New (to me) Author Alert

I honestly can't remember where, exactly, I tripped across Louise Penny's work. I think it popped up as a cross recommendation from another book that attracted my attention on Amazon.

No matter. I keep a running wish list on Amazon, a place where I store the titles of books that I'll either search for in a library or buy at a later date. The other day, in one of my ongoing fits of needing change, I visited my wish list because I'd looked at the books on my own shelves so often, the unread felt too familiar.

(Really, we're all suffering from bouts of cabin fever the like of which we haven't experienced in a long time. And I mean everyone we know. Too much snow, too much cold, too much staying inside too early in the season.)

Anyway, I copied a list of likely looking titles from the wish list then stopped at one of the three libraries maintained in Hartford. I came home with a reasonable stack of interesting stuff, and fell in love with the cover of this book so it made it to the stop of the stack.

The book is called Still Life and it's by a Canadian author, Louise Penny, who more or less lives due north of us in an area of the province of Québec called the Eastern Townships.

It's lovely up there. We visited quite often when my aunt and my late uncle invited us to spend summer weekends at their cabin on Lake Memphremagog. (Oh yes, you can pronounce that word. Just approach it slowly.)

Penny's writing is so good, her characters walk right off the page into your head. She shares a lovely quality that I enjoy in Alexander McCall Smith's work, adding insights into humanity through the people who inhabit the worlds she creates. This is not something I find in American work very often where the emphasis is always on what happens next, not who happens.

I prefer the who which is why I gravitate toward the books, movies, and television shows created by Brits and Canadians and other non-Americans. There's an appreciation of people in them, a willingness to be introspective and thoughtful that, to me, is missing from most of American culture. I mean, who else would think up television shows that purport to be "real" and have so many tune in to watch this staged reality?

Anyway, I digress.

Find Louise Penny's books. Read them. I hope they all have covers this good. I've had at least three design ideas from this one.