More Books

I read After Annie today.  A review I read once said that you don't just read about Anna Quindlan's characters, you inhabit them.  Or maybe it was that they inhabit you.  It doesn't matter; they're both true.

I could smell their dinners and hear their sobs.  I was as bewildered, as lost, as uncertain as they were.  After all, Annie dies on the first page.  Where is this book possibly going to go that won't rip my heart out and leave it on the sidewalk to fry? 

The reason Anna Quindlan won a Pulitzer is that she is able to find that space between the unbearable and the alarm clock.  Her gift is presenting the life that must go on, the quotidian details like laundry and hamster food, side by side with the inescapable reality.  

She's covered every possible relationship.  Immediate family, in-laws' families, replacement people for estranged families all bump up against one another as life goes on.  Nothing very unusual happens yet everyone is different at the end, but only around the edges.  

I feel like I've known them my entire life.

I've really been on a roll; the library has been fulfilling all my wishes.  Yesterday, I read S. A. Cosby's All the Sinners Bleed.  It's a police procedural and a family drama and a meditation on race and power.  It's beautifully written.  

I think I've read it before.  Pieces of the story felt familiar, but only like an old friend reminding me of a story and telling it again, filling in the parts that are really important.  I remembered who dunnit, but that was much less important than what was happening around the edges of the investigation.

Cosby gives you enough room to make up your own mind about his characters.  There are surprises and there are sorrows in a place that feels familiar and extremely strange at the same time.  It feels that way to the residents, too, which makes it just that much more relatable and believable.  

Which is weird to say because there is nothing about their lives which looks anything like mine.

An older and wiser James Lee Burke's latest collection of stories, Harbor Lights, has left me breathless.  The stories still have the wit of the young Dave Robicheaux, who was an old man even then, but it's tinged with wisdom and the knowledge that there's more behind him than in front of him.  

It was hard to read more than one at a time.  There was a lot to digest, much of it melancholy.  I tried to remember to read it when the sun was shining.

That's not to say that it should be avoided.  On the contrary, every bit of it was wonderful.  The landscape is still as much of a character as the humans.  He reveals truths and then lets them sit with the characters, so they can sit with you.  It is not to be taken lightly.