Dear Reader,
Word Raccoon and I intend to curl up with a novel after our flu shot this afternoon (writing this on Friday) and recover, whether we need recovery time or not, because reading.
It’s actually a literary mystery that we will be reading, and the mysteries don’t end with the novel itself.
Remember my friend who moved to Spain? Beforehand, she and her husband had a garage sale, and at it my friend pointed out a novel she loves that I have never read.
It contains vampires, which are not usually my jam, though WR whispers that we do enjoy Stoker’s Dracula, naturally, having read it when we were maybe twelve, and we were surprised at how different it was from what we knew about vampires at that point from TV and Halloween.
Though we might not have fully understood it, we knew there was more to understand.
Also, Anne Rice’s vampires are dope. A rock star vampire? Yes, please.
I actually met Rice once and later exchanged maybe two or three emails with her, too. We discussed novel writing.
Anyway, Reader, I brought my friend’s recommendation home.
Alas, I have not gotten around to reading it, but when Barry said he’d finished reading a vampire book (not his mainstay either, but for some reason…), I told him about the one my friend had recommended and asked him if he wanted to read it first. He asked me to point it out for him, so I pulled it from the shelf and handed it to him.
He laughed.
And laughed.
It was a different copy of the book he’d just finished reading, except he had picked up his on our last trip to the beach at St. Stan’s thrift shop, and I hadn’t noticed what he was reading.
Something he had mentioned to me about the book reminded me of Middlemarch, so once I realized we were talking about the same book, I wanted to read it even more.
You think that’s the end of the story? It’s not!
WR is doing a cartwheel here, because she’s so delighted at the twist.
The next day Barry pointed to a huge book on his bookshelf.
“What’s that book?” he asked.
I loosely identified it as a book I remembered him buying at the library book sale.
“But what’s the title?” he asked.
The same book. AGAIN!
The book’s title?
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.
A literary mystery with vampires and historical research AND in October? I mean…how can I not read it? It’s been thrice recommended by the universe, and hello, WR and I are writing a literary mystery!
Maybe it’s the just upcoming flu shot talking and not the universe at all, but WR lurves any excuse to curl up with a book.
BTW, my poem “Bonnie and Clyde Without Guns” is in the latest issue of Molecule: a tiny lit mag. So many thanks to them. I’m honored to be in such good company.
Drema