Blogger: Michelle Ule
Location: Drizzly Santa Rosa, Calif., main office
I never had paid a lot of attention to my boyfriend’s reading while we dated. We attended college sixty miles apart, and while I was immersed in Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer and the horrors of Joyce’s Ulysses, my intended spent his hours fiddling with mathematical equations and engineering tomes. Because my fiance was, and continues to be as my husband, eclectic in his interests, we also enjoyed seeing Shakespeare plays together. Did it really matter, what we were reading as long as we enjoyed it?
We bought a television with our scant savings after my husband learned The Hobbit would appear on network television. Prior to that we had been committed to not owning a TV the first year of our marriage. It didn’t much matter since upstate New York at the time only had four stations in that pre-cable dark ages. But then we got hooked on Masterpiece Theater, in particular a sudsy romantic series called Poldark 2. Apparently Poldark 1 had aired back when we were in college.
Winston Graham began writing what turned out to be a lengthy series of books, after the end of World War II. Since some seven of these books had been required to produce the Poldark series, and we obviously were behind, we fell into an orgy of reading all the Poldark novels.
Thus began a halcyon period in our early marriage. Working shift work at a training nuclear reactor, my husband kept odd hours. Fortunately, the tiny library in Ballston Spa carried the old Graham novels. We tried to ration ourselves: one book a day. I’d start and then pass it along, picking up the next one while my husband read to keep up with me.
We finished in about two weeks, awash in the romance of a Cornwall couple and their efforts to keep tin mines alive in the nineteenth century. Mining–you know–pumps, motors, gears. Romance–a young wife awaiting her husband’s return.
We’re certainly nicer than Ross and Demelza Poldark–but they made for a great fantasy couple on long summer days many years ago.
How about you? What kind of stories do you and your favorite snuggler like the best?
Biographies for my doctor/deputy husband. Especially anything related to history. He keeps a nest of books and magazines beside his chair and has three or four going at one time. We listen to lots of books on CD as we drive, and I often get a good nap during his favorites. But, I managed to stay awake all the way through John Adams! I lean toward novels, and now I have to go find he Poldark books!
We read aloud Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Sermon on the Mount as newly-weds. My husband reads mostly non-fiction. But when we were serving in Ethiopia under a 6 to 6 curfew in the late 1970s. I brought home the first of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain from the school library where I worked. I laughed aloud so much and had to keep stopping to read portions or explain that he read that first one himself. The rest we read aloud, first the two of us and later (more than once) with our children who both put hard-back copies of their very own on their Christmas lists sometime in college.
We like thrillers (Robert Liparulo for sure), but my husband paid me the highest compliment when he read my second novel (The Famous One) and told me it was his favorite novel of all. (And he hasn’t read any of the seven others.)
My sweet hubby doesn’t really read much (yet–I’m workin’ on it). But he often flips through magazines associated with triathlete training and things like that. But you’re right, doesn’t really matter what we read, just that we enjoy it.
Our whole family loved The Chronicles of Prydain as well, though they didn’t come home until I, too, discovered them while working in the school library. Our dog sometimes reminds us of Gurgi . . .
My husband and I also went through a Helen MacInness spell in the mid-1980’s–international spy stuff. He’s gone on to Ludlum, but I don’t care for the violence.
Like Nicole’s husband with her second novel, my guy is also a fan of my (unpublished) writing. That’s probably because he sees himself as the hero in each book . . . not without reason. But it amuses me when he does some of the “romantic” things I write about after he’s read my manuscripts.
Ah, subject for another blog. 🙂
Love that, Michelle. Sigh.