Laundry day book definition, and “Reading Matters”
My friend said I need to define the term “Laundry Day Book” if I’m going to keep using it because who wants to go back and read all the posts trying to figure out what I’m talking about.
Laundry Day Book it has to be a book you can put down and pick up again, nothing too intense so you can stop and move clothes from the washer into the dryer, nothing too unputdownable so the dryer clothes don’t remain there to become hopelessly wrinkled.
So while I’m on here, I found a quote in WLT (World Literature Today), University of Oklahoma literary magazine, that I would like to share and hope I take to heart when writing in my blog.
“We readers who say we want to share our love of books all too often choose to act as commentators. As interpreters, analysts, critics, and biographers, smothering great works in pious testimonies. Victims of our proficiency, the words in books give way to our own. Rather than allowing a book’s intelligence to speak through our mouths, we replace it with our own intelligence as we talk about it. Rather than acting as emissary for the book, we become guardians of the temple, boasting of its wonders in the very words that slam shut its doors: Reading matters!”
from The Rights of the Reader by Daniel Pennac
(forthcoming from Candlewick Press in November 2008)
Julius House, not Sookie, by Charlaine Harris
Saturday or Sunday is usually laundry day, so I think that calls for a Doing Laundry Books category. Of course it has to be a book you can put down and pick up again, nothing too intense so you can stop and move clothes from the washer into the dryer, nothing too unputdownable so the dryer clothes don’t remain there to become hopelessly wrinkled. This week it was a Charlaine Harris (of Sookie Stackhouse fame) book, The Julius House.
It is book four of her Aurora “Roe” Teagarden series. I know I read Three Bedrooms, One Corpse,
but it’s been awhile, I think that’s where she met her to-be-husband, wedded to him now in Julius House, it’s not entirely marital bliss.
“Well, if you really want to know—she asked me if it was really true that you were marrying a Yankee. I said, ‘Well, Miss Neecy, he is from Ohio.’ And she said, ‘Poor Aida. I know you’re worried. But there are some nice ones. Aurora will be all right, honey.’ ” p.72.
This was written before her southern vampire series, so sex is just alluded to and no gorgeous vampires appear. But it is what I think of as a southern cozy, which works for laundry day.
Chick-lit can also work but that can wait for another day.
I like the introduction of Angel and Shelby Youngblood. The mystery is all about a missing family, and what we know or don’t know about each other in any relationship.
I think Harris was developing her voice in these early titles and they are a bit uneven. She is certainly better now. But hey, it’s Laundry day.
