OK, so I have a new favorite author. Kate Morton. I've always liked reading, but until now have never really found a fiction author whose work I could literally stay up all night reading. Now I have. Her books have been around seven or eight years, but I just hadn't caught up, I guess. What they have in common are strong women characters, long-held family secrets that one character is trying to get to the bottom of, story lines that span two, three, even four generations, and unique houses in England with personality. Wow, what a combination!
The odd thing, though, is that at the end of a book, I spend at least 24 to 48 hours in kind of breathtaking appreciation of the remarkableness of normal life. Whatever time period she is describing, be it wartime London or Edwardian Cornwall, you feel like you are there. And then, once your head is out of the book, you feel as if your own steps are being taken as part of some larger drama. I love to write, and have even given fiction one try, but her facility with words, and her interweaving of time periods and characters, leaves me in the dust.
I guess it has been a good week for distraction. The news is overwhelming. I realize that the difference between now and my Time Inc. days is that on social media, I am not only accessing the perspective of one or two major news organizations, but dozens upon dozens of perspectives, warnings, criticisms, and predictions. Can there possibly have ever been a time in human history where keeping a calm center was more difficult?
And yet, in the end, it is rather simple to sort through it all. There is love, and there is the lack thereof. As I scan through news feeds and news reports, wherever I access them, I try to sense the "energy" of the sender. And when I can, perhaps paradoxically, to love the mixed cacophony. Somehow, we'll survive these times, and some brilliant writer 50 or 100 years from now will write about it.
