Solitude is only a human presumption...

As a girl, I remember wanting to become a writer when I grew up. I read books like eating food; I simply had to have that input, the fiction, the fantasy, the many worlds. It felt like I invented these worlds myself, as I lept right into them and lived them alongside the protagonist of the story.

Then I grew up. I stopped reading fiction and started reading philosophical then spiritual literature. Then I grew some more, and for the last ten years or so, I've only been reading professional literature and childrens books.

After finnishing my masters degree last winter, the reading has been generally low and the knitting has been correspondingly high. I lept right into the fictional world of Barbara Kingsolver by chance. I stumbled upon her non-fictional Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - a year of food life, and bought it for a friend that had just moved to a house with a garden. I didn't read it myself. But via that book, I was lead to the sensous world of Prodigal Summer. After reading the description, I just had to buy it; I read it, I ate it. Every spare moment, I immersed myself in the lush, moist and fertile woods, meadows and barns of Prodigal Summer. It could be described as a sexy biology class. How about that. And more, a politically important one as well. Three different women's stories tell the tales of animal and human fecundity and reciprocity in southern American farming land. The first two chapters could be short stories in their own right. Go read.