Well, I didn't post last week but I did finally finish 11/22/63, though it had a disappointing ending, in my view. It seemed a bit contrived, even rushed, as if the publisher was breathing down the author's neck to get the book finished. I won't tell you how it ends, but suffice it to say it didn't end the way I had hoped it would.
At any rate, following that book I read a book for work, Seamless Teamwork, that describes how people can use Sharepoint (a Microsoft networked website program) to collaborate on projects. Since I'm going to be helping with Sharepoint sites at work, I thought I'd read that. It's a pretty well written book, though some of it doesn't pertain to me, but it let me see how much people can do with Sharepoint.
Once I was done with that book, I started on The Women, by T. Coraghessen Boyle, one of my favorite authors. Published in 2009, it's a fictionalized account of Frank Lloyd Wright and his wives. Boyle has done this sort of thing before--taken a historical figure and given him an imagined story. (See The Road to Wellness.) In this book he's got a Japanese man as his narrator who's telling us what happened during the time he was a architecture fellowship student at Wright's farm in Wisconsin. I've just started it, but apparently he meets all the wives while there, and focuses his narrative mostly on them.
It's an interesting premise, but I'm afraid that so far this book seems a lot like another book by Boyle I read recently (and wrote about in this blog), East Is East, published 18 years earlier. That novel was also set in an artist's colony (Wright's farm seems that sort of place), and it too had a Japanese protagonist. Because it seems to repeat that book, I don't know if I'll stay with it. But I'll give it a few more days, I think.
I'm looking forward to moving on to a history book about African Americans in colonial New England, In Hope of Liberty, so maybe I'll jump ship on Boyle and head for that book. We'll see what happens . . .
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