This weekend I finished reading Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." This book started out slow for me, but I stuck with it and plowed through the middle and some slow spots after that before racing through to the end.
At the library today, I picked up "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett. I was tempted to get Larsson's "The Girl Who Played with Fire," but I wanted to read something different. I'm also trying to resist temptation to reread Sara Gruen's "Water for Elephants," which I just read a few weeks ago but LOVED, LOVED, LOVED.
About a dozen pages in to "The Help" -- I'm on page 2 of the second chapter -- I like it already. I like the voice of the initial narrator, a black maid in 1960s Mississippi. From what I understand from the book jacket, Aibilene, another maid and a young college-educated white woman named Miss Skeeter are the main voices of the book. "The Help" was recommended to me by a friend and I've been wanting to read it for a while.
I'm on a bit of a reading binge that started even before I went on vacation. Even though my own stories are tickling my brain -- always when I'm at work or shopping or anywhere but sitting in front of my home computer -- my impulse to read has overpowered my need to write.
Then again, most of my reading during vacation happened on the flights to and from Iowa. Otherwise, when I had free time I was checking e-mail or writing a new story in my journal. Hand writing a book is a much slower process than typing at the computer, so I would've written more while I was on vacation, but I was being anti-social and hogging my hosts' computers enough without getting absorbed in writing a new story.
And then tonight, for the second night in a row, I made the mistake of drinking wine with dinner after a long day, so now I'm too sleepy to write. Sounds like a good enough excuse to read "The Help" instead of writing my own book, right?
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