LIII -November 2011

October was a busy month. I've been going down the road doing readings for Under the Skin and getting to meet a lot of folks I know from the Internet.. And at each stop I've apologized for leaving folks waiting three years to find out the meaning of that puzzling phone call from  Aunt Dodie that ended In a Dark Season.  I made the same apology and told the same story about my backup plan HERE at Kaye Barley's blog Meandering and Muses.

In other news, we have an addition to the pack. Willa was a stray and she's come to live with us -- if we can survive this getting-to-know-you period.. She's about fifteen pounds of willful puppiness and she thinks that NO means run faster or chew harder.  Her story is HERE.

In less cheerful news, we were visited by a neighbor's roaming heifer, recently acquired from the stock yard, and  evidently she was a carrier of a kind of bovine plague aka shipping fever. It was an extremely quick-acting, pneumonia-like disease and we lost four cows before it was over. The rest have recovered and were all treated and vaccinated. Now all seem fine. The milk cows and the bottle-fed calves, Xena and Clover, were not affected but they've been vaccinated too. More on that unpleasantness HERE.

Of course the leaves have been lovely. Every other post on my daily blogs seems to have been devoted to autumn foliage. From beginning to end -- and we're on the downward slide of fall -- it's been beautiful.The yellows came first and after a few recent frosts, the reds finally came into their own.

The garden is all but over. Collards and kale and broccoli are hanging in there but I picked all the peppers and the last of the tomatoes. The sweet potatoes were great -- I hadn't grown any in years -- these did so well I'll plant lots more next year!

Reading

I blogged last month about The Forest Lover by Susan Vreeland and The Goat Woman of Largo Bay by Gillian Royes. 

And all in one post. Live Wire by Harlan Coben, The Magician by Lev Grossman, and Among Others by Jo Watson

I also re-read some of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books.  For the umpteenth time. Comfort reads when cows were dropping dead right and left...  

What are your comfort reads? Are you a re-reader?

Sheila says:, I haven't read The Help and don't intend to, too many other goodies to read. My grandma in southern Missouri had help for laundry, as did my aunt in the 30's. Grandma would wait and eat dinner with her so they ate together. I'm rereading Elisabeth Ogilvie's books.

Sue P.in Texas says: Have recently read a couple of excellent books, most notably, THE HOMECOMING OF SAMUEL LAKE by Jenny Wingfield. Her first novel, although she has done a couple of screen plays (The Man In the Moon). It is a marvelous read. Critics compared it to TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and I can understand why. Loved it.

I also read and liked THE HELP. While I agree that it couldn't address the true depth of the feelings of the people, nor fully realize just how tragic and awful it was, it was still a way for people (like my daughters, ages 36 and 29) to get some idea of what that time was like.

Am looking forward to trying THE STRANGER YOU SEEK. Sounds intriguing.

Liz Gullum says: I think I told you I am reading "The Lacuna", the whole book has been set in Mexico. Today I turned the page to a new chapter. The book is now set in Asheville! As is the custom with Kingsolver's books, I sometimes have to stop reading and go back and re-read a passage just to admire the prose. The main character hires a secretary in Asheville and she speaks the mountain language of so many of your books! What a wonderful world a book can be...

 

 If you're in the Asheville area, there's an interesting new book club idea called Eat Your Words at Avenue M on Merrimon. Basically, you get a book discussion with the author and a meal inspired by the book. On November 17th I'll be the author and Under the Skin will be the book we discuss. It's limited to 21 participants so if you're interested. check it out HERE.

And a slideshow of October... 

October 2011 - LII

This is it! After far too long a wait, Under the Skin hits the shelves on October the 18th. And, much like your friendly public radio station, I'm here to ask for your support. 

The sales figures for the first six weeks that a book is out are tremendously important from the publisher's point of view -- and that makes those sales important to the author.

 So I'm hoping that lots of you will purchase my latest offering right away -- either as a classy-looking, larger format and much easier to read trade paperback or as an ebook.  To tell the truth, I'm hoping some of you will purchase multiple copies -- as a head start on holiday shopping. 

