Lost and Found
18/08/10 21:34 Filed in: Reading
It was on the microwave, behind a thank-you card.
Hidden, sure, but not lost forever. Hooray.
I am amazed at just how relieved and happy I felt when I finally spotted my copy of Dick Francis' Wild Horses late yesterday afternoon, after having missed it for almost a week. I am nearing the end of a journey through Francis and I felt totally at sea when the 1994 novel went missing.
I even went to a used book store and a campus book store, looking to buy a replacement. I'm so used to having something to read (and for the last three months that something has been Dick Francis) that I was entirely thrown off by not having the book around. And I didn't feel like I could move on to Francis' next novel: I'm committed to reading them all in order and I was NOT going to break the string, no matter how desperate I felt.
The only problem is, Wild Horses is not a great novel. I have now arrived at the stage of Francis' career where, in my opinion at least, he started to wind it down. The ideas grew stale, the writing more lazy and stilted, the characters flatter and less interesting.
Oh well, I think Wild Horses is number 33 in his collected works so I guess I should cut him some slack. It's not awful. It's just not great.
But I found it! I'm going to glory in the delight of that moment for a while.
I am amazed at just how relieved and happy I felt when I finally spotted my copy of Dick Francis' Wild Horses late yesterday afternoon, after having missed it for almost a week. I am nearing the end of a journey through Francis and I felt totally at sea when the 1994 novel went missing.
I even went to a used book store and a campus book store, looking to buy a replacement. I'm so used to having something to read (and for the last three months that something has been Dick Francis) that I was entirely thrown off by not having the book around. And I didn't feel like I could move on to Francis' next novel: I'm committed to reading them all in order and I was NOT going to break the string, no matter how desperate I felt.
The only problem is, Wild Horses is not a great novel. I have now arrived at the stage of Francis' career where, in my opinion at least, he started to wind it down. The ideas grew stale, the writing more lazy and stilted, the characters flatter and less interesting.
Oh well, I think Wild Horses is number 33 in his collected works so I guess I should cut him some slack. It's not awful. It's just not great.
But I found it! I'm going to glory in the delight of that moment for a while.