What book could you read over and over again?
Unless it’s Pride and Prejudice, but then I’m more likely to watch a film nowadays.
However, I am an author re-reader. Mainly into thrillers with a comedy element, but one of my absolute favourites was: The Seven Sisters series, by the late and much lamented Lucinda Reilly. I recommend all her books.
She wrote the first six of the series and then sadly lost her battle with illness, so her son Harry Whittaker, also an author, finished the final book for her fans, and to honour his mother.
Typically of people there was some criticism that it wasn’t the same, and it was very slightly slower moving, but even so, without him we would never have found out what started it all, and what happened. We owe him a great deal, certainly enough to accept not-quite-perfect from a bereaved son. It must have been so hard.
Now he is tidying up some of her other work that was never published, and doing a better job. He’s moved from good to almost indistinguishable. Bless him and thank you to him.
It’s important to focus on gratitude for what people actually do, rather than your inner criticism of what they could have done.
Not love
A lot of life is about one simple distinction, love and not love. It’s okay to explore human behaviour in literature, that’s what it’s for, but it’s not okay for people to be so thoughtlessly unloving, critical, demanding, and downright unkind. Let alone violent. None of that is okay.
If only people realised how much the films we see and books we read are not setting the tone of our societies, they are calling them out. Showing us what we are, and in the lovely books and films, showing us the best of us, and what we can be.
Much as I love Reacher as a character (Jack Reacher from the Lee Child books), I can’t help feeling that a powerhouse like him with huge integrity and a passion for defending the weak, would make a much better inspirational speaker.
Okay, not a thrilling book to read: The Jack Reacher Lectures: Stop being a violent prick(ette). But it could work as a life plan and do a lot of good.
Well that’s my weird sense of how things link together for today.
Much love and joy to you all
Deb xx
Deb Hawken - Amorah 