The best thing about a vacation is that you can read for hours, days, weeks.  And the only good thing about sitting on an airplane for ten hours, 37,000 miles above the earth is that you have nothing else to do but read – no e-mail, no phone calls, nothing but a book and the occasional offer of food and drink.  Kind of the perfect life when you think about it.

I read eight books in the past seventeen days – not as many as I’d intended (my husband is an avid and adventurous tourist), and in fact I had to leave some of my list from the last post at home due to lack of space. But I also picked up two extra books that weren’t on the list. One was Blair Tindall’s wonderful Mozart in the Jungle, Sex, Drugs and Classical Music. Besides the sex and drug part, it’s also a clear eyed exploration of what the costs are to be a classical musician in New York.  The book is an interesting (and serious) combination of journalism and revealing memoir.

The other book that wasn’t on my list was a novel, The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper. I was on a sailboat for two weeks of the vacation, there were five of us, and we all ended up reading it.  Talk about word of mouth – whoever had the book would mutter, Oh God, this is wonderful, as he or she read it, and the rest of us would say, hurry up, finish it!  It’s hilariously funny, has a first line that’s a classic example of a hook to keep you reading, and makes you laugh out loud as well as cry. 

Three Junes by Julia Glass, which won the National Book Award (and on my reading list on the last post,) was so riveting that I wouldn’t share it on the boat, I didn’t want it to ever end, so I read other books at the same time and would save a chapter like dessert.  I finally finished it on the flight home, savoring every word. One of the things Glass pulls off so beautifully is point of view and time. (Some writer, whose name I can’t remember, said that the most important decision a fiction writer can make is point of view.)  Glass’s novel is divided into three sections, 1989, 1995, and 1999, each year from a different character’s point of view (two written in the third person and one in first person). In each section the story is told both sequentially and in flashback.  This results in depth of detail and emotion, and compulsive page turning. Plus the – deliciousness is the only word I can come up with – of finding out what other characters have been up to. If you love novels, read it. And if you want to write novels, read it and then study it. ( I just realized that “deliciousness” as well as “savor” and “dessert” is a good description for Glass’s writing. One of the comments made after the last post was from Becca who wrote: “I loved "Three Junes," but I loved even more "The Whole World Over," Julia Glass’s latest novel. More prose that melts in your mouth like rich chocolate.”)

I looked up both novels on Amazon and read the reviews. Wonderful reviews from the critics and other writers – and most readers loved the books as much as I did, but to my amazement some readers did not.  How could anyone not love these novels? I actually got mad reading some of the reviews. What do you mean there were too many characters? That the ending was predictable?  What kind of idiot are you?  But there’s a good lesson in this: some people are not going to love what you love, or what you write.  Remember that next time you get a rejection slip. And keep writing.