Have any of you ever read anything by Tim Sandlin? Years ago I picked up two of his books at a used book store — Skipped Parts and Sorrow Floats — because I liked the covers. (I hope it goes without saying that my copy of Skipped Parts has the same style cover as the one on Sorrow Floats; it was not that awful movie tie-in cover that drew me in.) And they have sat on my shelf ever since, except I once took Sorrow Floats on vacation and lost it in a suitcase for a while.

This morning I read four chapters of Sorrow Floats, and I love it. It’s quirky and funny and sad, already in just five chapters, and I want to read more. Only I just realized that Sorrow Floats is the second in a trilogy, so I have to read Skipped Parts first.

It looks like these two books got made into bad movies, and that Tim Sandlin was briefly buzz-worthy during the time when I was being a lawyer and not reading any fiction, and that his recent stuff has not been very well received. Anyone read any of these books? The descriptions are all saying Tom Robbins, but I did not get any Robbins vibe from the four chapters I’ve read so far. (That is a good thing, I think.)

Shroud for a Nightingale. The nice thing about listening to mystery novels on audio is that you can’t skip ahead and read the ending. The bad thing about listening to P.D. James on audio is that it is very difficult to keep the characters straight.

I don’t know if I guessed the ending this time or if I vaguely remembered it from reading this book twenty years ago.

I have a friend who is going to be on bed rest for the next several months, and she has asked to borrow some books. I have a whole lot of books, in a whole lot of genres, and I have already picked out a few. But I have never been incapicated for any length of time so I don’t really know what would appeal to me under those circumstances.

I don’t know her reading tastes in any detail, but I know that she likes Faulkner, she loves Walker Percy, she liked The Kite Runner, and she likes The Lord of the Rings. Those are pretty broad English-majory tastes so I am thinking that any literary fiction with a good story has a reasonable chance of working for her.

If I were on bed rest I think I’d enjoy Robertson Davies, so I am throwing in The Deptford Trilogy. She likes southern lit and I figure she might need some filler between novels, so I was going to throw in short stories by Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty. She’s probably read a lot of those but sometimes short stories are good for re-reading.

What do you think? Name some titles or authors and I will see if I have them.

So I have a draft, and possibly one eighth of it does not suck. I am going to spend some time this week reading short stories, because I have not done that in a long time, and I think I forgot how they are supposed to work.

I am almost positive that a 5,000-word short story should have fewer characters than a 19th-century Russian novel, however. I have some revising to do.

Voyage of the Narwhal. This book disappointed me, although I did enjoy it and I do recommend it to anyone who liked Ship Fever, her collection of short stories. I am a big fan of that collection, but something about this novel felt a little flat and amateurish to me. Early on I told a friend that it reminded me of those young adult historical novels that I used to order from Scholastic Books when I was a kid, those fictionalized biographies and coming-of-age novels set during the civil war or colonial times. It seemed to me that the novel and its characters lack a certain emotional maturity that is not intentional. By the end I was less reminded of The Witch of Blackbird Pond and its ilk; mostly I was just tired of what felt like cheap emotional payoffs.

Still, it was an engaging read: Arctic exploration, frostbite, and polar bear attacks! It’s not great (or even particularly good) literature, but if you want to read fictionalized accounts of 19th century exploration, you are a hell of a lot better off with Barrett than you are with Beryl Bainbridge.