Lit: Uniquely Portable Magic

Oh my, I feel like I'm really dropping the ball around here lately. I may be getting posts up here and there, and I am reading, but I haven't gotten around to responding to comments in ages and I'm barely getting around to browsing all of my blog friends' posts. 

I don't even have a very good excuse other than that The Big Guy has taken to using my desk chair to sit in to watch television and it's all but impossible to get him out of it. Which makes it all but impossible to get to my computer as often as I'd like to get there. 

I will be helped this month by a fortuitous email I received yesterday, an offer for the Nook Audiobook of Greg Iles' The Bone Tree which I was about to pick up for a review the end of the month. That sucker is more than 800 pages and I have yet to finish another book for a review next week and one that I'm reading with a group on Litsy. Being about to listen while I drive, clean, and even type this post is really going to help a lot! I've already "read" for almost two hours today. 

Because my September's been so loaded up with commitments, I've been hesitant to commit to too much in October, including R.I.P. XI (Readers. Imbibing. Peril.). I wasn't even sure I'd have time to read any books for Fall Feasting this year. But those are part of what makes blogging so much fun! Also, since R.I.P. includes thrillers, I'm thinking that I'm already reading for that challenge with Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree. So I signed up for that today and I'll spend some time browsing my books to later to find at least one more book that works for that and a couple that will work for Fall Feasting. I'm thinking maybe Sarah Water's Fingersmith for R.I.P. and maybe, finally, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for Fall Feasting which will also worth well for Nonfiction November. 

Last night a couple of book club friends and I went to hear Geraldine Brooks speak. If you ever get the chance to see her speak, I highly recommend it! She is open, funny, smart and an amazing storyteller and speaker. She talked about her history as a writer, her work as a journalist and how it influenced her writing as a novelist, making sure she doesn't use words in her work that take readers out of the time setting, and how she finds the voices for the characters in her historical novels, particularly the women. It helps, of course, that she's Australian, so she's got that accent going for her! She is married to Tony Horwitz, an American who is also a writer and an American Civil War fanatic (I think she'd agree that word is appropriate). His passion for that war helped inspire her Pulitzer Prize winning novel March. We were all very happy that we'd made the trip across town to see her!