Anita Hughes
Update: congrats to Kati W who was randomly chosen as our winner! She has been notified via email.
With books, like with most things, there is infatuation: passionate, fleeting, quickly forgotten, and there is true love: deep, lasting, life-changing.
When I was young, I was infatuated with one book after another. I gobbled them up like Easter candy. I read every Nancy Drew mystery, all the books by Judy Blume, every word of Agatha Christie. I remember the first books I had illicit affairs with: books hidden underneath the covers so my mother didn’t discover them. (As a parent now, I do think at the age of ten I was too young to read LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR and THE FEAR OF FLYING, but that didn’t stop me). I recall spending an entire summer curled up in a chair reading the complete works of Jane Austen and Judith Krantz. (Both wonderful modern women writers – though they wrote centuries apart).
But my first literary love, the first book that took me so deeply into its world I forgot my own world, I discovered in college. It was MIDDLEMARCH.
Like any kind of love, it is hard to explain why MIDDLEMARCH affected me so deeply. I only remember hiking the hills of Berkeley, while part of me was stuck in the English countryside. I inhabited George Eliot’s world so fully, for a long time I considered Dorothea one of my dearest friends. I fretted over her marriage to Casaubon, I cheered for her to get together with Ladislaw.
True love is a mysterious thing. It changes you and it lasts a lifetime. I went on to read all of George Eliot’s novels, all of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Wharton, George Sand, Wilkie Collins, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Somerset Maugham. I learned a lot from all these authors and each of them occupy a space in my heart.
But when I close my eyes, I can still transport myself back to Middlemarch, I can see the rolling green fields, the manor houses, the quaint English villages.
Like a girl who has outgrown her Tiger Beat posters, I am open to falling in love with new authors. I read constantly and voraciously and there are many books that stay with me after I put them down.
But I will always be grateful to George Eliot for writing a novel that showed me great writing is not about clever sentence structure or pretty phrases. Great writing is about taking the reader into your own world and making her so comfortable, she doesn’t want to leave.
We’re giving away a copy of Anita’s much buzzed-about novel, Monarch Beach, today. If you’d like a chance to win, just leave a comment on this post telling us about that one book you will never forget.
Anita Hughes’ Monarch Beach is an absorbing debut novel about one woman’s journey back to happiness after an affair splinters her perfect marriage and life—what it means to be loved, betrayed and to love again.
About Ariel Lawhon
Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, storyteller, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.
The book I will never forget is “Redeeming Love” by Francine Rivers
Sounds like and interesting book. My favorite book is “The Ladies of the Club” I loved following this women through their lives. Put my back in the early years of this country. The women and thier lives and thier resiliency.
Squee! I love love love George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, all those guys! Did you really read George Sand? I tried, and I found it almost incomprehensibly pastoral. I think I needed a graduate seminar to get me to understand what she was doing, it seemed like a lot of village culture, marriage rituals? I read The Haunted Pool and quit.
I have read many books due to the fact I am a bookaholic! There have been many that have stuck with me, but to just pick one, it would have to be Suzanne’S Diary For Nicholas by James Patterson. I have never cried like I did at the end of that book. If a book can make me laugh out loud or make me cry it is to me the best.
I was deeply moved as a child by “Little Women.” Then adored, “Rebecca” in junior high. There are SO many books. I can also say that the “Freddie the Pig Barnyard” stories were a huge favorite as a young child, and I was truly addicted to the Nancy Drew series. But if you were to ask me which book as a child, it was definitely “Little Women.”
I would love to win a copy of Monarch Beach. There are so many books I truly love, but I think the one stand-out for me was FALLING ANGELS by Tracy Chevalier. Really amazing.
Love love love
Redeeming Love by Francine RIver
Also
Anna Karinina
Sarah’s Key! I still get tears when I think about it.
Margaret
singitm(at)hotmail(dot)com
Jill Mansell’s “Nadia Knows Best” (Brit chick lit at it’s finest!) may not be the most obvious answer to this question, but it did cause me to fall in love with chick lit, which I still enjoy immensely to this day!
Oh, what a fun post. I too adore Middlemarch. I had a similar reaction to it, and also Anna Karenina, which completely swept me away.
It is hard for me to pick just one book that I love the most. I have several that I really love. But I do remember that there were two that really gave me some things to think about. Both were by Randy Alcorn. One title is Deadline & the other is Safely Home. If you have not read any of his books I highly recommend you do.
Hi Linda! I wept my way through Safely Home several years ago. Quite profound.
Ariel
I will never forget INTO THE FREE by Julie Cantrell. It is her debut and a wonderfully well-written story. I highly recommend it! I’d love to be entered to win please. Sherri christianbookreviewer at gmail dot com
I will never forget ROOM by Donaghue. This is such a gripping, hair-raising novel that haunts me to this day!
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite. I enjoy books that make me laugh or make me cry. I would love to read Monarch Beach. And will have to look up some of the books others have mentioned.
The one book I’ll never forget is when I first picked up Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews. It really opened my eyes up to a new world of books.
Fave book was and still is Jane of Lantern Hill by LMMontgomery.
Love the classics though, like Wives & Daughters, the Austen books, and Redeeming Love & the Baxter Books.
Most days am enjoying a good hour reading
I would love to read this book. Blessings!
Looks great!
I had to read the book gone with the wind when I was in high scoll I did not want to but I loved it To me it showed a lot of sprirt but the wrong way about going to get the thing scarlet wanted. I just wish she could have figured out who really loved her before she did.
I love, love, love living in the world Fannie Flagg created in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. My measure of a really great book is one that I don’t want to end, because I know I will miss the characters in it when it does! I’ve read Fried Green… many times (probably around 12) and I still miss all those people when I finish it again! Other “I miss those folks” books for me: I Know This Much is True, The Hour I First Believed (both by Wally Lamb) and The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.
Hi Kati W! Thank you for mentioning Fannie Flagg! ALL of her books have been fabulous! But my favorite, favorite, is the audio version is “A Red Bird Christmas.” Red birds are what they call cardinals in the south. I have recommended it to friends, and they have all loved it. I currently have the audio book out again, to listen to it. The ending is so wonderful, you will be sobbing with joy. It is such an inspirational book. Fannie Flagg is an exceptional writer, and you really do want to live within the world of quirky, and wonderful characters she creates.
Thank you for this opportunity to win! Thanks Anita!
Thanks She Reads!
So many books – so little time!
Susan G.
Hi Janice! I read and enjoyed A Red Bird Christmas thoroughly, too! I’ve read several other Fannie Flagg books, and I agree, I always enjoy “living” in the world she creates.
On another note, I am so excited to have won Monarch Beach! Yay! I loved this sentence in Anita’s post so much that I made it my facebook status: “Great writing is about taking the reader into your own world and making her so comfortable, she doesn’t want to leave.” Can’t wait to read a whole book full of her sentences!
Hi Kati,
Yes, I forgot about that wonderful line. I think Anita Hughes is a lovely woman, from what I have read about her on Chick Lit, and she asked to be a friend on facebook. I guess because I read so many books, around 4 or 5 a week. I listen to a lot of audio books as I drive so much. My mom has been in the hospital, seriously ill for over a month now. It has been a long, tough ordeal, and reading/listening to books get me through it. I am very glad you won the copy of Monarch Beach.