My Hectic Life in Books

Lately I’ve been reading five or six books at a time. Two books on the iphone, alternating whenever I have a break between appointments. One book on the ipad while eating my breakfast. One paperback ready in my secret escape haven, the bathroom, and another next to my bed. And two books, non-fiction, I haven’t been able to finish yet.

Two romance novels: a historical romance in which aristocratic Anthony is trying to seduce school-teacher Madeline, and a time-travel romance in which Sara is thrown back two hundred years in time to a gypsy camp to find her one true love. The paperback next to my bed is a middle grade novel recommended by my son. Young Jack and his butler travel to California to find gold in order to help the boy’s aunt keep her home. On the ipad: an adventure novella about two assassins trying to end slavery while falling in love. My serious reading: a book about meditation and another about will power. Just what I need. And last, a book detailing the historical travels of a collection of miniatures from Japan. I haven’t fallen head over heels with that one.

So many characters and their various escapades swirl in my head. Was it Toma the gypsy who hid the pig in a tent, or Master Jack who stuffed it out a porthole? Is Madeline the one whose father is ill or Sara? And which heroine is the really gorgeous sixteen years old who keeps her face covered at all times?


I guess I have high expectations of my memory, to keep all these people and events, their families, looks, and characters straight in my mind. Perhaps if that was all I tried to remember, I’d be fine. But I expect yet more. I’ve been planning three novels at the same time while attempting to revise another. I keep all my appointments in memory -- I write them down too, but I rarely recheck my calendar to make sure that my memory was right. And let’s not mention the piles upon piles of forgotten papers on my desk, the stuffed animals and other toys the kids have left there, and our camera, with photos from our last two trips still inside (yet another characteristic hoarding of details instead of uploading them into a better safekeeping device).


Oh dear. My life is chaotic beyond belief or relief! Why can’t I just read one book at a time? Keep one novel to write at a time in my head. Clear the desk, check the calendar, free my memory of all the phone numbers that have been gone almost thirty years ago (09-448-624 was our family’s phone number when I grew up). Perhaps it is time for me to clear my head and my desk of this unhelpful stuff. But at least in books, I find that sheer number adds to my excitement of life.

What books are you reading now?

Avoiding the Banal: How the Duke Fell in Love with His Maid

Sebastian Digby, the hero of Maya Rodale’s The Tattooed Duke, refuses to adopt the shackling conventions of Nineteenth-Century British society. He had much rather follow his heart, explore the world and experience all sorts of adventures. Life, however, has a tendency to catch up with those who try to elude its responsibilities, as he discovers when summoned back home from Tahiti to assume his duties as the Duke of Wycliff.

Wycliff may now be a duke, but more than that he is a sensation in British Society -- the kind of sensation no one wants attached to himself or herself. Not only is he rumored to have engaged in cannibalism and to have spent an entire night in a harem, he is now one of the Wicked Wycliffs, the spendthrift playboy dukes who tend to play around with their maids. No one doubts that this Wycliff will be just the same.

Eliza, a Writing Girl for a yellow newspaper, is sent to write a series of articles on the sensational new duke. Disguised as a maid, she falls in love with Wycliff even as she writes columns that reveal all of his secrets to the ever-more-shocked world. Wycliff and Eliza betray each other as they try to find a balance between their individual hopes and dreams and this new reality in which another human being suddenly has claims on their future. Does that sounds ordinary to you?

And yet nothing about this novel is banal. Not even the most minor character is what he or she seems. Wycliff resists falling into the Wicked Wycliff tradition while keeping his long hair and solitary earring, refusing to wear a necktie and proudly acknowledging his tattoos. Eliza ties herself in knots trying to redeem the duke while keeping her job at the crowd-pleaser, scandal-mongering newspaper. And the whirlwind begins: deception, lies, a secret locked room, an adventurous expedition to a legendary city, bigamy, tea laced with whiskey, a one-armed man whose second arm is in perfect working order, a child born out of wedlock, a  lady who is Hades’ Own Harpy, and of course loyalty and love.

Fabulous book! I loved the Henry Fielding-styled subtitles to the chapters (Fielding is also Eliza’s last name) and the many allusions to eighteenth-century British novels. And (Spoiler Warning!) the best part last: the novel ends with the most extraordinary marriage proposal:

...her beauty left him speechless. Of all the sunrises and sunsets he’d seen, of all the sublime natural spectacles and stunning sights he’d witnessed on his travels, nothing compared to Eliza emerging from the bath.

    Silently, he dropped to one knee.
    “Wycliff?” She said, lifting one brow questioningly. She glanced around for a towel. She looked at him on bended knee before her. Little rivulets of water trickled down her soft, pale skin. In that instant he was jealous of a mere droplet of water.
    “Will you marry me, Eliza?”

Enchanting.

Losing Control for True Love

Yesterday I finished reading The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae by Stephanie Laurens. The finely-wrought romance, set in 1820 England and Scotland, is full of rich descriptions of people, dress, scenery and customs, but I had a hard time relating to any of the characters. In other words, I didn’t fall in love.

Angelica, the female lead, lives in her head even in matters of the heart. Wearing an heirloom necklace which allows her to recognize her true love, she sets out to make the chosen man, Dominic Earl of Glencrae, fall in love with her. Dominic fully intends to marry Angelica. He needs her in order to get back another heirloom, the coronation cup which he must hand over to bankers by a certain date. As far as he’s concerned, love need not come into it.

Angelica agrees to help Dominic but refuses to give him an answer about their marriage. Her plan: to make him fall in love with her before she accepts him. Slowly she leads Dominic through the intricacies of falling in love. She shows him that she can manage a household and a skittering horse and that she’s interested in learning about Scotland, but each of her actions smacks just a little too much of over-thinking for me.

