Early Morning Musings

Today's books

 

“Early,” in this case, would not be when I woke at 4:30 a.m. but when I came back indoors at 7 after driving a red bag of garbage (“Red Bag of Courage,” the Artist used to say) out to the highway for pickup, which could only be done after the windshield and rear and front windows of my car had been scraped free of the night’s hard frost. Since my loving nighttime and morning companion (canine) is speechless and illiterate, there’s no point in sharing all my thoughts with her, especially when I’m thinking about books I’ve read, so I’ll put them out here.

 

The latest book I finished reading was one I’d read before but hadn’t remembered reading until about halfway through, at which point there was no stopping, because Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is not a book you put aside before reaching the end. My recent re-reading of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel, The Waters, was a different kind of second reading. As the first had been only a couple of months ago, I had picked up the book again not by accident or to remind myself of what happened to the characters, but rather to luxuriate, more slowly this time, in that lush Michigan-fictional world.

 

Nonfiction/fiction. Mountain/waters. Brothers/sisters. Yet in both stories, unlike as they are in so many ways, there is a family isolated from its own surrounding community, as well as from the larger world; a young girl, hungry to learn, who is kept out of school; a mother who knows herbs and how to take care of babies; and violence, an omnipresent threat, that breaks out from time to time without warning. 

 

I wonder if BJC has read TW’s memoir and if TW has read – or will read – BJC’s novel. What would they have to say to each other about their respective lives and books? Have you read both books? What do you think?

 

My rural world