Joanna Trollope

I'm reading Joanna Trollope. I really like her writing, parti ularly because she is so honest in delineating how complex women's lives and experiences are, including all the disappointments that a full life contains. In the book I'm reading now - A Spanish Lover - (I cannot find the shift key on E's iPad, therefore can't italicizes - I can see how our language changes and why) looks at twin sisters and their contrasting lifestyles, one a married mother of four with a successful business, the other a single woman who lives somewhat in her twin's shadow, but who eventually discovers her own capacity to run a business and seek out love. It. Isn't hard to guess which twinn takes the Spanish lover. What I love about Trollope's writing is what I've loved about Margaret Laurence's writing - it is the verisimilitude and dark poignancy of the real and everyday.  It isn't an Alice Munroean under the linoleum kind of mythical shadowing, but the seemingly ordinary everyday frustrations and redemptions of more contemporary social experience.  It reminds me of the work of Carol Shields in this way, too. I also like reading about English women because they seem so much more self- assured than the tripped out American women in fiction. Of. Ourse Canadian women in fiction are much more accessible to me.

I just started Kamourouska, which I will read after I finish this book and The Hunger Games, which I found at the express counter at the library on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to a bother Fairmont weekend, with E and I ru Ning away for a mini-break this weekend before the full chaos of our new lives begins with the advent of the new school year.  

 I accepted the program yesterday, but will do it online. I hope it helps lead me work I like. Lying in bed today, I again reflected on how much I learned last year about how little I liked teaching at the U. I had thhought all along that last year was going to be about learning what I could handle work-wise, and I did, but it wasn't what I expected. I learned that I didn't like doing what I set myself up to love. What do you do when that happens? I guess you try again. I think that is Joanna Trollope's message anyway. I will try to heed it.