What People Said They Would Be Reading

Day 116 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project. Phyllis, who (Day 114, at the end) is reading I, Claudius, by Robert Graves, and who had just finished Hester when I asked the question at Facebook, said she had True Blue, by David Baldacci, waiting in the wings.

I see there's a Hester with a snowy mountain on the cover by Margaret Oliphant Oliphant (yes, that's what it says, aka Mrs. Oliphant) at Amazon, a reproduction of a historical work, but I'm thinking Phyllis read Hester: The Missing Years of the Scarlet Letter, by Paula Reed, an intertextual re-seeing kind of novel (like Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, which re-sees Jane Eyre by way of a prequel with Bertha in the West Indies).

In this Hester, we follow Hester back to England, with her daughter Pearl, and they get mixed up in the lives of Oliver Cromwell. (Having read The Scarlet Letter again recently, for Great Books Chicago, I am imagining a different life for Hester and Pearl....)

True Blue is a cop mystery, with female protagonists, set in D. C.

Bob, who had just finished Everything Must Change, by Brian McLaren, previously mentioned in this blog, was about to begin Reaching the Animal Mind, by Karen Pryor. This is, as the subtitle tells us, about Clicker Training and What it Teaches Us About All Animals. I am afraid to ask what a "clicker" is.

Upstairs, on a bookshelf, I have The Buccaneers, by Edith Wharton, an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, finished by Marion Mainwaring. I think that ties in here because of the intertextuality and because I'm sure I said I would be reading that someday. And writers who are rewriting, re-seeing, or finishing the works of other writers are somehow also "reaching the animal mind," though without the help of clickers? Help!