There’s a reason I don’t read Romance.

As I left the library the other day, I stopped to peruse the Used Shelf as I always do to look for a treasure hidden among the discards.(Once I found a hardcover, first edition of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Really.)

On impulse, I picked up Claimed by J.R. Ward. It was by a best selling author, and she had graduated from Smith College; it couldn’t be that bad, right?

Let me give you the briefest sample of her writing:

“As she continued to mutter while staring at the barn, he tapped on her shoulder. When she finally looked away from the newscaster and cameraman, he took Lydia’s hand to make sure she paid attention.

“What did they do to you.” He put his palm up as she opened her mouth. “No, you don’t fucking lie to me. You brought me into this. You don’t get to start editing the story now.”

Her eyes went back to the barn, her brows down, her lips in a tight line. As a breeze came up her ponytail was swept in his direction and he caught a whiff of her shampoo.” 

Okay, let’s forget about the fact that there is not a vocabulary word in the entire 200+ pages I’ve read that a third grader wouldn’t know. Let’s even forget about the fact that there are at least two grammar errors in as many paragraphs. Dependent clauses, compound sentences, omission of ending punctuation marks be damned.

What really troubles me is that it is all so trite. What I’ve read is absolutely meaningless! The characters lie, swear, futilely joke with each other, break into another’s home, and essentially do nothing of any interest to me whatsoever. So, I’m abandoning this brief foray into a genre by an author I’ll never be tempted to pick up again.

Even if she  does have 88.2K followers on Instagram with “F**k is a comma” in her profile. That’s the best you can come up with?

I’ll be back in a day or so with thoughts on more books listed for the International Booker Prize 2025. What a joy that will be.

Sunday Salon: Mother’s Day Edition

 

My mother loves lily of the valley. And when I brought a bunch to her sister, who was feeling ill this week, my aunt said, “Grandma loved these flowers.” Apparently, it runs in the family.

What a thought: to run in the family. Imagine that the flowers loved by the women of the family grow in my backyard because I love them, too. Imagine the continuation of likes and similarities.

Once, when my son was in High School, we attended the Mother Son Brunch. I was surrounded by blondes with fake hair, fake eyelashes, fake tits, and fake nails. They were talking about what their sons would be after graduation. 

“And what would you like to be?” one of them asked my son.

“A mercenary,” he replied. 

He wasn’t kidding. For the longest time he wanted to work for Blackwater, an American private military contractor now known as Constellis.

There was a long pause. How do you respond to someone who wants to be a hit man? But, inside I smiled. Not because I condone killing, but because my son is, after all, like me. Neither one of us wants to fit inside a box. Be easily defined. Color in the lines. 

May you find the connection you need to the people in your life. And, to those who are mothers, a very Happy Mother’s Day.

(Find more Sunday Salon posts here.)

On The Calculation of Voume I by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J.Haveland (“Maybe there’s healing in sentences.”)

My husband, who is a gardener, notices things like this stone that is wrapped with a rope. In Japan, it has a name, sekimori ishi, and it indicates that a path is closed. Or, that visitors should take a different route.

I find it particularly meaningful in light of the way I placed such a stone in my blog. For a long time, it has been closed. Even now I am hesitant to move the boundary stone, uncertain if I’m ready to head down this blogging path again.

Yet, the requests to review books keep coming in, and more surprising than that, to me, is that my blog stats have not significantly changed since the post I last published. Perhaps there is still an interest in what can be found here…

Although I have not joined the International Booker Prize Shadow Jury this year, for the first time in at least eight years, I have been reading the list on my own. I was reluctant to read it under pressure as there is such little time between the announcement of long list and the winner. Instead, I wanted to take my time before submitting scores, and evaluating each book, with fellow shadow members so that we could arrive at a decision as to our winner. 

This year’s short list is not disappointing. I have read all but one, and I would like to share my thoughts on each as we draw closer to learning which book is the winner on May 20, 2025. Let’s begin with On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. 

The premise is relatively simple; the narrator relives the same day in her life over and over and over for a year. The end.

But, when thinking about it, I find much deeper applications. For example, couldn’t that scenario depict the way that we are stuck in our lives? We don’t know how we got somewhere, and we often don’t know how to escape. Certainly I have felt that I make the same mistakes, repeat the same routine, relive the same sorrows over and over and over.

Most poignant to me is when she speaks of writing, for it is a similar passion of mine:

I am sitting at a table with a pile of paper in front of me on which I have written that it is the 18th of November and that my name is Tara Selter. I feel as if I am no longer alone. As if someone is listening. My days have not been lost to oblivion. They exist. My days exist in my pile of paper, they have not been erased during the night, the paper remembers…Maybe there’s healing in sentences.” (p. 84)

Of course, this will probably not be an aspect of the book on which most readers focus. But, I am fascinated by the power of writing, the power of words, as a shelter in life’s storm. Can you relate?