Novels for April


From Courier and Press:

The Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library system has declared 2006 the Year of the Reader. Each month the library is focusing on a variety of well-known authors - adult, young adult and juvenile - with bookmarks and displays of their books at all library locations.
Authors for April include Charlotte Bronte, the revered author of "Jane Eyre," the penultimate gothic romance. A new novel titled "The Bronte Project" caught my eye and turned out to be so good that I ended up on a fiction kick.

[...]

"The Bronte Project: A Novel of Passion, Desire, and Good PR" by Jennifer Vandever (Shaye Areheart Books, 2005).
Abandoned by her fiance and overshadowed in academia by a woman with a talent for self-promotion, a mild-mannered Bronte scholar finds herself beginning to question everything from her love life to her life's work. My take: Funny sendup of academia by a first-time novelist and screenwriter with talent.

One of her other recent favourites is a book by an author I will probably meet eventually before I move on to grad school. I have heard her name dropped a dozen times, but she has so far eluded me. As an aside, one of Canada's finest writers has an opposite relationship to myself: I admire him as the writer of the best Canadian fiction I have ever come across, and I have seen him very often. I have even spoken to him, but won't say a word about his writing. He somehow manages to always be heading for the door the exact moment I am, and I am always the one to get there first, and hold it open for him. He thanks me, etc. This is all. It amuses me, but then small things do.