For Angelica, love is a carefully-planned campaign, the purpose of which is to bring Dominic to admit his love for her. For Dominic love equals a loss of control, a potentially life-long insanity. I’m not surprised that it takes the two of them over four hundred pages to fall in love. And even then I was not convinced that Angelica learned to love Dominic apart from the necklace which proclaimed him her hero.

In so many novels I find characters struggling with the fear of falling in love, afraid of losing control over their life. Yet I remember how much I wanted to fall in love as a young girl, the longing to feel the butterflies, the excitement. I fell in love with the idea of love, the sensations of love.

For a while I loved Haggai, then Avi, then Mitchell and Topaz. I remember being head over heels in love with Oron in seventh grade and later with Ze’ev, who I never realized liked me back. A first boyfriend, Tamir, when I was in tenth grade. And in the U.S. there was a red-haired teenager who I mooned over. And Yoni, the first boy I kisses. He was young!

I don’t think I ever resisted love or was afraid that it will disrupt life somehow. Over the years, my one most sincere, innermost and most often expressed wish was to be in love, to love, to be loved back. What is life without love but a desert of sorts? I always wanted to live it up a little. Fall in love. Sing and dance in the pouring rain.

And today, lucky me! I'm in love.

How the Woman Eclipsed the Rake

A week ago I finished reading Sarah MacLean’s Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake, and I’ve been raving about the novel to everyone. Most of my friends refuse to listen after my first sentence identifies this book as a romance, but see, this novel -- though a romance -- is one of those really great books which I don’t just read, I live.

Chapter One finds Callie sitting on the shelf: at 28, she’s an old, plump maid and nobody asks her to dance anymore. She sits with the other unmarried ladies and suffers their comments, like this one from her Aunt Beatrice: “Have you considered a diet of boiled eggs and cabbage? I hear it works wonders. Then you would be less... well, more.”

I don’t think Aunt Beatrice would have appreciated the direction in which Callie takes her suggestion to be “well, more.” Callie makes a list of projects which she would like to try: kiss someone passionately, watch a duel, learn to fence, smoke a cherut and drink whiskey among others. And she sets out to accomplish her list, finding an unexpected ally in confirmed rake Gabriel whom she had always loved from a distance. As you can imagine, Gabriel assists her with the fulfillment of her dreams while punctuating each of their adventures with a lot of excitement of the bedroom kind.

The kissing scenes in this novel are fabulous, each different from the one before. I got swept off my feet, left swooning, lost in the atmosphere of the book. The ballroom, the secret corners, Gabriel’s bedroom with the piano inside where he secretly plays to himself. I could see Callie and Gabriel from across the room, partially hidden by dancing couples, kissing passionately in an alcove. Blush. Swoon.

I always loved a rake. William Blake commented on Paradise Lost that “Milton was on Satan’s side and didn’t know it?” I loved Satan! And the devil’s in a rake, right? Rakes are dangerous and sexually thrilling. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century British Lit is teeming with libertines: Lovelace in Richardson’s Pamela, Don Juan, Willoughby of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The poet Lord Byron was a well-known playboy.

But in Nine Rules I fell in love with Callie. Gabriel is mysterious and desirable. He understands Callie and though he sometimes complains, does not prevent her from trying to fulfill her list. But he is just a sidekick, important to the novel only in as much as he supports Callie’s bid for adventure. Throughout the novel Callie shines, like a bright light that leads the way, freeing up herself and the other characters from the one-sided norms that rule their society, gently, kindly, peacefully without unnecessary noise, declarations or speeches.

So yes, I know this is a romance, and you, my dear reader, might be thinking that romance equals junk. But this one romance features the inner diamond of a woman in a way many novels try to and fail. And it is worth the time.

Ah, the Joy of a Writing Routine!

I had a image in my mind for my month of vacations, and it began, every day, with me writing. In my mind I saw myself producing page upon page of fabulous material which would bring me ever closer to finishing a first draft for my new novel. In Roatan Island I pictured myself sitting with my laptop in my lap on the beach, the wind caressing my hair and the sun blinking in and out of my eyes (such a romantic image). In Prague I imagined myself writing away in a cafe, surrounded by literary-looking types. And in Israel I specifically planned to write every day at my aunt’s house, seating by my grandmother’s little table upstairs.

The result? In Roatan Island I hated everything so much that my mind was not open to creativity. In Prague I walked with my boyfriend from morning till night and was too tired and jet-lagged to think about blogs or romances. In Israel we rushed from cousins to grandmother to brother to friends, and I only wrote once. At least that.

Now I’m home, and I feel like a truck has driven back and forth over whatever order I had in my writing life. I can find a smidgen novel here and a piece of a blog post there, but putting them together seems impossible. I don’t remember how to get back to the routine I had before. I’m disappointed I didn’t fulfill the writing expectations I had. And mostly I just have no idea how to find the flow again.

Coming back from vacation is always hard for me, but most often I face an opposite problem to the one I’m feeling now: usually on vacation I am my better self, I write, I exercise, I spend a lot of time in the fresh air. And when I come back I feel like I’m losing my better Sigal to everyday life, worries and chores. But coming back is much worse when my better self never showed up at all!

So how to get back to writing, I ask myself. This is a corner of joy, not of complaining, and I already whined enough last week. How do I retrieve that rare joy in writing which permeated every moment of my life for the three months before we left on our trip, the confidence in my imagination, the connection which I felt with my dreams?

Perhaps if I let go of how I expected myself to be on these vacations and allowed myself to feel the enjoyment I received from spending time with Dar, my family and friends, I will open the way for the writing to return. Perhaps by writing this page I am already opening the door. And perhaps I held the door closed because I was afraid of the flood of words waiting behind it, yearning to be written. But writing is one area of my life, I really do not wish to dam.