Today we welcome a fellow member from my RWA chapter, Jane Myers Perrine. Welcome, Jane!
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” ~ Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life
When I was a child, my favorite Christmas presents were books. My favorite activity during cold winter days was to curl up in front of the fire and read. My parents were readers. Mom had a bookcase built into one wall of the living room and filled it with novels. Several others covered tables or were tossed in chairs where they were being read.
I love the feel of books, the pages, the covers, everything. One of my favorite activities both as a child and as an adult has been to go into a bookstore and browse, enjoying all those books in one place and hoping to find one by a favorite author, a book I hadn’t read before.
I know a lot about history and geography and have a large vocabulary. I take no credit for that. I owe it all to reading. I love historicals. Where else can you enjoy a novel and learn neat stuff? In college I had a double major of English and Spanish because I thought, “How cool is it to be able to read and get college credit for it?” So I did that, in two languages.
My husband bought an e-reader several years ago. I fought even holding it. I kept repeating, “I love real books. I love the feel of paper. I love turning pages. I love holding books.”
Then I tried George’s Kindle and discovered a book is a book, in whatever form. It’s not the turning the pages that makes a difference. It’s the words on the pages that are important. Reading is reading and books are books. And I still love browsing for new titles and new authors in on-line bookstores.
Reading has truly been both a center of and a constant in my life. I imagine it has been for you as well. What wonderful memories do you have about reading? What is your favorite book? What books do you read over and over?
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A quote from William Faulkner “Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”
I started as a reader and am now both a reader and writer. Here’s a short excerpt from the first novel in the Tales from Butternut Creek series, The Welcome committee of Butternut Creek.
On a blazing-hot June afternoon in the middle of a clogged US 183 in Austin, Texas, Adam Jordan clenched his hands on the steering wheel of the stalled car and considered the situation. As a newly ordained minister, he probably should pray, but he felt certain the drivers of the vehicles backed up behind him would prefer him to do something less spiritual.
The day before, he’d headed west from Lexington, Kentucky, toward Central Texas, a twenty-hour, thousand-mile trip, in a car held together by his little bit of mechanical skill and a lot of prayer. Sadly, on Tuesday, the Lord looked away for a moment as Adam attempted to navigate the crowded tangle of highways that is Austin. The radiator coughed steam as the old vehicle stopped in the center lane of more traffic than he’d ever seen gathered together in midafternoon. Did rush hour start at three o’clock here? He soon learned that rush hour on US 183 could last all day and much of the night, because the city grew faster than its highway system.
He got out of the car and began pushing what had once been a brilliantly blue Honda across two lanes of barely moving traffic and onto the shoulder amid the honks and the screeches of highway noise and curses of angry drivers. If his defective directional skills hadn’t led him on a fifty-mile detour into South Austin, the pitiful old vehicle might have made it to Butternut Creek—but they had and the car hadn’t.
As happens to everyone and everything over the years, the Honda had faded and frayed until no one could tell what it once had been. The identifying hood ornament had long since fallen off, and the paint was a crackled and blistered gray, but it usually ran.
Adam’s first thought was to abandon the heap right there, but he’d heard Texas had laws against that. Instead, he called Howard Crampton, the chair of the search committee that had called Adam.
“Hey, Howard,” he said when the elder picked up the phone. “I’m stuck in Austin on 183.”
For a moment, Howard said nothing. Finally he asked, “Who is this?”
So much for believing the church breathlessly awaited his arrival. “Adam Jordan.” When silence greeted that, Adam added, “The new minister.”
“Hey, Adam. Good to hear from you. What can I do you for?”
“My car broke down on 183, north of something called the MoPac.”
“Know exactly where that is. I’ll send a tow truck to pick you up.”
“All the way from Butternut Creek?”
“Not too far. Sit tight.”
As if he could do anything else.
And that’s how Adam entered Butternut Creek: sitting in the cab of the tow truck, chatting with Rex, the driver, about fishing and hunting, neither of which he did back then, with his car rattling on the flatbed behind the two men. Although his disreputable arrival didn’t signal a propitious beginning, he fell in love with the town immediately.
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