It's Monday! What are you reading?

 

This event is hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Go check out her blog. Meanwhile, here's what I'll be reading this week:

Emily Post's Manners in a Digital World: Living Well Online by Daniel Post Senning (review coming soon!)
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. This is the last novel I've assigned to my class of high schoolers for the semester. I've got to get it reread it before they're finished with Angela's Ashes.
Charles Dickens by Simon Callow (I saw the play in London back in the fall.)

Another thing I'm looking forward to this week is hearing Jill McCorkle talk about her latest book, Life After Life, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. She'll be at the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta tomorrow night, Tuesday 4/30 at 7. You can purchase tickets on their website.

Asheville's Richmond Hill Inn

I wrote about several literary places in Asheville, NC after a visit there with my family in 2009. One of them was the Richmond Hill Inn, which was once a beautiful old hotel that burned a few months prior to my visit. Fire investigators determined that the first was started by an arsonist, but the case wasn't solved until late last year. The owner of the hotel, who was facing bankruptcy, set the fire. Isn't that just sad? The land where the hotel was was where Civil War poet Sidney Lanier camped one winter. I wrote more about seeing this place here.

It's Monday! What are you reading?

 

This event is hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. Go check out her blog. Meanwhile, here's what I'll be reading this week. I'm feeling ambitious:

Lipstick Jungle by Candace Bushnell (I need to get in a book where I don't have to think after Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson, which I finished over the weekend. If you've read this book you probably understand.)
Rereading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. I've assigned this to my high school literature class to read over spring break. I hope they're enjoying it.
Z by Therese Anne Fowler (I can't wait to start this one!)
Charles Dickens by Simon Callow (I saw the play in London back in the fall.)

Writers' Houses: Flannery O'Connor

Ann Napolitano, author of A Good Hard Look, which I read a couple years ago and wrote about, contributed recently to Writers' Houses. Her article, Where Flannery Became Flannery, is about her visit to O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, after visiting her farm in Milledgeville for seven years while working on her novel. Napolitano writes very well about the thrill you can get from visiting the place where an author got her start, either in life or as a writer. Take a look.

Look what I just got in the mail!

I can't wait to start reading these two books. Therese Ann Fowler and I were classmates in Elaine Neil Orr's creative writing workshop at NC State in 2005. I'm so excited for both of them and their new books. 

Call the Midwife is coming back

The only PBS show I love almost as much as I love Downton Abbey is Call the Midwife. Last fall when season one aired, it was the thing that kept reminding me that it was OK to wait a little longer for Downton Abbey, and to enjoy it in the meantime. I loved the good-hearted characters, the fact that the series takes place in London (one of my favorite places) and the good stories each week.

The show is based on memoirs by Jennifer Worth, known in the show as Jenny, a nurse and the central character. I bought the first of the three memoirs, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times during the time the first season ran, and enjoyed reading it very much. Two more memoirs follow (Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse and Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End), which I hope to read sometime soon.

The first book contains anecdotes that viewers from the first television season will recognize, so I'm interested to see what the second and third books and the second TV season have in store. Eight new episodes are coming on Sunday nights starting this weekend - March 31 at 8 pm.

Book Review: Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

Published by: Algonquin Books

Published on: March 26, 2013

Page Count: 352

Genre: fiction

My Reading Format: Advanced reading copy, Kindle edition from Netgalley

Available Formats: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle and Audible audio editions

My review:

Family secrets, disappearing acts, quirky old folks, memories, dark pasts, small town life, oral history, a beloved dog, those who are crazy and those who just pretend to be: ingredients needed to write a proper Southern novel. Jill McCorkle has included all these things and more in her first book in 17 years, Life After Life. In the spirit of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and the more recent A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (Joshilyn Jackson), McCorkle beautifully and convincingly captures the voices of a myriad of characters - all ages, both genders and those who will do good and the world and those who won't.

Life After Life takes place mostly in a small North Carolina town. A young girl named Abby feels more comfortable spending time next door at Pine Haven, the town's retirement home, than she does with her mother or her peers at school. Nearly every character has trouble fitting in to the world around them because of something: too many marriages, too many tattoos, too many affairs or too many inappropriate comments. At Pine Haven, the residents remember their life before they moved in: what they did for a living, how they raised their children, how they fit in in Fulton, North Carolina. What they can't remember or don't want to, they make up. Resident Sadie has made a business out of putting two old photographs together to create a new reality and make a new memory for its owner.

Though some residents appear to have moved to Pine Haven simply to wait around for the end of their lives, quite a lot of living is to be done here. It's their life after life, and so are their stories preserved by hospice volunteer Joanna. For one resident named Rachel, her reasons for moving south from Massachusetts are kept quiet, and she keeps much of the life she led before to herself.   

There are secrets and sadness for the characters like Abby who live outside the retirement home as well. McCorkle brings the two worlds in Fulton, North Carolina, together in beautiful ways as the story comes to a surprising, shocking, saddening close. 

4.5 out of 5 stars

*If you think you'll like Life After Life, you'll probably also like Lunch at the Picadilly by Clyde Edgerton and A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty by Joshilyn Jackson.