I’ve always been a little enamored with the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. One of those things were I like most of it (Fallingwater, e.g.), but if I were to build a house tomorrow, it wouldn’t look anything like Wright’s style. Which is why I was probably interested in reading Nancy Horan’s historical fiction Loving Frank, detailing an affair Wright had with the wife of a couple he designed a home for in the late 1900s. Horan does a decent job describing the uniqueness of Wright’s style and how he came to it along with how he struggled to support his lifestyle. All the while, it’s not a wonderful picture either Wright or his mistress both of whom leave the spouses and children behind. Interesting, but not really worth a read.
My recollection is that I got a free copy of David Bliss’ The Whiskey Rebels on the Sony Reader store (which, incidentally, is going all ePub tomorrow) when I first got my Reader, but I’m just now getting to it. Another work of historical fiction, but this one more painful for me. And that’s because the story involves the achilles heel of my favorite founder Alexander Hamilton–infidelity for which he was blackmailed–and his plan to solidify the US as a going concern, specifically the creation of the Bank of the United States and the whiskey tax, which caused a rebellion out west. Bliss weaves an interesting story well, though, as he admits, the whiskey rebels were not involved in the very real plan to cripple the US Bank.
Madysen’s a little freaked out that I’ve read Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones since it’s the second book I’ve read that she recently read. Kind of like, she and I getting a little too close, maybe? That would be terrible. Anyway, Sebold’s book will be on the big screen this weekend, I think, but I don’t plan on seeing it in the theater. Mostly because the subject matter is rather uncomfortable. Susie, the narrator, is a young teenage girl in suburban Philadelphia who is raped and murdered by a single, quiet neighbor. The police investigate Susie’s disappearance, but her body is never found and the neighbor is never tried nor convicted, all of which causes tremendous difficulty for her surviving family members. We get to observe all of this through the eyes of Susie as she looks down from heaven.
