The Monday Book – Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

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Another guest review by Janelle Bailey, retired Literature teacher.

So, first: I absolutely loved Writers and Lovers, my introduction to Lily King’s writing, and then read The English Teacher, which I also loved, so then ordered copies of everything she has written. But I have been saving the others for when I NEED to read something I can trust, fully, will be “really good.”

And then when I saw that a brand new Lily King was coming out, I probably did not even pay attention to the finely printed “Stories” on its cover, maybe not even until after I had selected it for book club. Hmpf, no emojis allowed in these reviews, huh? Well…it would be useful to be able to easily insert, otherwise, a kind of Steve-Urkel-sounding “Did I do that?” otherwise.

This is to say that it has been my experience that it is a very, very rare author who is equally good, let alone equally tremendous, in multiple genres. And there is absolutely a difference between short stories and novels and, I think, that is the case for both their readers and their writers.

So the fault may be mine, I say, for having had of this collection of King’s short stories some promise to  leave me feeling like reading a King novel does. For I did still think, when I finally treated myself to diving in, “It’s Lily King! It will be amazing!”

Therefore, I don’t know whether it is because it is King writing short stories instead of a novel, or my expectations of King novels being imposed on these short stories, or my not reading them as they should have been read, or what, really, but: truly and simply, these did not do for this reader the same as King’s novels have.

They did not make me smile (frequently enough) at characters I fully understood, smacking a sentence or page in as many of those “I see you! I hear you!” and “You get me!” moments as I have with her novels. There were also not the rich and valuable allusions to great literature that have always enhanced my value for, added to my connection to her novels’ characters. And there simply wasn’t enough or wasn’t the “right stuff” to give me what I needed, albeit in short story form, to feel the value of spending the time with these characters and/or their stories…in quite the ways I expected to, since Lily King wrote them.

And this is true of my feelings of most of the stories contained within.

But it is not accurate for how much I truly enjoyed meeting Oda and Hanne in “North Sea,” for their  mother-daughter relationship. This story struck me on a number of levels and gave me a truly valuable short story experience.

And I also enjoyed aspects of “Timeline,” but truly that was due, mostly, to the crazy coincidence of its setting being Vermont and Lake Champlain, where I had just visited for the very first time, myself, last week.

I won’t be quitting King any time soon, though. Yes, I will pay closer attention to the fine print that lets me know whether I am picking up a novel by a novelist I value, a collection of short stories by a writer of short fiction whom I value, or anything written by those rare few who have been tried and truly do cross genres amazingly well.

But you…you may love this one, so don’t listen to me. Just read it yourself, and let me know what you think!

Doogie the Bold Jumper

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We have a new member in the Beck/Welch household.

Truer words were never spoken than when a friend advised us that, once we had our wood stove in, our house would never be clean in winter again. Ash, wood pieces, papers collected for fire starting… we regret nothing because we love gathering around that stove.

But among the things we’ve brought in was a little visitor. I first noticed “Doogie” when I thought there was dirt on the wall. As I rose to fetch a sponge to wipe it down, the spot moved. Straight up the wall and katty-corner across the ceiling to crawl along the crown trim of our 1890s home.

Live and let live. Gnats living in the logs had also invaded; let the spider build a corner web up there, and feast on the annoying invaders.

But a couple of days later, Jack said, “I’m worried about Doogie.” (We don’t know why that’s his name; it just is.) “How can he be eating without a web?”

At that moment, Doogie jumped. I don’t mean freefall, I mean “envy of athletes” jump. A leap equal to a lion in the veldt. A “send Wendy screaming into the kitchen” jump.

Doogie is a bold jumper. Literally, that’s the kind of spider he is. Little, fuzzy, big mandibles, powerful legs. They don’t spin webs; they hang out in corners and when they see what they want to eat, they go for it.

After reading up on them via Google and using a picture from my phone to compare Doogie to some images, I was really pleased at my decision not to investigate up close. While bold jumpers can actually kill and eat things almost their own size, when confronted with a very large enemy, they tend to either shrink into their corner, or come out biting. Classic fight or flight behavior. I cannot shake the image of Doogie clinging to my nose, neutralizing the perceived threat had I leaned in to get a better shot. Bold jumpers aren’t venomous, but their bites tend to irritate human skin.

So Doogie occupies the unused upper portion of our sitting room, the gnats are fewer, he looks happy from this distance, and all is well. As Jack said, “It’s nice to have a new lodger.”