Those of you who support your local independent bookstores may find copies there -- or you could always ask them to order some. And of course Under the Skin is available for pre-order on line from the usual sources.  If you're a library user, it would be terrific if you asked your library to order a copy. Everything helps.

If you're in western NC, I'll be at various bookstores, talking about the new book. My schedule is over there in the sidebar. I'd love to see you there!

 

Under the Skin may read a little differently to you.  A few early readers remarked on this but couldn't say what it was. Well, it's that the point of view has shifted. After writing  four Elizabeth Goodweather books in third person point of view (Elizabeth opens the door; Elizabeth thinks about Harice,) I braved up and decided to write Elizabeth in first person (I open the door; I think about Harice.)

You see, in the early books, I was trying to distance myself from Elizabeth -- after all, the woman lives in my house, looks at my view, sits on my blue bench, pats my dogs -- third person seemed necessary so there shouldn't be even more confusion between the widow Goodweather and me.

But after four books, it seemed to me that Elizabeth was very much her own person  and she could speak for herself. And that's what she does in Under the Skin. The odd thing was that, as she spoke, I found that she was a little. . .  well ... bitchy. And after a few chapters of snarky comments, I really had to take measures to rein her in.  

I hope you'll find the results interesting.  There's an excerpt from the first chapter HERE

and another that shows the really bad effect Gloria has on Elizabeth HERE

BOOK REPORTS

Ruth says:  I just finished reading The Help and loved it. We had maids when I was a kid, but not the every-single-day sort. I think they must have been filling in their work week when they came to our house once or twice a week...so they weren't all that sweet mostly. Some were grumpy like Rosalie. But my cousin Sally's family had a maid that came every day and was the most big-hearted woman in the world (Essie). She would grab you up every time she saw you and give you a big hug as she was saying "Hay Baby, how ya doing?". She had impatiens and begonias all over her yard...she was the only person I knew that had flowers in coffee cans sitting on her steps and all around the yard. 

Also just saw Midnight in Paris...this you must see on the big screen (so that you fall in love with Paris) because I am pretty sure you will love the movie. I would have sat through it all over again if there had been another showing.  .

Ann says: I saw THE HELP movie.  I didn't mind the book but the movie left a bad taste in my mouth.  I felt like, not only did we whites enslave black people but gosh darn, we liberated them, too!  Had we not instigated freedom, they would have been too scared to.

 Deana: Re "The Help;" I will probably see the movie in spite of my not liking the book, because I've read such good things about Violet Davis's performance, and also because so many women have roles. Gotta support our sisters! … reading "Let the Great World Spin." I just started it this morning and find it extremely well-written.

Donna says:  Many of the books that you and your readers suggest end up on my ever growing reading list. Some of them are ones I've considered and just haven't had time to read or even to add to the list. But, today, I added 3 or 4 to the list. THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN is among them.

I recently finished Lauren Belfer's A FIERCE RADIANCE. Just like her CITY OF LIGHT, which I read years ago, I had trouble putting it down when I needed to. [I steal reading time during rides to/from work, during my 1/2 hour lunch break, etc.]. Not a fan of historical fiction, I still found myself drawn into her novel of a young magazine photographer, her life here in the US during WWII and her involvement with the people working on the the discovery and development of penicillin as a weapon of war. I read it cover to cover and lamented coming to the end. I wish I could say the same for two other books that I felt I wanted to read last month, SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM and A GOOD FALL. Both story collections sounded intriguing, but I couldn't get past a couple stories in either one of them.

Still plugging away with THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN. Although I enjoyed reading it earlier this summer, I set it aside for a time when I could read uninterrupted because it is requires more concentration on my part.

Liz G - I just finished a wonderful book Bonnie Jo Campbell's "Once upon a River". It was breathtakingly beautiful. Lyrical and vivid. A must read!

