An almost perfect day

 

No high drama, no hilariously funny situations, no exhilarating moments—just a day spent quietly at home with my nose in a book. It’s cold outside, Christian is fixing supper, I had leftovers for lunch, and nothing demanded my immediate attention. I even indulged in eggnog for breakfast—a habit I picked up in Santa Fe over Christmas, and I know better than to let it become regular. But there’s that big bottle Jordan bought staring at me every time I open the fridge.

Yes, I slept late, and yes, I “went” to church on my computer. And yes, I had a long afternoon nap. The only other thing I did of any consequence was to proofread the forthcoming edition of my neighborhood newsletter—at midnight last night, I was still scrambling to get last-minute articles and changes to the designed, so today I feel pleased that there weren’t more corrections than the scattered ones I found.

I’m reading Death at Bishop’s Keep, by Robin Paige, a pseudonym for my friend Susan Wittig Albert and her husband, Bill. They team wrote it, which is of great interest to me because I can’t imagine letting anyone else into my imagination as I crafted a novel. Susan tells me they edited each other’s work but, eventually, there had to be one editorial voice to achieve a consistent narrative style. She was the final voice editor.

Bishops Keep was published just after the first few of Susan’s signature China Bayles series, which intrigues me because I would think her writing style—the way she uses words—would have changed over thirty years. Critics often use the word “matured,” but that isn’t quite it—her style was never immature, but I think perhaps today it has a bit more subtlety. Part of that, of course, has to do with subject matter. It is perhaps easier to be subtle about current manners and ways than it is to go back over a century and recreate the social atmosphere of which most readers are innocent. And which sometimes now seem so—what? Trivial? Useless?

The time of Bishop’s Keep is late nineteenth-century England, the dwindling down of the Victorian era. Essex, to be specific. The book is a lot of things that don’t ordinarily attract me—British for one thing, life and restrictions among the landed gentry for another, the upstairs/downstairs/below stairs conflicts. But Kate Ardleigh, an American heroine—outspoken, independent, intelligent, and bent on being an author, which was unheard of in the day, especially in England—wipes out all my objections. Sir Charles—the English nobleman who dabbles in crime detection and the new science of photography—intrigues Kate to the point that she occasionally thinks maybe spinsterhood isn’t for her after all. It’s almost all standard Agatha Christie stuff (albeit a bit earlier) but it has me hooked, and I have spent a happy day mostly buried in the goings on at the Keep, surely a troubled household. My fascination is in large part due to Susan’s skill with character, even British, and structure.

These days I find I am more and more selective about what I read. Thanks to Amazon’s sample reading program, I often dip my bookmark into three or four books and withdraw it in disappointment. I long for that book that calls me back, tempts me away from the work I should be doing, keeps me up late at night. That’s probably why I read so much mystery, but even within the genre, I find disappointment. So I rejoice when I find such a book. Granted, that enchantment doesn’t always happen in the first twenty pages—you must persevere.

Bishop’s Keep is the first of, I think, twelve novels, and I’ll probably go on and read some of the remaining ones, though I'll not commit to all--maybe that's what happens to most series. (China Bayles, with twenty-seven books in print, is an exception). Once I am hooked on characters and their fictional world, I want to stay with them. So thanks, Susan, for a good reading experience and a lovely, self-indulgent day.

What about you, dear reader? What book has simply carried you away from your ordinary world, captivated you so that you crave every reading minute?