Towels Coming Soon

Sorry, I'm breaking my own rules; I was hoping to post my towel pics yesterday, but I've been reading! Fiction, to boot! I've complained for nearly three years until Nancy's ears nearly dropped off her head how I was disappointed with the last one-third of "Poinsonwood Bible", so she loaned me Kindsolver's "Prdigal Summer" a month or two ago. I couldn't get into it, or into any books other just gazing at pictures for all that time, but when I was sick last week and couldn't concentrate on anything else, I started it. (Among other things, it's bad luck in Japan to borrow things over New Years, so I thought if I started early in Dec, I might finish it in time to return it.) Well, it turns out I found it quite interesting and read it in three or four days, which to me is unbelievably fast. And I liked it for the most part.

I find it difficult to stay focused or interested where description of nature goes on and on, so the first chapter was hard going. I discovered I need people and interaction (which, to me, are "events") to stay interested in books, and this is probably why I like biographies, and can't stay focused on stream-of-consciousness stuff. I have a hard time organizing the different voices in my head enough I don't need to go into someone else's.

This novel had some interesting discourse on ecology, i.e. how dangerous it is to reduce the number of predators to the overall environment vs farming. I got bored with descriptions of flowers, trees, insects, and birds; for the most part I don't know them well enough to visualize and when I can't visualize a scene, I loose interest. But I could visualize a farm, (OK, maybe not a Southern farm at the edge of Appalachian Mountains, but I can visualize an old homestead,) and people and interactions, so that kept me sufficiently interested. Again, this would be why I tend to read stories taking place in cities, where I can smell the food and hear the sounds some times. But I hadn't realized this until this morning.

I'm excited about fiction again, kind of. I've got tons I've bought but haven't read.

Time for a quick bite and finishing my towels, then.