And Vicki has been reading too : The Passion of Artemisia and Luncheon of the Boating Party, both by Susan Vreeland - wonderful imagined glimpses into the live of two very different painters. I said more about these two OVER HERE. 

I also read a fascinating fantasy called Among Others by Jo Walton. I'll be looking for more by this author. 
 
Pinhook: Finding Wholeness in a Fragmented Land  by Janisse Ray  is  non-fiction about the fight to preserve a wild area in southern Georgia.  I blogged about this one HERE.

I reread The Nanny Diaries -- funny and sad at the same time. Some people just have too much money. 


All Cry Chaos is a terrific read -- a thriller and the debut of a series I will look forward to following. And now I know just a tiny bit about fractals and chaos theory.

 

The Luck of the Draw

LI - September 2011

Between the abundant garden and the two, count them, two, Jersey girls and their rich milk, it seems I hardly left the kitchen in August. It was too hot to spend much time outside anyway -- dart out early to water the garden and pick the beans or corn or tomatoes or basil and back to the kitchen to process same.  Frozen beans and corn, canned tomatoes, roasted tomatoes to freeze, and lots of pints of basil pesto, also freezer bound.

We've enjoyed gazpacho, BLTs, plain tomato sandwiches, salad caprese, and every other sort of dish where these wonderful seasonal treats will shine. One of my blog friends wrote to suggest putting sliced tomatoes and fresh basil leaves on a pimento cheese sandwich and that proved to be rather sublime. (My mouth is watering as I type the words...)

And then there's the milk.  Pretty much all I want. Justin and Claui do most of the milking with John providing backup. I've been making yogurt and Greek yogurt and farmer cheese and butter and ice cream and frozen yogurt . . . Oh, life is good!

Oops! Did I mention fall fashions and crinoline in the reminder I sent last night? I was sleepy and confused.  The crinolines are on my (almost ) daily blog HERE.

I should be receiving a few early copies of Under the Skin by the end of this month.  I already did a drawing over on my (almost) daily blog for some advance reading copies -- and they are all gone.  So I'll do a drawing here for two lucky commenters to win early copies. Just leave a comment and say Count me in. I'll draw names on the 15th  and notify the winners. And I'll send the books as soon as I get them.

So many people love The Help and now they love the movie. I still haven’t read the book (nor seen the movie.)  But I have been reading about it  HERE  and also HERE. Both of these excellent pieces address some of the misgivings I have about this story.

I'll read it eventually, I'm sure. After all, this story, set in the early Sixties, is pretty familiar to me. We had 'help' and they used separate bathrooms -- at my grandmother's house, they had separate dishes and silverware.  It's appalling to remember how normal it all seemed to me in those pre-Civil Rights movement days. 

Would I be capable of telling you what Lee or Annie or Grace or any of those other women who worked for my family felt? No, I would not. There was an invisible barrier between us.  It was the world of ‘the way things are’ and I – as a child and a teenager never questioned it.

I was a freshman when I was asked to sign a form asking if I favored integration or segregation at Emory University. By then my eyes had been opened and I signed  in favor of integration. The cute little blonde sorority girl who was doing the survey looked at my answer and said, "Do you know integration means letting them in? Maybe you got confused..."  

I assured her that I hadn't. I should have gone on to say 'I once was blind but now I see."

The second article makes an interesting point, noting that all the bigots in the movie are unlikeable. The author says "To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.”

Sadly, a lot of good people were -- blind and racists.

As I type this on the last day of August, the hot weather has abated, thank goodness. But it's dry, dreadfully dry. and our pastures are looking sad. we felt no effects here from Irene, not even a shower which would have been most welcome.

I hope all of you who were in her path came through unharmed -- so much destruction.

A few leaves are turning already and as I sat in the dining room at lunch today, a little breeze brought a flock of yellow leaves dancing past the windows. There's a lovely golden quality to the afternoon light and a feeling of slowing down after the hurry of summer.

Are you looking forward to Autumn?

