IMPERFECT STRANGERS by STUART WOODS

Okay folks. You will want to read this one. It gathers its plot from the movie "Strangers on a Train" but this novel speeds down the convoluted story tracks ready for a collision with death at any turn of the page. So hold on to your seat.

I wished I didn't have to go to sleep or do anything else once I got this book in my hands. But life happens and so the book had to lay on the couch, the table or in my purse waiting and baiting me to grab a line or two out of it while I waited in line or stopped at a light (just kidding) or sat in a chair while my car got inspected.

Okay so that all happened to me but not at a stop light. I try to be a good driver.

Hint. The plot begins to take shape on a plane. A stranger sits next to another stranger in first class and begins a conversation. By the end of a few drinks, a movie and a nod the two men agree to kill each other's wives.

Do they pull it off?

You will just have to pick this book up anywhere you can get it and start reading it. Make sure you have some time on your hands to devote to it. You may want to take it on a trans Atlantic flight to fill in the hours if you can't take a snooze. I can't seem to fall asleep on a plane much to my sorrow and aggravation.

Just remember not to talk to strangers!

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

I have joined my neighborhood's newly formed book club and this is the latest selection we had to read. I have to say that it really affected me and I have changed a few things in my life.

This book is a pilgrimage, a journey, a walk through Harold's emotions and thoughts as he suddenly decides to walk from his home one day to a woman he once worked with who is now dying of cancer. He believes that as long as he is walking towards her that she will live and perhaps recover.

But it is Harold that recovers. He recovers not only the meaning of his life, and unearths his own demons but heals one of his most cherished relationships.

I won't tell you if he saved his co-worker's life but he saves his own and touches other souls along his wandering path.

I think you may enjoy this read. I know I did!

The Cat Who ... by Lillian Jackson Braun

Here we go folks. I'm on a Cat Who marathon. And who can blame me? I feel like I have been visited by a best friend with his two Siamese cats and we have been on our own adventures in Pickax from the K Mansion.

 

I can taste Mrs. Cobb's cooking from here, smell the fresh lake air from the cabin where Mr. Q. goes every now and then, and know The Big One is coming by looking at the clouds in the sky. But if you need any more relevant information then all you need to do is gather yourself up at the Dimsdale Diner for the coffee hour and you'll get more than a cupful of terrible brew. It's not gossip in Moose County. It's just neighborly info passed along a verbal line that extends from house to house without the use of the telephone wires. It's faster that way. No one locks their doors and you can walk right in and borrow a cup of sugar even if the owner isn't there. It's how it's done Up Here and contrary to Down Below.

 

But mischief reigns supreme in them thar mosquito ridden woods and if you have two cats by the name of Koko and Yum Yum then you are in luck and on your way to solving things that aren't brought up in conversation if someone from Down Below comes into a room. We're all family in Pickax and what the foreignors don't know won't hurt us.

 

But Mr. Q. is fast becoming one of them for various reasons. He is now the richest man in the county and lives in the best mansion on the circle in downtown Pickax. He's likable too with his ingratiating mustache that lures in the women and the secrets that aren't usually shared with those who weren't born and bred and raised right in the throw back county of Moose. And his two cats are problem solvers with a reputation known only to the favored few who can speak 'Yow!".

 

Grab one of these books and be ready to have a good time and make a new friend.

Mr. Q.'s sense of humour is worth it.

 



The Cat Who Went Up the Creek by Lillian Jackson Braun

If ya'll have never dipped your paws into a Lillian Jackson Braun "Cat Who ..." book then I suggest you do. If you like what you read then you will have a shelf full of editions to keep you purring. I have thirteen paperbacks which I have collected here and there since my mother got me onto Qwilleran, Koko and Yum Yum. You'll understand in a minute.

 

Unfortunately Miss Lillian is no longer with us in person but her spirit and humour live on in her witty books. I would have loved to have met her. I know our conversations would have been delightful.

 

So here's the deal ... her books center around Jim Qwilleran who writes for the newspaper where he finds himself living at the time, from The Daily Fluxion to the Moose County Something. I suggest you start at the beginning with her first books, The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern and The Cat Who Turned On and Off. That way you can get into the life of the columnist as he helps solve crimes and mysteries through the whiskers of a cat and sometimes even through the twitching of his own voluminous mustache.

