Two Months of Reading | Suite101.com

The last two months have been difficult for me, as I have been hospitalized twice and had surgery twice. Now on the road to recovery I am back with you. Despite my physical ailments, I have continued to read. I have a library near me which has many unabridged books on tape and I am usually listening to three at a time as well as actually reading a book.

I have completed one of Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott books called The Bootlegger's Daughter. It was wonderful. The tempo of the words brought the book to life and gives the reader a feeling of actually being there. I am now into another of the Deborah Knott series, Shooting at Loons and am enjoying it with equal zest.

I have enjoyed Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax series. She takes an abusrd idea and turns it into a delightful reality. Can you imagine your grandmother walking into the CIA and announcing that she wants to be a spy, and they, actually taking her seriously. I have been in love with Mrs. Pollifax from the first book in the series, The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax. Dorothy Gilman has also written several stand alone mysteries. One of them, called The Nun in the Closet is also so absurd in its concept as to be laugh out loud funny from cover to cover. I picked up her book, Caravan, expecting the same, funny and delightful mystery romp through the absurd. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. It was not a mystery, but an excellent and colorful tale of a young American girl's journey into womanhood in the early 1900's, in the world of the nomadic tribes of Northern Africa, her marriage to a much older man as a means of survival, his death, her nomadic wanderings with a young black boy, through the deserts of Northern Africa. She meets a man with whom she falls in love and becomes pregnant with his child. As she awaits his return with the treasure he has hidden, and discovers her condition, she is beset upon by an English gentleman of the landed gentry. After several months of waiting, her young man does not appear and she is forced, out of desperation, caused by her pregnancy in a society which does not tolerate unmarried mothers, to marry the gentleman. Though not a mystery, this is a tale well worth the time of reading it.

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