Book Reports

I just did a blog post on The Stranger You Seek -- a debut thriller by Amanda Kyle Williams.  Keye Street is a salty, flawed, kick-ass private eye who is drawn into the search for a sadistic serial killer. This was a real page turner -- a twisty plot, great descriptions of Atlanta, and quite a bit of humor along with the darker stuff. I have a real feeling this one's set to be a best seller.

As I've indicated before, I do love to reread. I began rereading the Sigrid Harald books -- the series Margaret Maron wrote before she moved on to the Deborah Knott series. Sigrid is a police lieutenant in NYC and for some reason, I like her even better than I like the down home NC Deborah Knott. Go figure. 

The Sigrid Harald books have been our of print for a while -- I have three tattered paperbacks. Imagine my delight when just recently Maron did a blog post over at Meandering and Muses and announced that the books were now available on Kindle.  Hurrah! So now I'm in a Maron-a-thon.

 

Pat in east TN reports: 

....   I just finished reading THE LAST CHILD, by John Hart.  I highly recommend it!  It sure has twists and turns, and I just couldn't read it fast enough.  I read another of his books, DOWN RIVER, a few years back and enjoyed it too.  He has a new book out, IRON HOUSE, ( I believe the title is) and it's gotten great reviews.  I really enjoy his work.  Although I was tempted to read another of his books immediately, I decided to wait a bit and am now going to read UNDER THE MERCY TREES.  I read about it in the Asheville C-T's quite a while ago and it also has great reviews on Amazon.  While 'hibernating' in the house in the afternoons, ha, I have lots of reading time, although tomatoes are calling and they'll keep me busy soon.

Deana the Queena says:

I completely agree with Mary about the poor writing in "The Help." I'm still not sure why that book got so much hype.

"Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter," by Tom Franklin, was really a good read, particularly well-done was the sense of place (Mississippi) and the interaction between the two main characters. I liked how the story of their relationship with each other unfolded very gradually. There's a mystery involved, but it's actually fairly obvious. 

Beth Elsey writes:  I really enjoyed "Anatomy of Ghosts" by Andrew Taylor, won the Dagger Award, set in late 1700's England; also "Revenge of the Radioactive Woman" set in Tallahassee--amusing and touching.  Just started "The Glass Demon" by Helen Grant--looks promising.  Can you remember the author who writes about an inspector in Quebec who has adventures in a village called Three Pines?  I read all of them and somewhere saw a new one out, but can't remember the author.

(Beth is thinking about the award-winning Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny.)

 

And here's a slideshow from August. . . 
Just below the slideshow is where you can leave a comment.
Click on the word COMMENTS down there.

L - August 2011

Ta da! Here's the new, improved cover for the forthcoming Under the Skin. I'd love to hear your opinions, either here or over on my (almost) daily blog where I discuss the changes and why I think they were made.

It's been brutally hot recently and I'm busy in the beans and tomatoes -- canning and freezing  as well as drinking copious amounts of minty ice tea. To work outside past ten or eleven in the morning is to court heatstroke-- not that the kitchen with a canner steaming on the stove is much better.

But with the coming of August, it always seems that relief is, if not around the corner, at least on the way.

In other Big News, Silverbell presented us with a beautiful pure Jersey heifer calf.  Clover looks like a deer...and is a dear.

 And I spent a week teaching at Wildacres Writing Workshop -- a wonderful, reasonably priced retreat just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I recommend it to all you writers of prose and poetry -- an amazing experience.

WHAT ARE YOU READING?

MARY says: What did you think of The Help, which everyone seems to love?  I thought it was too simplistic, not nuanced enough.  Though I sort of enjoyed reading it, as in--"what's going to happen next?"  Here's a book you might enjoy--My Dream of You, by Nuala O'Faolain.  It's about an Irish travel writer living in London, who is writing a book about an Irish peasant accused of having an affair with his English landlady during the potato famine in Ireland.  And about the writer's life as she's writing the story.  Also, Olive Kitteridge, actually a collection of short stories with the same characters showing up in most of them.  I loved these.