 

I personally love it when he finds himself the recipient of a mansion full of money and he begins to take root in Moose County which is "400 miles north of everywhere". Specifically Pickax with a "population of 3,000", a love interest who works at the library and has his level of brain info and catly persuasions, and a community of individuals who make the everyday life seem interesting. You seriously want to have a vacation in Pickax and have dinner with Jim, see a neighborhood play and discuss the possibility of the dead body found floating down Black Creek (in the book above).

 

Well I'm not going to tell you.

 

You'll have to curl up on your own couch like a cat happily dozing in the sun and read your own edition or 13. I guarantee, if you have an ounce of dry humour in your bones, that you will be purrfectly satisfied.

 

If not, then all I can say is "Yow"!

 

 



The Knights of the Sacred Lake by Rosalind Miles

Do you like Camelot? King Arthur and Lady Guinevere? Sir Lancelot? Merlin? Knights in armour and swords and horses and castles? Oh my!

 

This is an easy read and I have to admit I would have liked more. A bit more description so that I could really feel as if I was there. A bit more emotion. However, I did  feel the love between Guinevere and Lancelot and wished there had been more of that but ...

 

The cover is vivid.

A Book of One's Own: People and their Diaries by Thomas Mallon

I thoroughly enjoyed this book by Thomas Mallon. I found it in my daughter's Goodwill while I was visiting her last Spring. I just finished it!! I know. That's bad, but I had other books to read as well, the summer job and I finally picked it back up this past weekend from the table by my couch. I had been stung by a virulent yellow jacket and needed book sustenance of a lighter kind where I didn't have to figure out a mystery, a murder, etc...

 

This book was published in 1984. I love the cover. The funny thing was this: when I grabbed this book off the shelf I also grabbed two more and what do you think they all ended up being about? Diaries. So I took it as a nod to "Hello! You may want to start one!" So I did.  It may not prove to be as fascinating as the diaries that Mallon discusses in his book.

 

Mallon says he had read "hundreds of diaries" and that he came "to feel sure of three things":

-writing books is too good an idea to be left to authors

-almost no one has had an easy life

-no one ever kept a diary for just himself

 

You really do want to read the diaries he has picked to discuss and go back in time to experience the daily life of a downstairs servant, or what the gossip was at court during the reign of this or that King or Queen, or what it was like to be a grave robber. Famous diarists such as Sylvia Plath, Samuel Pepys, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Queen Victoria, Thoreau, C.S. Lewis, Anne Frank, Mary Shelley and so forth. To get into their minds is to get into their daily thoughts whether uplifting or downtrodden. To look through the window of their soul.

 

Mallon explains that a diary keeps a person alive and some if not all of the diarists within his book carry this wish when they are writing. That they may live on eternally.

 

I get it!!

 

So if you can find this little gem then grab it. It'll be a good read.

 



Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

 

Here's a classic that I was trying to read last summer but finally read this summer. Better late than never, right?

 

Yes, I found this book on my Goodwill shelf and grabbed it before anyone else could. Don't you love the book cover? So haunting. It befits the story that always seems to be brooding, self loathing and quite sparse of cheer, sunshine and flowers. But one is compelled to continue reading even though one knows that the outcome is not going to produce rainbows and lollipops but rather dismal rain and sorrow.

 

We are intrigued with Catherine and Heathcliff, their deep and eternal love that exudes such highs and lows to the point of devastation. Would one really want that kind of love that pulls one only into another and without that other then one drowns in one's own contemplation in solitude and despair? Regardless we must read on and on to the conclusion which has a glimpse of redemption and recovery for us to feed on.

 

If you have not read this classic, then I suggest you grab one from a friend, the library or off a shelf somewhere. Even though you are not going to laugh uproariously nor smile from ear to ear I think you will be glad you can say that you read it.

 

If I wanted to throw a pun in I would call this novel "Withering Heights" because that is what happens to everyone, almost, who surround themselves around Healthcliff. He is a social vampire.

 

I must admit though that I like the 1939 movie with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. It has one of the best lines in it that I love which is not in the book.