LUCIE WINBORNE

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30 BOOKS AND 30 THANKS: RANDALL HARTMAN

Can I tell you something? I like lists.

I like them because they break down information (something else I enjoy) into easily digestible parts, and because they give me a sense of accomplishment as I check items off. In other words, they help me to feel more in control of my environment.

I have a plan. I have steps. I can conquer the world.

Dr. Randall K. Hartman

(Just kidding on that last one.)

Seriously, who else tends to feel as if a project is half accomplished once it’s broken down into steps? Self-help gurus know and cash in on this very well.

Therefore, when I had the chance a few years ago to be a beta reader for a book called Tom’s List: 50 Commandments to Transform Your Life by Randall Hartman, it didn’t take much consideration for me to sign on. For one thing, next to lists, I’m rather a sucker for promises of transformation. Never mind that at nearly sixty years old I still haven’t effected even half as much of one as I’ve at various times planned. And that fifty commandments are, well, a lot. Even the Good Book contains only ten, and don’t they cover pretty much everything?

But Tom’s List is so much more than a litany of platitudes—or glib advice. It’s filled with simple yet deep-rooted “Why” questions that nudge us out of our unthinking routines and into the sort of thinking that sparks change. And three years after the book’s publication, I finally got around to thanking Dr. Hartman for . . .

. . . your generosity in not keeping these nuggets of wisdom to yourself. As you said in your preface, nobody’s getting any younger, and now is the time to start upgrading our lives. How blessed you were to have such a friend as Tom Drake. Among other things, a lifelong avid reader and learner who distilled the “meaningful truths [he] had gleaned while reading one book per week” for four decades into 50 individual lines!

In your preface, you also said that “the work has already been done”—meaning, of course, that the rest of us won’t have to plow through a couple thousand volumes—but you were being too modest. Your contribution of examples and applications from your own life, in easy-to-follow and highly relatable form, show us how we can all end up better at the end of just one year than when we began it, in just one step per week.

So thanks for taking that “neatly typed” list Tom’s widow found in his briefcase and making it your own as well. Tom would have been so happy to know it.

Folks, do yourself a favor and check out Tom’s List for yourself. Then do Dr. Hartman a favor and let him know of any positive results you experience. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.

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30 BOOKS AND 30 THANKS: BARBARA COOL LEE

I won’t deny that I like a gritty novel. Serious drama. Fast paced. Twists and turns. I like to be kept wondering, kept turning pages until way past my bedtime, on the edge of my seat in anticipation of what’s next for the characters whose skin I’m temporarily inhabiting.

At other times, I like my fare on the lighter side. A romance with just as much of a “will they or won’t they actually make it” factor, but less heart pounding. Or a new hero/heroine with a dash of eccentricity in a particularly scenic locale I’d love to visit but likely never will outside the printed page.

Know what I mean?

And at such times, I find that a cozy mystery is the perfect fit.

I’m not sure when I first came across the term, only that it was relatively recently, but Wikipedia defines the genre this way: “Cozy mysteries, also referred to as ‘cozies,’ are a subgenre of crime fiction in which sex and violence are downplayed or treated humorously, and the crime and detection take place in a small, socially intimate community.”

They seem to be enormously popular, too. So not that long ago I tried one, and that’s how I discovered Barbara Cool Lee and her Pajaro Bay series.

barbaracoollee.com/

Now, I haven’t even finished the first book in said series, but . . .

Dang it, Barbara Cool Lee, you not only have me enjoying cozy mysteries, you’ve got me wanting to WRITE one! I’ve just stepped foot in Pajaro Bay and I already want to live in a Jefferson Stockdale cottage. I looked up “Jefferson Stockdale” on Google (so have some other folks, apparently) and was rather disappointed that he was only a figment of your authorly imagination, but as a fellow writer, I forgive you. Anyway, I’m already invested in Honeymoon Cottage (you had me at the title, I think) and am dying to find out why that skunk Dennis abandoned his kid with the now ex-fiancee he allowed to be arrested for his crime, how he’ll get his comeuppance, and if Camilla can heal Officer Ryan’s shattered heart. Yes, that means I haven’t finished the book yet—something I normally do before I thank an author for writing it. But I’m sure you’ll excuse me just this once.

