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Web-Exclusive Books Blog
A Rainy Day
By Marilyn Johnson, April 6, 2007
Drop by AARP The Magazine Online's Books channel every week to read and react to a new blog from the author of The Dead Beat
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Reading-wise, I act like I'm going to live forever. I'm going to
catch up with Dickens someday; someday I'll read Proust. When I discover an
author I love, like Haruki Murakami, who writes books in which nothing much
happens but everything is at stake and fraught with tension, I'll put the
brakes on after a few books and save the rest. What am I saving for? A
last-minute plane trip, a rainy day, or some other circumstance in which I
dread boredom and couldn't bear to be caught without a diverting story.
I've saved Carol Shields's last novel,
Unless. I trust it will be as good as
The Stone Diaries or
The Republic of Love; I'll stake the train ride to Washington on it. Is
it wise to wait? I don't dwell on the thought that I might not be around
someday. Part of my pleasure in reading is reverting to that greedy, childish,
selfish state in which I grab a book impulsively and stay up half the night
reading heedlessly—that gleeful abandon.
 
AARP is reorganizing its Web pages, and I have a book to write, so this
column will be my last. I cashed in a short stack of Kate Atkinsons for the
occasion. Atkinson's
Behind the Scenes at the Museum was declared Whitbread Book
of the Year in 1995. It was one of those novels that captivated me from its
beginning: "I exist! I am conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock
on the mantelpiece…. I'm begun on the first stroke and finished on
the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless
sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smith's Best Bitter…."
Exuberant and intelligent and surprising and original, Atkinson was a
discovery. She continued to write; I didn't, however, continue to read
her—I collected her instead. I squirreled away
Case Histories and
One Good Turn, and the other week during a cold spring sleet, I started
in.
Case Histories was the find. A crime novel of sorts, with multiple
strands from several eras, it was as vivid and inventive as Behind the
Scenes and just as delightful to read. Atkinson is not one of those
literary writers who works in a hothouse, extruding sentences in angst and
tears; her rollicking sense of mischief keeps her safe from the academy.
It's simple, really—she seems to have fun writing. One Good
Turn is a sequel, and an inferior one, to Case Histories, but
it's still a good read, and it's set at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,
which gives Atkinson plenty to mock and malign. Her hero is an ex-detective of
a certain age who listens to Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams and beds a
wacky fringe actress. Life is sweet: there's Motown piped into my grocery
store and Lucinda Williams singing in my novel.
Atkinson has written other novels and a story collection, but I'm saving
them. I don't think I'll ever run out of good books. Meanwhile,
I've weathered the sleet, the flooded yard, and the mud tracked through the
kitchen. Whatever the heavens want to throw at me next is fine. I'm going
to keep acting as if I had all the time in the world to read. Please don't
tell me otherwise.
Marilyn Johnson's
The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of
Obituaries is now available in paperback.
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