Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving!

Room For Two by Abel Keough

Just a little background first: I've been reading Abel's blog online since he was on diary-x. I bookmarked it because we had one thing in common I knew of right away: we were both widowed and then had remarried. Even though there are differences in the ways we lost our spouses many of the feelings we had in the aftermath were very similar. Abel subsequently moved to another website and called that blog Running Forward which I think is a very apt name. Over the years Abel and his second wife have had 3 children and I was thrilled at the news of each birth. Yes, there is love after the death of a loved one. It can happen. I was also thrilled when Abel announced his book was being published and was eager to read it.

Room For Two was hard for me and it's not because there was anything wrong with Abel's writing style. It's a painful story and I was shocked at how many of my own feelings came back to the surface, particularly guilt that I hadn't been able to do more to save Rich. Now, I think that is universal with widowed folks. In Abel's case, he had some premonitions of danger but felt he didn't act enough on them and when he entered his apartment, he heard the gun go off. His first wife had killed herself.

Abel did all the right things. He called 911. He was also in a state of shock. When my son and I found my first husband, Rich, on the floor he was already gone but I also went into shock. I remember calling 911, trying to keep the children from their father's body and leaping around like a frightened deer scooping up Rich's medications to take to the hospital. And even though I was stunned, I was still beginning to berate myself for not insisting we go to the emergency room the night before. Well, that's another story not related to the book but the fact I'm rambling about it is just testament to the fact that reading Abel's book brought back all those memories and feelings.

After Rich died, I belonged to an online community called Widownet. There were other widowed spouses whose loved ones had committed suicide. There's a stigma associated with suicide and that was an issue that everyone could try to understand but unless you've been through it you can't really "get" the shame of saying that your spouse killed him/herself. And so there was a separate sub-board called SOS (Spouses of Suicides, I think).

Abel mentions the isolation of being widowed. Yes, he is right. Ministers of churches I talked to said "oh, yes, the widowed--that's a group of people with needs we need to address" but had just never gotten around to it. Luckily the Catholic church has a good bereavement program and that's where I met other widow/ers. My friends and relatives were all single or married and I was totally uncomfortable with married couples after Rich died. I felt like a third or fifth wheel.

Another issue Abel addressed was dating. Only the widowed person knows when is the right time and yet everyone wants to tell you what's right for you. Abel's family was shocked when he began to date after his first wife died. I think it was about six months after but it doesn't matter. I felt "skin hunger" and a deep loneliness for the sound of a man's voice and the touch of his fingers and that wasn't disloyal to Rich. When TB and I met online and then began dating, members of both of our families said, "But didn't you love ....?"

Yes we did. But our loved ones were gone, away from us forever and somehow you have to go on or dry up and die.

Anyway, Abel's written a excellent book, one that is helpful to understanding the thoughts and feelings of being widowed. I can't do justice to it because it hits me too close to home. It's definitely something everyone could read--and there is a happy, hopeful ending. You can lose your love but still find love again before your own life is over.

Changing the List

I don't know if you're supposed to change a reading list after you've already made one for a challenge but I just have to do it because I need a little Christmas right now! I feel like Mame at the moment: older, colder, and in need of an angel on my shoulder!

From my original list, I read these:

Non-fiction:

A Matter of Degree: The Hartford Circus Fire and The Mystery of Little Miss 1565 by Don Massey & Rick Davey

Room For Two by Abel Keough

Fiction:

Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

A Dangerous Woman by Mary McGarry Morris

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

The Cloud of Unknowing by Thomas H. Cook

And I read two that weren't on my list at all:

Born On A Blue Day by Daniel Tammet (non fiction)

The Dream Hunter by Sherrilyn Kenyon

I'm still planning to read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

I'm also planning to read as many of these as I can between now and the end of the challenge...right on through the New Year:

Deck the Halls and Santa Cruise by Mary Higgins Clark & Carol Higgins Clark

The Christmas Tree by Julie Salamon

The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans

Christmas Feast (collection)

Christmas In My Heart (another collection)

I didn't know...

...that John Robison (Look Me In The Eye) and Augusten Burroughs (Running With Scissors) are brothers! That's good to know because now I'll read one after the other!

The Cloud of Unknowing by Thomas H. Cook

This is one of those very few times I've felt wishy-washy about a book. It sounded intriguing to me when I read the back cover. I hadn't read anything by Cook before. David Sears narrates The Cloud of Unknowing with two different voices in alternating chapters. David is an average attorney, partner at an average law firm. He's always been in the shadow of his older and brilliant sister, Diana, and their father--also brilliant but also a paranoid schizophrenic--has made it very clear that David is lacking.

The book starts out with David's "you" voice, seemingly disembodied and removed from himself. He mentions a story written by Leo Tolstoy about the deaths of three people and how a sense of dread grows when one person is murdered and then another...and there is this anticipation, when is the third one going to happen? David reveals he is talking to Detective Petrie. David seems to be a material witness or a suspect to ... what? Murder? And whose? The "you" David slowly spins the story of madness, grief and ...is it murder? The second David speaks in the more normal and attached to reality "I" voice. He adds to the details "you" David parcels out.

Diana was devoted to caring for her mad and brilliant father for almost all of her life. After his death, she falls in love and marries but the son she bears seems to bear the taint--"it's in the blood"--of mental illness. The boy drowns and it's ruled an accidental death...or was it an accident? Diana is obsessed with learning the truth and draws David's young daughter Patty into the increasingly weird investigation.

