while i've been MIA from journaling i've been, well, what else?  reading!

G read Love by Toni Morrison (never one of my favorite authors, i have to confess) and reported on it thus:  "a confusing, disturbing ordeal."  so, i skipped it.  i did, however, read Our Lady of the Forest, David Guterson's (Snow Falling on Cedars) latest novel.  now, from a well-past-middle-age recovering catholic this may sound pretty silly...but, as a child much of whose reading material was some variation on The Lives of the Saints, one of my greatest fears was that Our Lady would appear to ME.  hugely influenced by both Lourdes and Fatima, as well as a wildly Irish-Catholic mother who would make us all drop to our knees and say the Rosary at odd moments, i feared openings in the clouds, bright rays of twilight streaming from heaven, etc.  OK, go ahead, laugh your ass off.  i'm laughing too.  but i mean every word of it.  so, this was a difficult book for me.  go read Amy Reiter's review here and you'll see my problem with Ann and her visions.

on a totally different track, i also read Kevin Baker's re-released 1993 baseball novel, Sometimes You See It Coming.  Allen Barra, sportswriter for the NYT, calls it  the best baseball novel ever in his review.  maybe.  or, i may think Michael Chabon's fantasy novel for young people, Summerland, was a better story about baseball.  but this one was pretty good.  raunchy.  sexist (what did i expect?). but funny!