Fall Books!

Apologies for not posting this past week, but I have an excellent excuse. It's fall book season and I am reading, reading, reading. Like the gardeners and farmers who are reaping their harvest at this time of year, I am gathering in the books and staying home to enjoy the literary bounty of the season. What am I reading? Three books at once...

I'm racing to finish The Book Thief (550 pages!) by Markus Zusak, in time for a new YA (young adult) book group that's having its first meeting on Tuesday. I'm 450 pages in, and it's been a marathon read. One hundred (dense) pages to go. I'll post my impressions once I'm finished. 

I was mid-way through two other books before I began The Book Thief, and I'm excited about getting back to them. They are both wonderful! One is the new Miriam Toews novel, called The Flying Troutmans, which has some of the best dialogue between siblings I've every read. It is authentic, painfully sad and comical, all at the same time. Toews (author of the Governor General's Award for A Complicated Kindness) has an amazing ability to juxtapose dark and funny, and make you feel like laughing and crying in the same breath.

The other book (which I'm reading a year after it was published) is The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, Vancouver authors who began a one-year experiment to eat only food that had been grown within 100 miles of their home. It is truly amazing to read of their struggle to find enough to eat, and also enlightening to understand how this book has helped revolutionize our thinking about what we eat and where it comes from.

I'll post more about these books as I finish them, but for now, it's time to get back to The Book Thief. For all of you writers who have contributed so generously to the fall bounty of books, I send my sincere and grateful thanks.

Happy Reading, everyone! 

P.S. If you'd like to email with your fall book recommendations, I'll gladly post them. Send them to: deborah@deborahhodge.com.