A Good Day to Read a Book

There could not have been a starker contrast between yesterday morning and this morning:  the bright sunshine and mild temperatures, the long sweet afternoon on the beach reading books, the glow of slight sunburn at the end of the day, suddenly replaced by a grim and rainy February day.  I went out to do my Tai Chi and realized that the wind had sprung up again overnight, out of the north, and on the way out to the dune-top deck a light rain began to spray fitfully on me, freckling the boardwalk. 

This is the kind of day that I would imagine a detective from the Murder Squad might be called out to investigate a murder on this same dune-top deck.  There would already be yellow tape stretched across the walkway and men in white coats would be bent over, carefully combing the sand dunes for evidence.  I would nod to the officer as he lifts up the tape and I duck under.  "What have you got?" I would ask curtly . . .

But thankfully I am not on the Murder Squad!  Instead I was glad to tie the hood of my sweatshirt tightly around my head as the rain intensified, and to return to the warmth of the condo and the sweet smell of coffee where I intend to merely read about murder most of the day - a good way to rest up for tomorrow's race.  My new book is Tana French's The Likeness, and the cover blurb describes it as "a nearly pitch-perfect follow-up to her debut thriller, In the Woods." That is exactly right.  And I am forbidden to say anything more about it because Martha will want to read it next.

 
What a wonderful thing it is to read a book!  I feel sorry for young people today who know nothing more about reading than that little device in their hand and its tweets and posts, or (worse) that television screen and its loud flashing horrors.  The next best thing to a book is a Kindle, I suppose, which allows a reader to easily pull hundreds of books like this as if my magic through cyberspace into a comfortable little tablet on one's lap.  I do understand its advantages, but I love the smell of real paper, musty and sweet, the ability to flip back a page or two and re-read something I might have missed, to dog-ear a page I might want to return to. 

And the talent of a good writer of fiction like Tana French who is able to effortlessly transport me to the Irish countryside and its driving rain - I can almost smell it! - evoking so well the little village there and its inhabitants, and creating out of nothing real flesh-and-blood characters who think and feel and whom I come to care about by the end of the book.  And a plot that twists and turns like a maze of country roads, leading the reader deeper and deeper into the woods.