Saved By The Edgars

I finished Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak series and her Liam Campbell series and after 26 books in a row I was left bereft. 

I tried to fill the gap with mah jongg on-line, and the mental nimbleness required kept me distracted and stimulated.  But there are so many hours in a day when you're sheltering in place, so many, many hours.  And Scarlet has a life to lead and isn't always available to amuse me. 

A  book is a friend you can count on, there when you need it, as long as the devices are powered up.

It's not that I needed to rely on the Kindle app, and Amazon Prime's monthly free downloads, and the vast collections available to me on-line from all sorts of libraries all over America.  I have a library filled with the best of what we've collected over our lifetimes - actual, physical, bound books.

But I've been staring at those shelves since March.  I've been doing Pilates in that room since March, often distracted by the titles.  But none of them jumped out at me.... although Plutarch and Thucydides almost had their moments, as did Jeeves and Lucia. After weeks of playing Tiles on the New York Times web edition, of cleaning grout, of spending hours on my cook top which has never glowed so bright, I realized that nothing would replace reading.

The library is open for curbside deliveries, but I'm not thrilled about bringing something new into my house unless I can sanitize it to within an inch of its life.  I've been consistent about staying safe and I'm not taking any unnecessary chances... even though the science suggests that the books will be okay. 

I'm going to wait, once again, for the first adopters to react to the situation.  Until then, I'm putting new ebook releases on hold.  Eventually, which is how I usually feel when I'm 184th in line for 5 copies, has taken on a new meaning of late.  Time is elastic, fungible, a commodity with some utility in a vague breakfast-or-dinner sense but not much beyond that.  Still, I had nothing to excite me.

I moaned about this when TBG and I had a BYOE (except we forgot our chairs but theirs had been out in the sun, untouched for two days, Not-Kathy, who's a nurse, decided that were okay) on Saturday night.   Dr. K said that he'd been reading the Edgar Award winners via Kindle.  Mysteries are one of his genres, too.  He's also a stickler for excellent writing, a voracious reader, and a very smart person. I took his advice.

I came home and searched and found and bookmarked the lists.  Novels and short stories and first timers and lifetime achievements and more have been honored in some form or another since 1954. Not all but a lot of the titles are available digitally, and there are enough of them on the libraries' websites to keep me occupied for a very long time.

Is it any wonder that I've been friends with him
for almost 50 years?