Holt was never in any danger of bumping into Nobel Prize consideration, but she -- along with Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier and Regency romance queen Georgette Heyer -- could make time spent on a summer lawn chair simply evaporate. Yes, there were always dark corridors and a great guy at the end, but Holt was never entirely predictable. Other reader surprises that made me giddy: by Wallace Stegner, in which an aging professor recalls the tragedy that shattered his pioneer family.
If you can finish Angle of Repose and not immediately miss the characters as if you've been forcibly separated from family, you're a better, and probably chillier, reader than I am. And how did I manage to forget this book in my top 10, or John Irving's , with the tragic bark-voiced narrator who talks ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS? That's the thing about Irving: I don't care if every book he writes is not a gem.
I'm with it from the day I first see it until I finish it, usually about 2 a.m. a few days later.
Irving isn't always good, but you always have that sort of anticipation that just any page now, he's going to get A Son of the Circus Count me schooled about the middle class of India. A Widow for One Year ? Walk the prostitute-littered streets of Amsterdam with Irving.
At least I now know enough about tattooing to bandy around references to "flash." A Prayer for Owen Meany gets to readers who don't even call themselves John Irving readers. (We in Kentucky can forget about the godawful movie mess called that resulted from that one, even if it starred Kentucky dramatic goddess Ashley Judd.
If you want well-adapted cinematic Irving, go for or The World According to Garp We love us some William Faulkner, even if you have to work for the first 60 pages or so to get into that Faulkner flow. If you're among the high school students feeling condemned under the threat of a mandated reading of Light in August this summer, just remember: You'll thank your cruel teacher for forcing you to read it. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not a decade from now, but eventually.
Holt was never in any danger of bumping into Nobel Prize consideration, but she -- along with Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier and Regency romance queen Georgette Heyer -- could make time spent on a summer lawn chair simply evaporate.
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