Hi All,
I hope you are enjoying the holiday with good
weather, good food, and good neighbors and that in between the pancake
breakfasts, the parades, and the picnics, you find a moment to think of the fathers,
brothers, sons, husbands, and wives, and daughters who have served our nation.
Part of our holiday celebration was a friend’s
garden tea, where, in between the clotted cream and scones, people were passing
my pen around (a writer always has a pen) to capture recommendations for their
book groups. It got me thinking.
What about you? Do you make note of every
recommendation you hear? Do you trust a certain friend’s taste and know that
what excites another friend will never do for you? And what about your mom? Did
you ever read or NOT read a book because your mother recommended it? Are you
still resisting your mom’s recommendations?
Just as certain retailers market a brand of
jeans called “Not Your Mother’s Jeans.” I suspect that for some of us, at least
for a few years of our lives, we’re thinking--Please, Not My Mother’s Books!
I have to confess that I’ve resisted some of my
mom’s favorites because they seemed to belong to her and her life experience
and not mine.
By chance I read about one of her favorite
writers, while doing research for my upcoming book from Kensington, The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London--Rumer
Godden. It was just a snippet in my research, but it made me want to take a
second look at Mom’s shelves. Godden’s extraordinary life spanned the twentieth
century, and she lived from Bangladesh to Scotland. She wrote “women’s fiction”
before we had a name for it, perhaps because she had a husband abandon her,
lost a baby, and raised a pair of daughters on her own before a second happier
marriage.
She grew up at Narayanganj, a small town on a tributary of the
Brahmaputra River in East Bengal where their father was the manager of a
steamship company. She and one of her sisters were sent to England to school
and returned to India with the outbreak of World War I. She taught dance and
insisted that her parents educate her in the language and customs of the land
she had come to love.
She claims that she didn’t “ever fall for any
real man, not after Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice” a book she read over a dozen times. However, when
her second husband James died in
1975, in her diary Godden wrote: "I never want to be consoled. I never
want another man in my life." Now, I definitely want to read a writer
who fell for Darcy and her own husband so deeply. It may be time to borrow a
book or two from Mom’s shelf.
What’s on your Mother’s shelf? Have you and she
developed shared tastes?
