Wednesday Letters on a Thursday

Boo!

As good as any other start since it’s October.

People have been complaining – and I do mean people and not just my mother – that I haven’t been writing.  You probably all assumed I got too busy to write.  Wrong.  Well, I am busy, but not too busy to write.  That wasn’t it.  Anyway…

There are some books that just pull me in completely, make me part of the world; the characters are people I know in another life.  And then, there’s most of the books I read.  Sadly.  Maybe I’m just too hard to please.

Last night, I finished one of these ‘usual’ books.  It was called The Wednesday Letters.  It wasn’t a bad book (thank goodness!) but it wasn’t stellar either.  It started out with this neat idea – old couple dies in bed together, kids find special letters their father wrote to their mother every week of the marriage.  Neat, sweet.  After the first chapter I thought I’d send the book home to my daddy.  Seemed like the sort of sappy love stuff that would make him hug Mommy a little tighter.

Then, I kept reading.  Pretty soon, crazy stuff started happening and the book wasn’t about the Wednesday letters.  It was about eight different storylines crammed soap-opera style into 150 pages.  I’m sorry, but unless your book is a large, thick tome, it shouldn’t have more plot lines than Les Miserables (which, please note is a large, thick tome).    And resolving them all at once just comes off as unbelievable.  I hate being reminded I’m reading a book.

Maybe I’m just spoiled by my love of Pride and Prejudice and it’s beautiful handling of only three plot lines, all of which end at different points and are realistically intertwined throughout the book.  Or maybe I’m just bitter because the last novel I read, A Blue and Gray Christmas, had the same ridiculous amount of plot lines crammed into an itty-bitty space like Genie in his lamp.

The current book I’m reading is 600+ pages.  At least I won’t have to worry about jumbled plots.

 

P.S. Even though I wasn’t a huge fan of these novels, I still think it’s really neat that the authors sat down to write them, turned their ideas into reality and got their books published.  So kudos for that.