Slowing down; recent books by my bed

You'd think that releasing Able to... and getting past the party, things would slow down.

Not really.

I've been busy with finding places to do readings and signings and I feel pretty good about that. I have at least one event per month for the rest of the year. Well, through December. Nothing in December yet.

I say "yet" like I'm looking for something. If it comes knocking on my door, I'll do it, but I think I'm not looking for it. For one thing, the dance theater piece I'm directing goes up in December and I might want to carve out some time for that, eh?

But in general, I need to slow down. This past week was a good start. I some vacation days from the day job, drove down the coast to see friends (although that wasn't a work-free jaunt--I have a signing at the Corpus Christi Barnes & Noble for October [Friday] the 13th), and I'm trying to get back into the the swing of things with a little more balance than I've experienced recently. There's still plenty to do, no mistake about it. But I think I slow down just a tad from the crazed pace I had up to and slightly after the release party.

Besides, I'm not writing. And when I'm not writing, I get a little nuts. So promotional things for Able to... can take a breather for a month or two while I let out some of the people in my brain onto paper.

And by "breather," I mean I have only one other place I'd like to get into before the end of the year.

Insert rolling eyes here.

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It's been a while since I talked about what I'm reading. So I turn to the pile beside my bed to see what I've made it through recently. Note that I'm a slow reader. Or a careful reader? Mostly, a tired reader. The time I've had for reading lately is just before bed and so it's just a few pages a night before I have to give up and turn out the lights.

(I'm currently trying to read Don Quixote before bed. I'm averaging about 10 pages a night for a 1,000 page book. You do the math, I would just get overwhelmed.)

About the time I last wrote about books (other than my own), I picked up a slim novel called The All of It by Jeannette Haien. It's a tale that is set in Ireland and it's a curious thing. After the first few pages, I wasn't too enthralled. I kept reading, however, because I'd bought the thing and it was so short. And it's one of those books that sort of creeps up on you. Now, I don't find the prose particularly artful, neither do I find anything particularly surprising in the plot. Oh, there were a couple of turns I hadn't expected, but I'd guessed some of it.

And yet, once I got going, Haien had me. The story has a mystery--a deathbed confession to the local priest starts to unravel a life of layered lies. Had it all been more sensational (and it could easily have gone that way), this would be a summer beach read. Haien's art, then, is in the quiet subtlety and human voices of the characters.

It also strikes me as the sort of mystery that could only have taken place before the internet age, indeed, the main mystery and lie is laid in an age before there were much of any instant communications. It struck me that the ruse that is played out over a lifetime would require it's setting--a time of few background checks, a time of taking things at face value, a time of sketchy record keeping.

Did I like the book? As I write about it, I admit a sort of lukewarm feeling about it. And yet, I was drawn in, I found one or two surprises. I found humanity in the characters. Given so much of what passes for writing these days, I think that's enough to say the reading was time well spent.
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I was also going to write about Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, but I think this entry is long enough. Part of my slowing down is taking more time for this blog, so come back in a couple of days and hopefully I'll have passed judgment on last year's Pulitzer Prize winner . . .