Extra copy

Thank you so much, ghir, for sending out an RABCK even when you were jobless! I was thinking of you yesterday because I came across your 2-week-old post on the forum saying you'd found a new position - I'm so happy for you!! And then today here comes your book in the mail.

I had already emailed you shamefacedly to admit to having accidentally accepted another copy of this book - thanks for being understanding about it. Mr Potok-fan and I recently booked our summer holiday - a cruise across the North Sea - and we will take this copy with us as cabin reading. Kiitos.

I spent the first few pages really irritated with Kent Haruf for not using quotation marks, and worrying that that was going to ruin the book for me, but I’m happy to report that I got (mostly) over that. It still slightly rankles, but it didn’t ruin the book for me.

Otherwise, I very much enjoyed the book. Some sections were hard to cope with, so I confess to skimming a few times (much like hiding my eyes when watching television or fast-forwarding or muting when watching a video or dvd), but overall I loved reading it. As gushing as it sounds, I agree with the reviewer quoted on the back cover of the hardback (James Crumley), ”I loved the prose, as bright and hard as the winter sun sparkling off a sandy snowbank, and the characters, scrubbed to their essentials by the extremes of the Great Plains weather.”

Now, though, I am left slightly irked by the number of loose ends still left hanging at the end (Authors these days! I ask you! – What do they think, a novel should be like real life??), and super-grateful to ghir for sending me the sequel ... but also worried that I will dive straight into it. I must not! I have work to do!

Reading this spare prose about strong silent farmers evoked some of the same feelings I had when watching Brokeback Mountain. As an American I was raised to find strong silent men really attractive, but boy am I glad I married a man who talks!! Still, I do find them attractive – at a distance. :)

thanks so much ghir.

Mailed this out to meshe today as part of the relayers' fiction Virtual Book Box.

Potok-fan's intriguing JE was what drew me to this book in the VBB. And reading the synopsis on the back of the book tells me that I've made a great catch. Thanks so much for mailing me the book. Look for another JE as soon as I've read it.