Wonder On A Budget

Whether you borrow from your local library, grab a handful at a thrift store or pay full price for a new release you must have on your shelf, books are an entertainment bargain. Where else can you find answers or advice sought, feel the personal experiences of a life lived, or conjure a world with new found friends from words written by a fiction writer from the comfort of your corner of the world?

Libraries have been essential to me since my father hoisted me up the steps of the bookmobile as a bright-eyed preschooler in my Iowa hometown. Through the decades in between, books on library shelves have introduced me to writers of nonfiction and many fiction genres. Some of those borrowed stories found a place in my personal library.

An Anne Rice Surprise

“Interview With The Vampire” was on the required reading book list for a University of Iowa Summer Writing Workshop on fiction writing that I had the honour to be chosen to attend many years ago. I couldn’t finish it. Imagine my surprise when years later I spent four hours at a library reading “The Violin”. I couldn’t put it down long enough to check out the book and take it home. The literally haunting tale of a Stradivarius, the ghost eternally attached to it and the woman caught in the spell of both is off my shelf and in my TBR pile to read again.

Eat, Pray, Love

I discovered this memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert in atypical reverse order. I enjoyed the film starring Julie Roberts so much that I reserved the book from the library then bought a copy and read it again. Two more of this author’s books are on hold for future pick up at the bookmobile where I live now in Nova Scotia: the non-fiction “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear” and historical fiction “The Signature of All Things”.

All Things Wolf

Books with 'wolf' or 'wolves' in the title usually end up on top of my TBR pile. When I read a favourable review of James Patterson's novel, I put a library hold on "Raised by Wolves" as I had done previously with Jodi Picoult's novel "Lone Wolf", a story so moving that I wasn’t able to get past the first chapter of another novel for days after I finished reading it. The parallels, comparisons and intersections of how human and wolf families relate and function, or do not, define, blur and cross in this author’s near-perfect work of literary fiction.

After I returned my borrowed copy, I bought "Lone Wolf" for my personal shelf. I won't buy Patterson's thriller of a young sister and brother who leave the woods to live among humans. I didn't enjoy this read and I find it difficult to explain why.

The characters tugged at my heartstrings. Teenage Kai and her much younger and more vulnerable brother Holo are pushed and pulled by a society and way of life that is foreign to them. Their visceral yearning for home and overwhelming urge to run are primal.

I almost didn't finish this book. But I did. In the end I felt the story didn't end when and where it did but maybe it should.