It’s Never Time Not To Read

My husband says that I read everywhere, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I always have a book with me, just in case. So, say I’m in line at the dry cleaners or the grocery store on a busy Saturday morning-why waste time when I can get a few pages of reading in while waiting. When I’m driving,  I always have reading material. No, not WHEN I’m driving, but in  case of an emergency, when I’m stuck in traffic or at at a complete stand still. You get the idea. I can put off any task just to get some reading done. Some people say they don’t have time to read, but, the way I look at it, I don’t have time not to read!

So, I was presented the perfect opportunity when our power was off for 72 hours because of the vestiges of Hurricane Ike running up through the Midwest. For once, I had no reason to feel guilty because I was reading rather than doing laundry or vacuuming. This is what I read by candle light and lantern during that time:

Petite Anglaise  by Karen Sanderson.  Sanderson, a Brit living in Paris, is the author of a wildly popular blog of the same name. Sanderson fell in love with all things French at an early age.  One reviewer compared her to Peter Mayle so I imagined the book would be an homage to Paris but I was a bit disappointed. She moved to Paris, fell in love with Mr Frog and had a child, Tadpole, with him. While her love affair with Paris continued she began to drift apart from Mr Frog and here is where I had problems. Much of this book seemed like an attempt to explain, justify and excuse how she came to cheat on Mr. Frog with a fellow Brit she meets online at her blogsite. While her descriptions of Paris and Parisian life resonate  and her anecdotes are entertaining and often humorous  I was left with the impression that writing this book was her way of validating her cheating and moving on.

Never Enough by Joe McGinniss(author of Fatal Vision) does it again in this page turning true crime book. On the surface, it appeared that Rob Kissel had it all-a beautiful wife and children, wealth beyond measure, a meteoric and fulfilling career and an upscale life in Hong Kong. So why was he murdered, rolled into a rug and dumped into a storage room? Read this chilling story of a life and a love gone terribly wrong which proves that truth is often stranger than fiction.

Bob Schieffer’s America  by Bob Schieffer. Schieffer has been the moderator of Face The Nation since the early 90s and his book is a compilation of some of the anecdotes and commentaries he has ended the show with, a’la Andy Rooney. I was pleasantly surprised that his writing did not have much of a political bent. Though the show is obviously political, Schieffer’s book attempts to stay above the fray of the left and right in an  admirable and  successful way. There’s enough here to make both sides of the aisle mad! He takes both political parties to task and holds them equally responsible for the unsuccessful way that Washington tries to get the people’s business done. It’s refreshing not to see blame pointed exclusively at one side or the other.