. Let me tell you, writing well is much harder than most people realize. When you read something by Louise Penny, say, or Amor Towles or Pat Conroy (just pulling some names out of the hat) you are carried along by the words on the page, guided through the story by the author – effortlessly. But that does not come easily. Not at all. I so appreciate a good fiction writer, and I fully acknowledge that I do not have that skillset. I also appreciate the work of a good editor. Every author needs the eye of an editor and all of the good ones freely acknowledge that.
I’m not sure what I’ll start next. At the moment, I’m reading Otto Penzler’s short book about his rare book collection. Otto is the owner of The Mysterious Bookshop in NYC. He is lifelong collector of rare books, specializing in detective fiction and mysteries. His collection was so vast that he had to build a house to contain it. In 2018, he auctioned off much of the collection. A friend suggested that he highlight his favorite acquisitions and tell the stories behind those books. The book is Mysterious Obsession; Memoirs of a Compulsive Collector. I’d wanted it for quite a while and I finally purchased it when I was living in Brooklyn last autumn.
I’ve also reserved a few books from our local network of libraries and I’m sort of stalling today as I wait to see if one of them comes in.
Stay safe.
Happy Tuesday.