Carol writes: I just finished The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly and liked it very much

Deana the Queena says.
Lamb by Christopher Moore was very enjoyable, and led me to read more of his books about vampires in San Francisco. I just finished Moloka'i by Alan Brennert, an historical novel about the leper colony there. The story doesn't focus on Father Damian, about whom much has been written, but on the lepers and how the colony changed from the late 1800s through modern times.
Earlier this week I read "the Housekeeper and the Professor" by Yoko Ogawa, a novel about memory, math, and making a family. I highly recommend this.

Jon Michael says: Louise Erdrich's A Plague of Doves,

I highly recommend this one!  She is a powerful medicine-woman writer.

I checked out her new short story collection, The Red Convertible.

Just finished Cutting for Stone which was great in spite of head hopping,

info dumps galore and a rich array of O.R. blood and gore, some of which

I just had to skip over. Still a remarkable saga @ 650+ pages.

From Barb in Missouri

  The awful heat we've been having this summer has kept me inside a lot,so I have had lots of time to catch up on my reading. I have recently read 3 books, by an author new to me named Gayle Brandeis, titled Delta Girls,Self Storage and The Book Of Dead Birds.All three have unique plots and characters and I enjoyed them all. Another book I recently read is Every Last One by Anna Quindlen.This is a story of before and after a violent act against a family takes place.A good read but intense in parts.

And I fell head over heels in love with a book that some of you were carrying on about a while ago -- The Art of Racing in the Rain really grabbed me. I read it and talked about it HERE, and then a week later read it again.

  

Here's a slide show of random shots from July. Click on pictures to biggify.

 

XLIX - July 2011

My big news is that Random House has decided that the forthcoming Under the Skin will be in trade paperback rather than mass market paperback.  And they are working on an all new cover. 

I was surprised, to put it mildly.  It will make the book more expensive (probably $15) -- but easier to read (bigger pages.) And there are many reviewers who just don't bother with mass market but will review trade. 

We'll see if this is A Good Thing. I hope so.


In other news, I am still working on the next book, somewhat distracted by the garden which, as Candide says, we must cultivate.

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 If you're in the western NC area, look for the July issue of WNC Magazine -- free at bookstores and other locales. I'm pleased to say I'm one of various NC writers who were asked to do a piece on 'Why We Love Western North Carolina."  You can also read it HERE.

After a very hot beginning to the month, the weather has moderated. Ample rain has brought out the best in our day lilies-- I can't stop taking their pictures as readers of my daily blog are, no doubt, all too aware.

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I have some good reads to share, if Miss Susie Hutchins will let me at them...  

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler is charming and low key in the way I expect of Tyler's novels. No one does families better and this is Tyler at her best. It begins, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." 

Le Divorce by Diane Johnson is a must if you've ever daydreamed of living in France. An young American woman comes to Paris to lend support to her stepsister whose aristocratic French husband wants a divorce. A comedy of manners and the conflict between French and American ways -- I was fascinated.

Lamb by Christopher Moore is my kind of quirky, wise and wisecracking humor. It's the Gospel according Biff, Christ's childhood pal. I loved this book and all the various threads it pulled on to explore where Jesus might have been between his childhood and his last years. The more you know about the Bible, the more of the allusions you'll 'get.'


A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King. A re-read - Ms. King is such a good writer! Her Mary Russell series is one of my favorites but I'm growing more and more fond of this earlier series featuring Kate Martinelli, a San Francisco police detective. Wonderful setting, characters, plotting -- small wonder this won the Edgar for Best First Novel back in 1993.


Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James.  A wonderful survey of the genre by a woman who is one of its top practitioners.


Time is a River by Mary Alice Monroe.  I talked about this one HERE

FROM YOU ALL

Pat Browning writes ... my reading is not usually what everyone else is reading -- except that I did read and love THE HELP. I just finished reading THE LAST CONVERTIBLE by Anton Myrer. Not a new book (1978) but the kind of intergenerational (is that a word?) saga I love.

