Five Books That Have Stayed With Me.

 RHYS BOWEN: Recently on one of the Facebook groups I browse occasionally I saw a posting about five books that have stayed with you.  This got me thinking about which books I would select. I came up with a list pretty quickly and could certainly go beyond five books.

But here are my five:

Passage, by Connie Willis.  It’s about near death and what happens after death. So thought provoking. That book has haunted me since I read it.  If the list was longer I’d also include her Doomsday Book, which I felt was a masterpiece.

The Handmaid’s Tale.  I suspect this might be on everyone’s list.  It seemed like speculative fiction when we first read it, didn’t it? And now….

Possession, by Byatt. That book had so many layers to admire, including the body of work of two fictitious poets. Wow. I wish I could have written it.

The Lord of the Rings:  I had to include this since it was the first book I read as a teenager that completely obsessed me, swallowed me into another world.  I have read it so many time since then that I think I know it by heart, but I still get chills when I read it again.

Prince of Tides, Conroy.  Another book that was so clever as well as so evocative. Talk about sense of place!

I realize this is my five, without including any mystery novel.  So what do they all have? Thought provoking. Sense of place. Certainly not comfortable reading although LOTR does have a sem-satisfying ending. 

If I had to include a mystery novel, it would be Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height. Or

Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, or… Dreaming of the Bones by our own Debs.  All three way beyond what a reader has come to expect from a mystery novel.

And as I write this I feel a sigh coming on. I suppose as I come closer to the end of my career I’d love to have written that definitive novel like one of these. Would any of my books ever make a list like this? Maybe the closest would be the Venice Sketchbook.

Your turn Reds. What books are on your lists?

LUCY BURDETTE: We’re covering our ears at the phrase “come closer to the end of my career” Rhys! This is a hard question, because it depends on how the books stayed with me and what was going on in my life at the time. I’m leaving out the Reds though I adore and admire every book my friends have written.

During my growing up days, I would have  chosen GONE WITH THE WIND. That’s the book I took to school to hide in my textbooks so I could keep reading about the incredible saga of Scarlet O’Hara..

Julia Child’s MY LIFE IN FRANCE for her astonishing voice and sense of adventure and love for food and France.

Galit Atlas, EMOTIONAL INHERITANCE. This is from a psychoanalyst who explored the ways that people carry forward trauma and secrets from their families with little idea about how it’s affecting them.

Kent Kreuger’s IRON LAKE introduces a complicated and appealing character, a compelling setting, and powerful conflict–I’ve read everything he’s written since.

THE LOST VINTAGE by Ann Mah tells the story of a present day sommelier who returns to her family’s Burgundy vineyard and discovers layers of historical trauma. Tied with THE ART OF INHERITING SECRETS by Barbara O’Neal. The character inherits a crumbling English estate and a title after her mother's death, leading her to uncover family secrets, explore a new life in a charming village, and navigate a new romance.

What stays with me? Compelling setting, complicated but good-hearted characters with messy family backstories, and usually a happy ending:)

HALLIE EPHRON: What stays with me is always characters. Especially ones I can relate to.

So starting off with my earliest, Sara Crewe from Frances Hodgsen Burnett’s THE LITTLE PRINCESS earned a place in my heart as the little orphan girl who ends up marooned at Miss Minchin’s school for little girls. Fortunately I missed the1939 version with Shirley Temple who (imhop) was far too saccharine to play the feisty, clever, moody Sara.

Then ELOISE, star of the illustrated children’s book by Kay Thompson and illustrated by Hilary Knight. This precocious six-year-old is every nanny’s nightmare.

Then ANNE OF GREEN GABLES by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne is a plucky (see a theme, here?)  homely, orphaned redhead who is sent to live with her aunt and uncle, Matthew and Marilla. My own children loved it as well.

Several more grownup novels: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen; STONES FROM THE RIVER by Ursula Hegi. And finally one with an adult female heroine (published barely pre-women’s lib)  with whom I so identified, Carol Shields’ THE STONE DIARIES.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, gosh, I think of this from time to time, the books I hope to write.