What’s more, I’ve been inspired to download a bunch of other cozy mysteries from freebooksy.com that I haven’t even started yet, much less finished, because of you, Barbara Cool Lee. Because you have this whole series with these adorable titles like Lighthouse Cottage and Boardwalk Cottage and Little Fox Cottage, with these adorable beachy covers, and I love the beach and I love cottages, and I want to read every dang one of those books, because sometimes the news from the local paper’s headlines or the television or the doctor’s office or the mechanic’s shop or the local high school is so depressing and alarming that pretty much all of us need a little escape from time to time . . . to a world where the bad guy always gets his (or hers) and crushes are requited and you wish you could hang around with the main characters long after “The End” because they really do seem like people you’d love to share a meal or a laugh with.

Thanks for obeying the call of the storyteller within you and imagining, then sharing, such a world with us.

Do you like cozy mysteries? If so, and you haven’t done so already, check out the highly enjoyable voice of Barbara Cool Lee. Then write me with some recommendations of your own.

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30 BOOKS AND 30 THANKS: CHARLES S. ARESON

Once again, I can’t recall exactly how I came across a certain book that touched me. But that’s really not important. What’s rather surprising is that it was a book written for children, a genre I don’t normally follow since I don’t have any little ones of any relation to read to.

C. S. Areson

Of course, sometimes words written for the very young have lessons for us grown folks. And such is the case with Pastor Charles Areson’s The Bee in the Blackberry Bush.

This sweetly simple story, delightfully illustrated by Don Lee, far surpassed the usual expectations for a self-published book, as Charles points out on his website. And brought a big old lump to my big-girl throat. Here’s part of what I wrote to the author today:

Charles, it’s been a pleasure and privilege to work with you as a proofreader on a couple of your works. But did I ever actually thank you for the one that introduced me to you, The Bee in the Blackberry Bush? Maybe I did, but this month I want to do so again. The lessons so gently told of industriousness, contentment, and sacrifice—not to mention, of course, the greatest one of all, love—are so easy to overlook in our busy, distracted world., especially as we get older. Thanks for honoring the storyteller within you, for selecting such a wonderful artist to bring your words to life, and letting me see with the eyes of a child again, for just a few short minutes. Sometimes a few short minutes are all that is needed.

Friends, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Bee in the Blackberry Bush today. Read it out loud to your kids or grandkids, to a child who needs a friend, or even to your spouse. And don’t be surprised if you get a lump in your grownup throat too. A good one.

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30 BOOKS AND 30 THANKS: SCOTT CAMPBELL

I don’t know about you, but when I’m deep into a novel, I can’t help picturing how I’d behave if I were one of the characters. Actually, I suspect most readers do that, without even meaning to. It’s part of the fun of immersing ourselves in another world.

And one book that certainly had me wondering what I’d do in a particular situation—a number of times over—was Scott Campbell’s Touched.

Scott Campbell

The subject matter is both disturbing and, unfortunately, timely, though the circumstances are variable: A 12-year-old boy enters the family kitchen where his mother is preparing dinner and announces that their neighbor’s “been touching me.”

As she says:

You wonder how you’d react. When you see those people on Donahue talking about their messy lives, you wonder how you’d behave if your life all at once turned into a soap opera. I guess I’d always thought I’d know exactly what to say and do and I’d do it without a lot of fuss, crisp and confident as a nurse. But when it really happens to you . . .”

While I don’t recall now how I discovered the book, I had a bit of initial hesitation about purchasing it. Did I really want to read about a pedophile? But in the skilled hands of Scott Campbell, there is so much more to this story.

Here’s part of what I wrote to him:

So one day I step into a calm suburb. Into a normal kitchen, like my own, on a normal evening, until five words change the landscape forever—just five words, sending a seemingly endless circle of ripples into the air and out of doors and into hearts, ripples that pierce and keep widening into ever greater levels of destruction and challenge. I followed them and wondered, with no effort, how in one house I would assess the state of my marriage, in another house, how I would or could shield my children from the side eyes and taunts of their schoolmates; what my next move, next word would be to a trusted husband speaking a confession such as I never could have imagined. If I would or could keep silent, how the pieces of my world would fly apart to ungatherable locations if I didn’t—just as if it were happening to me and not people you invented, but who (I have no doubt, as a fellow writer) were very real to you. I was astonished at how, as a man, you wrote in the voice of a woman . . . in the voice of a man succumbed to a deep, incomprehensible sickness . . . in the voice of a child-now-man still beset by memories, a permanently altered identity. I moved from horror to sympathy to near nausea to disbelief to anger to sympathy again as if it were real and not fiction, as the people inside the heads of both writer and reader become.

Wow. For that masterful demonstration, I thank you.

For more about Scott, and to read an excerpt from and/or purchase Touched, as well as some interesting background on his experience of writing the book, visit his website.