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Dear Reader,
A big welcome to today's guest columnist, author Julia Keller.
Julia's new novel, Summer of the Dead, is the third in her mystery series featuring prosecutor Belfa Elkins. A native of Huntington, West Virginia, she won a Pulitzer Prize during her journalism career at the Chicago Tribune. Julia suggests that you read Summer of the Dead in an abandoned cabin by the light of a flickering candle.
Win your own copy of Summer of the Dead. Julia is giving away five copies to book club readers. You have to enter to win. Send an email to: Julia@Juliakeller.net
Take it away Julia Keller...
My first apartment as an adult was the second floor of a rickety old Victorian house in Ashland, Kentucky, an abode so chopped up and oddly configured that it was possible to get lost on your way from the kitchen to the bathroom. The apartment had only four rooms, but those rooms seemed to shift their locations when you weren't looking, like that staircase at Hogwarts Academy in the Harry Potter books. I suspected early on that the elderly owner, who lived on the first floor and who could never remember my name, was visiting the place and rummaging through my meager belongings while I was at work; this was confirmed when I called home one day to check my answering machine and she picked up the phone. Instead of "Hello," she said, "This is that girl's apartment."
What makes the place so vivid in my memory, though, is not the irregular layout or the batty landlady. It's the fact that, within that space, I first read Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. By the light of a high window, I read those stirring tales of great adventure--moral adventure as well as the more familiar kind set on the high seas and within a haunted jungle.
And thus I came to believe this about reading: What we read is important, yes, but where we read is also critical. The physical locale--the context--in which we engage with a book is an important part of the reading experience.
I first read Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark in the Marshall University library in Huntington, West Virginia. I first encountered Michael Connelly's crime fiction on a flight to Great Britain--and because of his storytelling acumen, I'd swear the trip lasted minutes, not hours.
I discovered Denise Mina in a downtown Chicago bookstore when I was early for a doctor's appointment and read Exile in the waiting room. Stephen King's Misery will forever be linked to a long car trip through the American West. (I wasn't driving.) James Lee Burke's novels are yoked to a shady back porch on a succession of glorious summer afternoons.
Dedicated readers can tell you not just which books they love--but where they were when they read them. Every book tells a story--the one that the author wants to tell, yes, but also the reader's story. What's yours?
--Julia Keller Enter to win a copy of Summer of the Dead email: Julia@Juliakeller.net
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
AUTHORBUZZ: SCREAMING DIVAS (Young Adult) by Suzanne Kamata
At sixteen, Trudy Baxter is fed up with her debutante mom and deadbeat dad, and her standing reservation at the juvenile delinquent center. Changing her name to Trudy Sin, she starts a band with Cassie, Esther, and Harumi. Together they are The Screaming Divas. But will music heal them, or tear them apart?
Go to: http://authorbuzz.com/dearreader click on SCREAMING DIVAS to find out more about the book and the author, Suzanne Kamata. Send her an email, she'd love to hear from you.
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