2009 - 12
2010 - 23
2011 - 23
2012 - 14
Whoa! I need to pick it up a little! At least I am doing better than I was in 2009!!
In This Mountain
is the 7th book in Jan Karon’s Mitford series and it has been more
than 6 weeks since I finished this book. Granma and I listened to it on the
drive home from Florida.
I was hoping that this book would be more about Father Tim and Cynthia’s time
in Whitecap Island, but three years have passed
since the end of the previous book, A New
Song. Timothy and Cynthia have returned home to Mitford and are preparing
for a year-long ministry in Tennessee
and there are many emails from the pastor who they will be meeting for the
ministry of things to bring and reminders of times and dates. As the date to
leave draws closer, Father Tim ignores the tell tale signs of declining health
and slips into a diabetic coma while he is driving.
The coma and the accident curtail any plans made for the
ministry and Father Tim sends Cynthia off on a book tour so that he can recover
without her hovering, but he falls into a depression and quite a bit of the
book is spent dealing with his emotions and feelings about the accident, his
age, the diabetes and how he fits into the world now that his days of
ministering might be behind him.
While the depression and Timothy’s fight to regain an even
keel were not joyous to listen to, it was pleasant to have many of the old
characters make an appearance in the book to try and help Fr Tim “snap out of
it.” And there was progress made on finding Dooley’s missing brothers. And of
course, the normal hustle and bustle of the small mountain town was ever
present!
One of the books that I finished last night was Laura Lippman’s The Most
Dangerous Thing. Gwen, Mickey, Tim, Sean and Gordon (Go-Go) spent several
years running around Dickeyville, the small Baltimore suburb where they lived. They
explored the large park near their homes and had adventures that would be
typical of most kids growing up in the late 1970’s. And then a terrible thing
happened that changed their friendship. The group grew apart, grew up and went their separate ways. And thirty years
later, Go-Go drives his car into a wall. His brothers, Tim and Sean, aren’t
sure whether it was an accident or suicide, but Go-Go’s death brings the rest
of the group back together to face the terrible thing that happened so many
years ago.
To me, this book was quite a change from the Tess Monaghan series
that I fell in love with over the past year or so and I wasn’t expecting a book
that was so dark. For most books, when I listen to the audio version, I can’t
wait to turn the book on and see what happens next and I didn’t get that with
this novel.
The story jumps back and forth between current day and events in
the late 1970’s and a lot of times one chapter ends in current time and the
next starts with something from 30 years ago and there isn’t a lot of a segue.
Another thing that threw me was that the first third of the book was told from
Gwen’s perspective and then all of a sudden we hear from Mickey, Tim, Sean and
all of the parents as well. And some of the things that we heard from the
parents still seem a little irrelevant now that I am finished with the book.
There is also a lot of Gwen trying to convince family and friends that she
should leave her husband, but she can’t even say why she wants to leave him
until the end and by then, I really couldn’t have cared less whether she left
him or not after she whined about it so much.
1 comment:
I've always wondered about the Jan Karon books. Will have to check the library to see if they have them on audio
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