Two books

We popped by Page One at Vivo City, and I succumbed to a book purchase - actually two.

I was first acquainted with Jamaica Kincaid's work back in Bowling Green. One of my dearest friends there JM was doing her dissertation on women expatriate writers - Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid. She introduced me to Lucy. Not many people I know like Kincaid - she's rather an acquired taste, apparently, but I did. And I do. When she writes, it's like she doesn't care about what the readers might think - like she is writing to please herself first, and the reader, a distant second. It seems to me that this is a good thing - a freeing thing - to be able to just put it out there - bahala na. And she has a very unusual way of expressing herself - it's both modern and antiquated at the same time.

During the first six months of my marriage, I was living in Ann Arbor, and JM, who was still plugging along on her Phd back in BG, an hour and a half away, called me and said Jamaica was coming to the UofM and we must see her. So we did. We heard her read in the Hopwood Room in Rackham Hall. And it was just wonderful. She was wonderful. It was a wonderful day.

Back in my twenties, I couldn't put my finger on all of this, but now it seems I understand it more - she just goes on her own with sentences that sort of go slowly slowly slowly and then build to so much more than the thought she initially wanted to express. Today I bought Among Flowers: A Wlak in the Himalaya, a memoir about how she and two botanists went seed gathering in the Himalayas.

And the second book? The second book seems like it's going to be a lark An 84-year old woman has written about the best summer of her life back in 1944 in New York. I am hoping that Summer at Tiffany by Marjorie Hart will be just what it promises: easy reading pleasure.