When you finish a good book or TV series, do you cry?

I do

I’m not the voracious, insatiable reader my mother was. Mom always had a book in hand, or one was not far away - in her purse, on a nearby shelf, in the glove box, or a desk drawer. Not only was she a bookworm, Mom was a brainiac, an academic sponge, and a snob - and I say that in the nicest possible way. Mom would have celebrated 100 years on July 3 this year if she were still with us. Her reading tastes were eclectic. Mom was weird and whip-smart, more like an octopus than an autodidact; she always reached for something new or different to discover, examine, and devour. She knew who could reel a good tale: John le Carré, Robert Ludlum, James A. Michener, Jean Auel, and Tom Clancy counted among her favorites.

What’s he on about?
I am not nearly as bookish as my doctorate mother—Ludlum and le Carré require me to reread paragraphs, and still, I don’t know where I am—but I revel in reads by Vince Flynn, Daniel Silva, Cara Black, Dorothy Gilman, Steve Berry, Dan Brown, John Grisham, and the like. I love a complicated, flawed, sometimes unprincipled, yet desirable protagonist that I can follow book after book. 

Can one be a voracious book listener?
I am. I come from the radio world. I worked as a radio DJ in the eighties with my own shows spinning Top 40, polka, and Big Band in a wee Texas market and, later in the 90s, marketing public broadcasting programs for an organization that repped great storytelling voices like Garrison Keillor, Ira Glass, Rudy Maxa, Krista Tippett, and Peter Schickele. I’m spoilt for good sound. Knowing that it won’t surprise you that my Audible app stats say I’ve achieved its Master Listening Level, having enjoyed 432 titles or the sum of four months, five days, and fifteen minutes of listening time and counting since subscribing in 2022. Thank you very much. 

Much like Mom was never far from a book, I’m never far or much disconnected from my Apple Beats earbuds - as my husband will attest. He only regrets this Christmas gift when he’s been talking to me for a minute or two from another room or calling me from half an acre away to no reply, only to find me engrossed in another time, place, or world and paying him no mind. Sorry, Love.

Honorable mentions
The other day at work, I had a wonderful chat about good reads with a woman in her late 70s. She waited for family members to finish a tour with her nose in a book. I asked what she was reading. Something by Nora Ephron. We both agreed that we liked an excellent series and started rapidly listing some favorite, must-read authors. Ephron is absolutely one of hers. We also traded a few names and titles, and I’ve added them to my Audible Wish List. Then we went to one-offs. I don’t mean like a one-hit wonder, but more like a first or giant hit book for an author wholly contained between its covers. Two that came to the top of our recent reading hit parade were The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese, an epic story set in India about a family curse, and James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, a story of Black and Jewish residents of the Chicken Hill neighborhood of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s and ’30s.

Jamie Fraser (sigh)
I’m late to Diana Gabaldon’s books. Friends have told me for years that I should read the Outlander series. I would see the bookstore endcap displays of tomes thicker than The Joy of Cooking, and I couldn’t get my mind around something that hefty being that good—her first nine novels in the series number just over 8,200 pages in English. I waited so long to get to these. Did no one tell me it was a time-travel romance with an 18th-century Highlander dish?

The video clip below is the shortest recap of Outlander seasons one through six (there are seven to date) on the Starz network that I could find for the uninitiated. I’ve inhaled all of these, too, and am looking forward to the final season eight premiering November 2024, concluding only ten episodes later in 2025.

To all good things
I remember several times Mom asking whether or not I’d read Tolstoy’s 1100-page Anna Karenina yet. Nope. She’d shake her head and roll her eyes to heaven. Despite Mom’s pleas to the good Lord, JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series had me scrabbling for the weighty reads, inhaling all the goings between Number 4 Privet Drive and Hogwarts. Reading the final words, “The scar had not pained Harry for 19 years. All was well.” and closing book seven, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, left me satisfied and a bit weepy. Along with millions - maybe billions - of others, it marked the end of a decade of investment in an extraordinary tale.

Tolstoy’s Count Vronsky is my kind of storybook guy - handsome, seductive, emotionally tangled, and a passionate equestrian to boot. It was an excellent 35 hours and 35 minutes of listening time. A horse-crazy girl, Mom knew Tolstoy would have me at Frou-Frou. Thanks, Mom. I miss you.

I have listened to the entire Outlander series, and like all Gabaldon fans, I await the as-yet-untitled book ten that will finish the Claire and Jamie saga. I predict an excellent blubbering at my house when the book, its TV seasons, and the Audible series end. 

I’ve told you mine, now tell me yours. If you like this kind of chat, please subscribe and share. Thank you.