Summer challenge update

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I am on page 200, but I have come to the conclusion that it will take me one hundred years of solitude to be able to understand the importance of this novel. I should have been suspicious when I saw it was an Oprah choice...sigh.

I will finish it and hold my definitive opinion until then. But for now I will put it aside in favor of these mystery choices:


The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne

This does not technically fulfill my requirement of a new author, but he is certainly a new mystery author for me.


Murder at Markham by Patricia Houck Sprinkle

This recommendation comes via Amanda at Wittingshire (actually recommended by her mom.) Reading on Sprinkle's website, I found this about her:

I decided in ninth grade to become a writer, so after Robert E. Lee High, I headed to Vassar College, which had a great creative writing program.

After college I returned to my folks, by then in Miami, to work toward a serious test of my writing commitment. With $750, one suitcase, two coats and a portable typewriter, I headed the next October to a Scottish Highland village where, at that time, room and board cost $14 a week. Before the money ran out, I had sold one poem, one article, one short story, and a one-act play. Fortified by that major impact on British literature, I moved to Atlanta and started a series of writing-related jobs.

When I eventually met and married Bob, he looked over our budget and demanded, "Why don'’t you write a mystery to pay for all the ones you buy?" I immediately took a building where I'd once worked and put a body in its basement. However, being over endowed with the Protestant ethic, I wrote "important" things first and only wrote the mystery in my spare time. That first book, Murder at Markham (reissued by Silver Dagger in 2001), took thirteen years to complete. It took even longer for me to learn that any writing which gives me pleasure is important, whether fiction or non-fiction.

The Hill Update

The Hill is still there. I am climbing it daily. It is still hard, but I will climb it again tomorrow. Someday I will OWN that hill.