One book leads to another.
I finished reading William McPherson's Testing the Current over the weekend. I loved it. If I can find a little energy this week (I'm afraid I am feeling under the weather and am fighting off a cold) I am going to finish writing about it in the next day or two. I wondered as I was reading whether I would ever get to the end (not in a bad way, but in a, 'wow' this book has tiny print and I don't ever seem to make much progress kind of way), but now that I am done I feel a little at loose ends and despondent--wishing I still was lost in the story.
Sometimes it's best to pick up a new book that is vastly different and set off on a new reading path, but as several books of similar tone and style were mentioned in the afterword, and one of them is Peter Taylor's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Summons to Memphis . . . I have found my next library read.
I've only just brought it home and will start reading tonight. Here's a little teaser from the beginning.
"The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved--especially when there are unmarried daughters. This seemed particularly true in the landlocked, backwater city of Memphis some forty-odd years ago. At least it is a certainty that remarriage was more difficult for old widowers in Memphis than it was over in Nashville, say, or in Knoxville--or even in Chattanooga, for that matter. One needs to know those other cities only slightly to be absolutely sure of this. Yet one cannot say with equal certainty just why the difficulty was so peculiar to Memphis, unless it is that Memphis, unlike the other Tennessee cities, remains to this day a 'land-oriented' place. Nearly everybody there who is anybody is apt to own some land. He owns it in Arkansas or in West Tennessee or in the Mississippi Delta. And it may be that whenever or wherever land gets involved, any family matter is bound to become more complex, less reasonable, more desperate."
The summons to Memphis comes upon the remarriage of the narrator's father. This is a story of "revenge, resolution, and redemption." I'm already looking forward to it.
Somehow this puts me in mind of Eudora Welty, but perhaps only because they are both Southern writers. I read Welty's The Optimist's Daughter last year and was suitably impressed by her. I've not read much of her work, aside from an essay and a story or two, but this is a reminder, too, that I want to read more by her. Maybe Southern writers in general and this sort of story in particular will end up being my next reading path.
Do you do readalikes? Or do you prefer each book be different from the last one read?