love, affairs & roads less traveled

These past two weeks, I have been reading.  Winter is a great time to read.  When it is cold and windy outside, it is so nice to curl up in a chair with a book.  Of course, I could say that summer is a great time to read as well.  Laying by the pool with a book--nothing better.  Anyway, I have read all my library books, which is a shame because it is about to be really cold and snowy and now I have nothing to read.  (Krista, I guess I have stupid problems too. :) )

The first book I read was Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Famous and Obscure Writers.  I loved reading this.  Some memoirs were quite sad: Time heals all wounds? Not quite. and some were so funny: Should have learned to count.   And here is one of my favorites: We were each other's favorite person.  Aww.   This book inspired me to challenge myself and so I am going to try to do all my post titles in six words. 

Then I read Lucy by Ellen Feldman.  This was the book club selection.  I really liked this book.  I went into it without knowing that Franklin Roosevelt had affairs or that his affairs helped shape who Eleanor Roosevelt would become.  As the author writes in her note at the end of the book: 

If Eleanor Roosevelt had not known betrayal, she might have lived out her life as dutiful wife and mother rather than as a force for peace and social justice throughout the world.

She wrote this as a fictional story with historical facts and real people, which is facinating to me.  I go to my first book club meeting tonight and I am excited. 

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is described as "the searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Comrac McCarthy's masterpiece" in the front flap of the book.  And it was emotional.  So much so that I had to skip the middle of the book and just read the last quarter of the book.  Because it was almost too much to bear.  This book about a father and son's journey through a burned, empty America to the coast is terribly heart-wrenching, all throughout the book.  (I think, like I said, I couldn't read all of it. Well, I could have.  I just chose not too.)  His writing is beautiful though.  I loved how he describes the father and son's relationship: 

each the other's world entire.

Isn't that tender and beautiful? 

Last night, I finished Bel-Ami by Guy De Maupassant.  The sentence from the book that describes it perfectly is "

My dear woman, love doesn't last for ever.  Easy come, easy go.

Maupassant himself was one for easy come, easy go love affairs it seems and he sure knew how to write about a man that is moves ahead in life by seducing women who have money.  This book was written in 1885 and set in Paris. I enjoyed it because the main character was very likable.  Even though he was a master manipulator and seducer.  I even fell for his lies.  Only toward the end, did I think, "You know, I don't really think he loves any of these women!"