My five? Books that have stayed with me.

BLACK BEAUTY. Weird,I know, but this is the first book I read where i realized there was such a thing as theme. I remember it so well, finishing and then thinking..wait, I think this is about more than a horse. I bet I was…ten?

THE GOLDEN COMPASS by Phillip Pullman. I was in college, and absolutely transported. Still am.  I put Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, in this section, too. I had never stretched my imagination like that before. Life-changing, both of them.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, by TH White. I still think about this book all the time: justice, honor, community. Magic. How the boundaries on maps are only on those maps. People created them. And it has been a problem ever since.

WINTER’S TALE, by Mark Helprin. Absolutely magical. A perfect book. An adventure, time travel, love, justice, journalism, possibilities. (NOT the movie, run away, run away.)

SO what’s my fifth? Ah, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? Gillian MacAllister’s WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME (I know, but that book is a total wow.) 

Oh, wait, I know, Edith Wharton’s THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY. Still so timely, female empowerment, the mores of society, ambition,  and no one is better at dialogue.

JENN McKINLAY: Like Hallie, Anne of Green Gable was a pivotal read for me. I just loved Anne with an “e” so much.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis. My first fantasy and forever my favorite.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich where I learned how to write found family and over the top capers. 

Circe by Madeline Miller which proved to me I could love literary fiction.

Nettle & Bone by T.  Kingfisher. One of the most imaginative fairy tales I’ve read. Loved, loved, loved it! 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Gosh, this is hard! Like Jenn, my earliest will be THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE. Hooked me on fantasy and made me an Anglophile in one fell swoop.

PETER PAN for Barrie’s gorgeous omniscient narration; a children’s book that’s even more meaningful for adults. “All children, except one, grow up.”

Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, which I read fairly young and therefore without expectations. I was blown away by how real and painful his metaphor became, and will never forget the last line: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

THE STAND by Stephen King. I read it the year it came out in (impossibly thick) paperback, and it lingers as one of the most terrifying views of an apocalypse ever.

SEPTEMBER by Rosamund Pilcher - so many characters brought to life! Such loving descriptions of the setting and mores of the well-to-do Scots and English. Plus a galloping, irresistible plot. It’s like rolling up Dickens, Trollope and Barbara Bradford Taylor in one enormous doorstop. 

So, my takeaways? All except for King are British authors. I like big, expansive stories. And I love fantastical worlds that seem completely grounded in reality.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: So interesting to see where overlap and where we differ! And so hard to narrow down to five.

A WRINKLE IN TIME by Madeleine L'Engle. 6th grade. The first book that really introduced me to the power of good prose, and world building.

THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE by C S Lewis. More fabulous world building, and surely a big contributor to Anglophilia.

LORD OF THE RINGS by J R R Tolkien. Ditto, but more so!

THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING by T H White. Gorgeous, funny, heart-rending, and it started me on an obsession with Arthurian England that lasted for years.

It occurs to me now that all four of these books are about good vs evil and moral choices, and I still think about these stories every day.

GAUDY NIGHT by Dorothy L. Sayers, in order to get in a mystery. This is the book that showed me what you could do within a mystery. And it made me fall in love with Oxford.

RHYS: Isn't it interesting that we have overlapped so much? And when I wrote my list I didn't think of children's books I've loved all my life. Black Beauty... oh how I loved that book. And The Hobbit. And the Chronicles of Narnia.  I still re-read them.

So, dear Reddies, how about you???

Guess What Time It Is!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: You know what time of year this is! And I am so excited. 🦆

If you are new, let me explain. This is so fabulous.

Every year, for the past oh, 25 years, wild ducks come to our backyard pool.  The pool is covered with its winter tarp, and it fills with rain and melted snow, and I guess it looks like a pond on the duck maps. The main two ducks, the very first ones, were Flo and Eddy.

