One night, I was literally wandering around the house, searching for something to read. It’s only been in recent months that I’ve had any interest in reading for pleasure. My brain had been so fried by the first year of new motherhood, even books on new motherhood didn’t appeal (okay, ESPECIALLY those). You all know how many books on sleep I read — though frankly, only the pages deemed relevant by a bleary-eyed and desperate me.
In this new phase of being a person who reads for pleasure, I have enjoyed a few lovely, engrossing novels, some courtesy of my much-more-literate little sister who passes them on after she’s read them for her book group, one on the recommendation of masterful writer and blogger Maggie Dammit, and one because everyone on the interwebs was talking about it (but I don’t get the fascination and will probably lose friends for admitting this *out loud*).
The Post-Birthday World
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Mary Modern
Twilight
So, if you’re familiar with these titles, you might get a sense of what I like — a little magic, a little romance, a little irony, first-person prose that ranges from pedestrian to lyrical.
I looked to my husband’s bookshelf. Perhaps he had some hidden gems I hadn’t considered? His taste runs to the historical, non-fiction, and/or graphic novel comic heroes variety. Plus a few fiction books with murder as the central plot device.
Nope.
Then, the phone rings.
It’s a publicist, calling from the East Coast (at midnight her time) to see if I’ve received the review copy she’d sent of a book by an old impov friend of mine, Everything Changes: The Insider’s Guide to Cancer in your 20s and 30s, by Kairol Rosenthal.
Perhaps I should have written: Then, the universe rings.