Martin in England says ...thanks for flagging up 'The Book Thief', in a recent post. It's an extraordinary book. I've just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go', which was a good read, but this is something else.

We also have roses and clematis...
But it's the day lilies that get the attention...

A slide show with more of my favorite June pictures -- and lots more day lilies.

Have a wonderful 4th of July!

XLVIII - June 2011

Can it be June already? Two or three weeks ago we were worried about frost. But Heaven knows, the past few days have felt like July. 

We've gone into deep summer mode -- hitting the garden early and getting back to the house before noon, not to set foot outside before three. Fans are roaring; the eastern windows are shut till the sun's off them; and a big pitcher of minty iced tea has taken up residence on the kitchen counter.

I'm still doing research the Civil War novel.  Our little neck of the woods --which is, of course, where I'll set my story -- is somewhat atypical for the South in that there were very few slave owners and quite a few rugged individualists who just wanted to be left alone.  There are stories of men conscripted by the Confederate Army who deserted to return home only to be conscripted by roving Union soldiers. 

And then there were the Outliers -- men who took to the woods rather than fight but all too often ended up as little better than criminal gangs, taking advantage of war's anarchy to settle old grudges.

A wealth of possibilities . . . I hope to give you a taste of it next month.

I've also been on a bit of a reading spree.  My dear friend Josie up and moved to California, taking only part of her extensive library with her.  I have been feasting on the remains -- an eclectic selection..

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 A Girl Like I by Anita Loos is a memoir of Miss Loos' long. long career in show biz.  Loos is best known for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes but she got her start in the silent films, writing her first script in 1912.  I found it a fascinating picture of an era.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith is a terrific example of an anti-hero. I didn't expect to like this book but I couldn't put it down. That said, I'm not sure I'll look for the next in the series -- I really didn't like Ripley, even while I admired Highsmith's writing.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.  Didion could write about air fresheners and I would read it for the elegance of her prose. But she's writing about widowhood and she does it with such fine-wrought delicacy that I couldn't help thinking of an oyster, producing a pearl from the pain of an unwanted intrusion.

 The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble could have been a cliche -- woman who has lived for her husband is left by her husband and goes on to find herself in a new life. That's the book --but the writing is beautiful and  the characters excruciatingly real.

The Glorious Adventure by Richard Halliburton. Halliburton's romantic travel adventures fueled my teenage imagination back in the mid-Fifties. Of course, since he was writing in the Twenties,  the world he described no longer exists. But what fun to follow his travels as he attempts to trace the wanderings of Odysseus, swims the Hellespont, climbs Mount Parnassus, consults the oracle at Delphi, and takes shelter in the Cyclops's cave!

The Book of Small by Emily Carr is a real oddity. Carr is a well-known artist of the Canadian Northwest and this is a memoir of her childhood -- growing up in Victoria, British Columbia in the late 1800s. I found it completely charming.

To Dance With the White Dog by Terry Kay. The story of an old man whose wife dies suddenly, his and his children's attempts to cope with the new situation, and the mysterious white dog that only he can see. It could have been corny and maudlin but it's not. It's quietly moving and the old man is terrific.

I talked about The Year of the Hare  and  Feeding a Yen   over HERE. And there were more which I'll get to another time.  Currently, I'm rereading The Book Thief and enjoying much more than my first time through.

 

Here's a small plea to all of you who receive my heads-up notices that a new Goodweather Report has been published. I'm in the midst of switching my stuff, including mailing lists, from one computer to another. In the past, this has not always gone well and whole chunks of my address book have disappeared.

What I'd like to suggest, if you want to be sure to continue to receive the Report on the first of every month, is that you sign up, over there on the right and almost to the top, to subscribe to this blog by email.  I'm going to try very hard to maintain my lists  and will continue to send reminders as long as I can but the ways of information transfer from Vista to Windows 7 are fraught with hazard -- at least for me they are.

Wishing you a happy June --- looks like it's gonna be a hot one!