Flo is the male, don’t ask me why, that’s just how they got named. Eddy is the female, and she is hilarious. She waddles to our back door and demands food if we don't feed them fast enough. (We give them wild bird food, of course, not bread.)

So far, the mallards have arrived every year, right around this time of year. It is quite amazing, and I will tell you much more about them as the time goes by. We adore them, and often they bring their friends, and it’s such a rite of spring. 🦆

Now is the time that I am worrying that this is the year they will not arrive. This is such a fear. But I am trying to trust in nature.

There is still ice on the pool,as you can see, but you can also see how the ripples are looking spring-like now, and that is a sign that they are potentially on the way.

Shall we have a duck pool? Like we always do?

Just guess what day the ducks will arrive, and you will entered to win a very nice prize.

You don’t even have to guess the right date to win! (But you get an extra prize if your name is selected at random, and you have chosen the right date! I will choose the winner on the arrival date. )

And send good vibes for the arrival of Flo and Eddy! I'll post pictures of them in Insta and Facebook when they arrive. I am continuing to be optimistic about this.

Anyone remember what date they arrived last year? Often it has been March 14, but last year I think they were a little late.

Also this spring, as the snow melted, I noticed that the rabbits, although completely cute and adorable to see hopping around, have ravaged our rose of Sharon bushes. Look at that!  (Those bushes were as tall as the fence last summer.)

The garden people came, and put up fencing, but the rabbits did not care one bit, and still got inside. I asked the garden person whether the rabbits were hungry, and said maybe I should put out carrots to deter them from the bushes, but she said no, it would just bring more rabbits.

And look! Snowdrops!

So Reds and Readers, what are your guesses for the duck pool? And are there signs of spring where you live?

Can This Be True?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I’m not sure what my reaction is to this. It’s either: duh, I could’ve told you that very easily. 

Or: wow, see, I knew it!

See what you think.

I read an article in The Washington Post about “hasslers”. That’s how the article terms people who are hassling you. And the jist of it was basically, that there is medical research that shows the difficult people in your life might make you age faster.


That while positive relationships, this article says, make you happier and healthier, hasslers have the opposite effect. So it says this article. Because they increase chronic stress.

According to this article, negative relationships actually make your cells age more quickly.

Here’s a quote from the piece:  “Researchers found that for every additional hassler, participants regularly interacted, with their pace of aging increased by 1.5%. In other words instead of aging one biological year per calendar year, a person with at least one extra hassler would age around 1.015 years during the same time. It gets worse, the more hasslers you have.”


It also says (I’m shocked! shocked!) that women typically have more hasslers than men. Not even going to go there. And, that women tend to be disproportionately affected both positively and negatively.


See what I mean? I can’t decide whether this is obvious or groundbreaking.

Plus now I am even more annoyed with the one-time co-worker who I asked whether she’d like me to tell her what happened in a certain meeting.

Her reply was “I already know what happened in the meeting but I’m happy to hear your version of it if you’d like to tell me.”

Whoa.

Or another co-worker who was producing a story I was investigating, and I called her to say I was at the scene of the crime, but that there was no way to get ot he actual place without going on private property.

She told me, "Well, I’m looking at Google earth on my computer, and it looks to me like there’s a way in. Just go ahead, and then turn left.”

I said: "You are in your office looking at a computer, and I am in the real place! I’m right here. And there’s no way in. I can see  how it might once have been, but there’s no left turn anymore, it’s been changed.”

She said: "It shows it on the map."

And I said: "I am actually HERE."

And she said "Well, I guess you aren't really interested in this story."

So. AH. I am not going to do the math about this, but she lost me some time.

I’m trying to figure out how to ask you about this without having you throw your theoretical father-in-law or second cousin or boss under the bus. So I’ll just ask you this. Do you think this medical finding is shocking? Or obvious?

(And if you want to tell us the best hassly line you’ve ever heard from anyone, we’ll commiserate…)