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Dear Reader,
Stephanie Barron is today's guest author at the book club. Her newest book is That Churchill Woman, a novel about Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill's American mother. Other titles include historical suspense novels A Flaw in the Blood and The White Garden, as well as the nationally bestselling Jane Austen Mystery series. A former intelligence analyst for the CIA, Stephanie also writes under the name Francine Mathews, drawing on her experience in espionage for such novels as Jack 1939.
Please do welcome her to the book club. Say hello, click here.
January is the Greatest Month
Years ago, when I had small boys underfoot, my sister sent me a slim book entitled A Round of Applause for Mrs. Claus. It suggests that without women and their holiday genius, humanity would wander through the soulless winter howling and alone. In my household, this is indisputable. I alone string lights and stuff stockings and roast pancetta-wrapped beef. It's a tad tiring.
Which is why I am usually down for the count with a noxious disease by midnight, December 31st. One year it was double pinkeye, which my elder son brought home from college. It made me look like Voldemort. Some years it's the flu. But I toddle into the cold embrace of January with as much relief as if I'm sighting the White Cliffs of Dover after four years at The Somme.
January is my favorite time of year.
If April is the cruelest month, January is the best. If it did not exist, if it had somehow been left out of the calendar because it was too busy organizing its off-season getaway to Dubrovnik or Puerto Vallarta, we would have to invent January.
It's a time of fresh starts, regardless of whether we keep our resolutions. It's a caesura between the cynicism of a played-out year and the hope of one yet to begin. I wake up on New Year's Day ready to strip the house of greens and red ribbons and toss everything in the trash. I strip beds. I strip my closet. I strip the dogs.
'I clean out my refrigerator.'
And then I walk downstairs and enter my office.
It has been quiet and dark for weeks. But January--time of lung-stopping cold, of drifting flakes, of landscapes sunk in monochrome, of the soft swish of tires on icy streets, of the silence of a single bird call against the frigid morning branches of a bare tree--January is waiting. It offers a clean, spare, bracing road forward. It offers lowering skies that deny any impulse to fritter away time by wandering out of doors. It offers hair pulled back and monkish discipline. January is the Marine Corps of months.
I sit down at my desk. I open a file I haven't touched in thirty days. It is the book half-gestated, almost stillborn, I left unfinished in December. January gives us this power: the cold, clear, commitment to hard work and good dreams.
This month, I wish you discipline and focus. I wish you dedication to a task and the vital things that come from it. A lifetime of Mrs. Claus, in fact--followed by her gift of January.
-- Stephanie Barron
Email Stephanie
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
** AUTHORBUZZ **
WE HOPE FOR BETTER THINGS (Fiction) by Erin Bartels
When Detroit Free Press journalist Elizabeth Balsam meets a great-aunt she didn't know she had, what she learns about her family's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the Underground Railroad during the Civil War will forever change her perception of her own place in history.
Go to: AUTHORBUZZ click on WE HOPE FOR BETTER THINGS to read more and to email author Erin Bartels, you'll get a reply.
* This month's Penguin Classics book is THE PROPHET, by Kahlil Gibran. I have a copy of the book to share with a lucky reader, so start reading today and enter for your chance to win.
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