I'm trying to get a handle on why it is I didn't love the book. There was lots of mystery and suspense. It's pretty obvious almost from the get-go that we're supposed to think that the grief stricken Diana is losing her mind. The more I read, especially of what "you" David was telling the detective, the more I wondered who might have really gotten the schizophrenia gene. Keep that Tolstoy story in mind because I'd forgotten and it does foreshadow what's to come in this story. How many deaths were there? And how many were murders?

One thing I'm not wishy washy about: I didn't care for the title. There's no zing to it and I probably wouldn't have picked it up at all were it not for the fingertips reaching up out of the water. The title is very blah and I wonder what Cook and his editor/agent/publisher was thinking?

I liked the book enough that I wanted to read others written by Thomas H. Cook. Check it out and see if you like it!

A Dangerous Woman by Mary McGarry Morris

After reading A Dangerous Woman I've decided that Mary McGarry Morris is my new favorite author. She is amazingly perceptive about people and life in small towns and makes you feel like you are there watching the story unfold--sometimes like you are a part of it! I think we all know someone like Martha Horgan: "different", difficult to talk to or to be around and someone who is just "weird". There's been something "different" about Martha her whole life. She is socially inept, painfully honest and unable to maintain an adult relationship with anyone because she becomes obsessed with that person. Is it because she's lonely? Or autistic? Or is she psychotic?

Martha was already "different" when something traumatic and horribly unspeakable happens to her when she is seventeen. After that, and particularly after the death of her father, she is sheltered by her Aunt Frances who really isn't all that much older. Frances is the one who arranges for Martha's job and room in town and is usually the one who has to deal with any of her problems.

Martha's only "true friend" is a co-worker, Birdy. To Martha's horror, Birdy becomes involved with a despicable type of man, one who uses Birdy and pilfers from the cash register. You can't tell someone in love that their lover is bad, though, and Martha just cannot understand why Birdy won't listen to her. Martha loses her job when she's falsely accused of being the thief and throughout the book, she is determined to make Birdy listen to her.

Martha just wants to be normal like you and me, to love and be loved, to have friends, a life, a purpose and to be happy.

That's what the other wonderfully depicted characters in this book want too. Frances has invested years of her life with a man she cannot claim. A ne'er do well by the name of Colin Mackey appears, a troubled man who'd like to be a famous writer and seduces both Martha and Frances. There are the ladies at the boarding house, at least one of whom appears in another great book by Morris, Songs In Ordinary Time. Now that I've read this book, I'm very much looking forward to reading other books written by this author. It's definitely an excellent book to read!

The Dream Hunter by Sherrilyn Kenyon

The Dream Hunter wasn't on my original Fall Reading Challenge list but I won it in a drawing, the first time I've won anything in years and I was curious to read it. I thought it was part of a vampire hunter series and wanted to give it a try. It turns out that this is a separate new series by the same author about dream hunters.

What are dream hunters? It's a little bit involved but they are Greek in origin; they were placed under a curse by Zeus, god of all Greek gods, and haunt the dreams of humans so that they can temporarily feel emotions again. I can't remember exactly what they did to piss Zeus off so much that he condemned them to a void of emptiness, a world without emotions. One of these dream hunters, Arikos, is particularly addicted to the dreamer's emotions and when he finds someone with especially vivid dreams he tends to latch on like a drug addict.

He finds such a dreamer in Dr. Megeara Kafieri, whose father spent a lifetime seeking Atlantis. She has some pretty bitter feelings toward her father because over the years, almost everyone in her family has died in this search for Atlantis. After his death, she receives from an old family friend coins that her father found and wanted to give her. They seem to be from Atlantis and so she becomes re-energized and decides to take up the search again.

Meanwhile, Arik keeps invading her dreams. It gets to the point where one of the other dream hunter gods comes and forbids Arik to visit Megeara again but Arik is too hooked on a feeling and so he makes an outrageous bargain with Hades: make him human for two weeks in exchange for a human soul.

The beginning was all right and I rolled along thinking this was a nice light fluffy bit of story, probably best at the beach, but not terrible at all. All of a sudden, about a third to half way through the book, it bogged down and at times was very unpleasant to slog through. Too many unfamiliar characters were introduced and the story just seemed to go from whimsical to silly. Oh well. Although this particular book ended up being disappointing, I wouldn't give up on the author yet. I would still like to try one of the vampire hunter books.

Booking Through Thursday

Booking Through Thursday

Would you say that you read about the same amount now as when you were younger? More? Less? Why?

I'm sorry to say that I read less now than when I was younger. One reason is because of the distraction of the internet. While TV can't keep me from my book, the internet and all its temptations can: blogging, memes, emailing, forums and other message boards, fan sites, and so on. I also don't seem to be able to read as fast as I used to nor retain information as well. It's part of the Fibro Fog I struggle with.

Oh, Horror!

Booking Through Thursday

What with yesterday being Halloween, and all . . . do you read horror? Stories of things that go bump in the night and keep you from sleeping?

I thought about asking you about whether you were participating in NaNoWriMo, but I asked that last year. Although . . . if you want to answer that one, too, please feel free to go ahead and do both, or either, your choice!

The answer to both questions is: yes! I especially enjoy reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz's books, as well as Peter Straub and Anne Rice (well, not so much her anymore).

And I'm also participating in NaNoWriMo!