I temporarily interrupted my non-fiction reading - I just finished reading a very unusual book, and an unlikely one for me to read. It is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It's a novel, and it is laid out as a series of letters and notes between a bunch of people, with a writer named Juliet Ashton as the central character. It's a beautiful story of post-war recovery in Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands. As it begins, it is a little hard to find the flow and the story, but you find yourself sucked into the correspondence and come to know the characters. I really liked it. Yes, I have to admit, among all my manly reading I've also read and enjoyed Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Sense and Sensibility, etc, etc.
While I'm on the topic, I feel like I have to admit, and proudly, that Jane Eyre actually is responsible for the union of me and my Queen. We were dating, and we read it aloud together, and she decided that a man who would read that book with her was worth hanging on to. The rest is blissful history!
2 comments:
Jane Eyre has some fantastic power! I relate!
I always picture my future groom as a very Rochester type. Everyone always calls me crazy because of his dark, surly outward demeanor, but I don't see him that way at all!
Go team!
Hmm. Sounds worth reading simply for its setting. The Channel Islands intrigue me.
"They are not sovereign states, nor are they colonies. They are British, but do not belong to the United Kingdom. They are partly in the European Union, partly outside it. They do not bow the knee to Her Majesty's government in Great Britain, but loyally (if anachronistically) toast the Queen of England as 'Our Duke of Normandy'.... They have their own language, but everyone speaks English. They have their own banknotes, but deal in familiar pounds and pence sterling. They hold elections, but there are no party politics. They flourish in a democratic age while preserving the western world's last bastion of feudalism. They attract international financiers and rich tax exiles who drive Porsches and Jaguars, yet nowhere does the speed limit exceed 40 miles an hour."
Okay, I admit it, I swiped that from a travel book. But the Islands are definitely on my list of must-see's.
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