When I was a kid, sometimes I'd peruse my parents' bookcase looking for something interesting to read. They both love to read so there was never any shortage of interesting books to choose from. I narrowed my choices down by first deciding whether the title on the spine caught my eye. If it did then I would check out the cover. If the cover passed muster, I'd move on to the back cover to read the synopsis. Many books were (unfairly) deemed unworthy using this method, and other books created years of confusion. For instance, every time Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton caught my eye, I often wondered which was the name of the author, and which was the name of the book, because both were given equal billing on the spine. I took it off the shelf every now and then to remind myself, but would quickly forget, and so on it went until my senior year of high school when my humanities teacher, Mr. Hayward, assigned us the book and then took us to see the movie, which had just come out.
One of the authors who consistently fell victim to my ruthless system of weeding out books was Willa Cather. To my teenaged mind, how could someone named Willa Cather have anything interesting to say? Also, O' Pioneers and My Antonia weren't titles that made my heart go pitter-pat. Then, the one time I took My Antonia off the shelf to scope out the cover art, the picture of a woman standing on a prairie pretty much sealed the deal for me, and back she went onto the shelf, never to see the light of day again, unless it was by someone else's hand.
So I didn't think much about Willa Cather after that.
In March or April I was camped out on the couch one evening after having put Henry to bed. I was snuggled up with some knitting and hot cocoa, checking to see if History Detectives was on PBS. It wasn't, but a biography of Willa Cather was. So I watched it. And it was fascinating. They talked about how she wrote her first novel in the style of Edith Wharton, and that a good friend of hers read it and told her to stop writing like other people, and write about what she knew. So she did, and it really spoke to people. They also mentioned how when the roaring 20's came in, her writing style was deemed old fashioned, but she didn't care, she kept writing in the style she had established as her own.
It was such an interesting program it made me think that perhaps I had judged her books on my parents' bookcase a little too harshly, which is surprising considering what my criteria for a good book was back in the day, right? I also decided it would be fun to read her books in the order in which she wrote them, just to see how her style evolved, although I have a tendency to get too wrapped up in the story to pay much attention to anything else. That probably makes me a very bad Lit Major. Anyway, I've read the first two, Alexander's Bridge and O' Pioneers, and so completely enjoyed them that tonight I'm going to head over to the library to get the third.
I always get a little thrill when I find an author whose books I just can't put down, I suppose because it doesn't happen very often.