DROWNING IN BOOKS!

I'm reading so many books so quickly I don't really have time to keep up with commenting upon them.  Little Children, Tom Perotta, was not worth commenting upon, in my opinion.  I felt the same way I feel after watching a truly worthless TV show that I was too lazy to tear myself away from.  I should have given up on it, but there was a little thread of mystery running through it that I had to follow to the end!

Divining Women is the first book by Kaye Gibbons that I was not totally in love with.  It's been quite a while between books for her, which of course could mean any number of things.  It's a story set fairly early in the 20th century, which may have been the difficulty.  She uses a stilted form of writing and dialogue, also a deal of epistolary writing, when talking about the characters and in their speaking, writing  It's hard to get close to writing like this.  For a Gibbons fan the story is familiar - a courageous young girl sent into a situation where she is a lone defender against an abusive man.

Here we have Mary Oliver, the young daughter of an eccentric family in Philadelphia sent south to North Carolina  to be a companion to a woman during the end of her pregnancy. Maureen Ross is a relative by marriage; her husband, Troop, a wealthy tobacco company executive, is Mary's mother's half-brother. Troop is a monster of egotism, greed, and selfishness, who has agreed to "let" Maureen have one child before the medical authorities of the day remove her ability to do so. If you've read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, you have some idea of the basic story here.  The difference in this one is Mary, who immediately falls in love with the gentle sweetness of her aunt and becomes her protector, and ultimately her savior.  Abusive men and courageous young women are sort of a theme for Gibbons - any of you who read Oprah's recommended books will know Ellen Foster, for instance.  I quite liked and agreed with Sharan McBride's review of Divining Women in the Houston Chronicle. 

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But HOW can it already be Thursday and the Weekend Assignment again already?  I no sooner manage to do one week's and the next one is staring me in the face.  It's the hardest ever, look at this:

Weekend Assignment #8: Name the book that you feel would best describe you to a total stranger. It could be any book -- a novel, a non-fiction book, a cookbook, or heck, even a textbook (if you're an academic type). The idea, however, is to present a book that would offer up some insight about you as a person.

One restriction: Please refrain from choosing a primary religious text of your religion -- the Bible, Torah, the Koran and so on. The reason I put in this restriction is for the very reason that these texts are no longer listed on bestseller's lists: They're so popular and pervasive that they'll swamp the other books. Let's take as a given that these books are absolutely important to people -- and of course rightfully so -- and set them aside for the purposes of this assignment.

Extra Credit: List a book that someone swore would be a book you would love -- and you didn't.

I'm going to have to think on this for quite some while.