Error Correction, Reading Jag, & Almedingen

How idiotic of me to say in my last post that I thought The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin is on the Women's Fiction Prize Longlist for 2013. It is not! But it was on the "Best Books of 2012" list for nearly every major U.S. newspaper. Please forgive my careless moment in print.

I'm suffering from "Please just let me read-itis." This is a peculiar affliction. Have you ever experienced these symptoms?

Over 60 percent of the books I hear or read about sound fascinating. I place on order a dozen books from the library at a time. (Lots of the books are 2013 titles and are in high demand.) I sneak reading in wherever and whenever I can get away with it, even if I  have only three or four minutes to spare. I neglect my other pastimes completely. I go to bed early, feigning excessive fatigue, just so I can read. I try to convince Ken to read with me rather than watch my customary daily hour of a TV drama. I wake early just so I can read.

I'm now on page 200 of The Andalucian Friend by Alexander Soderberg and hope to finish it by late Saturday. Lots of twists and turns--the plot is so intricate and there are almost too many characters for my brain to handle competently. But I charge forth regardless of my limitations. It's engrossing.

I am so lucky to have found that our library system has a copy of an adult title by E. M. Almedingen, whom I wrote about in a post last month. Tomorrow Will Come is a memoir of Edith Martha's youth in Russia, in the years before, during, and after the Russian Revolution. The memoir starts in the first decade of the 20th century and ends in 1922, when Almedingen was able to leave Russia for England. This book was published in 1941 by Little Brown in Boston and the book is a first edition. I can't wait to read it. To think that a library in the upstate New York library has held onto this book for 72 years and it is still in circulation!