I may have been a tad ambitious on my vacation reading. I fly home tonight, but I picked up another book to reread not on my original list, Leah Stewart’s The Myth of You and Me. Stewart has a new book coming in May, Husband and Wife, that I’m eager to get my hands on, but Myth explores some of the same issues of identity, only in the context of women’s friendship.
Meanwhile, I ripped through Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper, a hilarious, pulse-pounding story of a mafia hitman in witness protection as a doctor at an urban hospital. Highly recommended. I passed on my copy to my nephew in the Army, along with Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, pointing out the blurb from my original Orlando Sentinel review 20 years ago. I dipped into it before handing it over, and it’s still amazingly powerful.
While my mother was reading my copy of The Piano Teacher, I read Victor Lodato’s Mathilde Savitch, about a teenager coming to terms with the death of her older sister. Mattie has an irresistible narrative voice, and her tale is funny, fierce and moving; not the downer you might think. I gave the copy to my friend Laura, who knows a thing or two about teenage girls.
That leaves me returning home with The Tourist and The Piano Teacher still TBR. But I did scribble a few ideas for a novel in my notebook. Mmm, I have an hour before I leave for the airport…to read, to write, perhaps to pack.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 