I read recently that to be active, a blog must be updated at least once a month. And a friend has been chiding me about this one being out of date, so I hereby resolve, once again, to post more frequently. By the way, I wonder how often one has to Twitter to be considered active? I am one of the 60 percent who abandoned Twitter after brief use, but if I am finally updating this blog, perhaps there is hope there, too. I have flirted with the idea of tweeting about really wonderful books that I am reading or have just finished; presumably someone is doing that, but I haven't found them yet.

A friend has been rhapsodizing about the author Wallace Stegner, and I just this moment finished Angle of Repose. According to my own note on the flyleaf, I had bought my 2 dollar used copy eleven years ago, but I opened it for the first time last week. First, it's a beautiful, well beautifully sensitive and bittersweet story. Two stories, actually: one is that of the narrator, a physically crippled man who is spending what may be his last days going through his grandmother's papers in an attempt to understand the mysteries of her long, complicated marriage. His story intertwines with lengthy accounts of his grandparents' lives in the American West of the last quarter of the 19th century, where his grandfather was the engineer, or would-be engineer of mines and dams that would allow people to settle in places like Idaho, even before it became a state. His always-thwarted attempts, the births of their three children, and, especially, the grandmother's work as an artist and writer who, by sending back her works to the great Eastern magazines of the day, are all told in a vivid present tense with occasional narrative intrusions by the grandson, who is writing the account near 1970s Berkeley, where the free love and drug using mentality contrast mind-bogglingly with his grandmother's approach to the challenges to her monogamous marriage. Stegner pulls you into these two plots while also writing them in magisterial prose replete with perfect metaphors.

Based on this, and my friend's advice, Crossing to Safety, Stegner's other highly acclaimed novel, is next in my queue.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery.

This book won't be for everyone, but it's unique, funny, philosophical, charming, and full of references to literature and cinema. Also, it's a translation from a foreign language (French) that has achieved some measure of popularity in our literarily xenophobic country! I did feel slightly hammered on the head by one of its themes when I got to the end (not to mention its Orientalist notions of Japan), but it's still a great reading ride.

Still Alice, by Lisa Gennaro. The subject matter is so grim that you will automatically shy away, but please don't miss this great book. Written by a woman with a Harvard PhD in neuroscience, it is the story (a novel) of a Harvard professor afflicted with early stage Alzheimer's at age 50 and her subsequent horrific decline. Told, amazingly, from the woman's point of view, it is a real page-turner. There's a beautiful story behind the book's publication as well. Burning to get the word out about this, Gennaro self-published, which drew the attention of the National Alzheimer's Alliance, and then the book was picked up by a huge mainstream publisher.

The Private Patient, by P.D. James. The cliche "writing at the height of her powers" defines this book James is now 80! The same description applies to Barbara Vine’s (aka Ruth Rendell) latest: The Birthday Present.

The Professor's Wives Club, by Joanne Rendell. A very light book, and thoroughly delightful. Rendell has a PhD in comparative literature but decided to write novels like this one instead (I still have to write my manifesto deploring the term "chicklit" and particularly its adoption as a Library of Congress Subject Heading). Rendell's husband is a professor at NYU, and this entertaining story is set in the neighborhood where I work at a very thinly disguised version of the school. Four women form an alliance to prevent the institution from paving over paradise to put up a parking lot, as Joni Mitchell says. A plot strand involving an Edgar Allan Poe manuscript enhances the story.

"A Diary of Chronic Depression," by Daphne Merkin, May 12, 2009, cover story, New York Times Magazine. If you've ever known someone suffering from this devastating and too frequently fatal disease, but couldn't understand what it might feel like, this article provides a perfectly pitched, vividly realistic account.

Songs for the Missing, by Stewart O'Nan. I've recommended a couple of this author's books before. His plots treat very different situations, but the writing is always exquisitely attuned to the pain inherent in living and loving.

The Fiction Class, by Susan Breen. What aspiring writer could resist a book about a weekly writing class? Not this one. The class exercises are even included! Shortly after reading this fun novel, I took an all-day class with Breen at the Gotham Writer's Workshop. She was as down-to-earth, practical, and sympathetic as I imagined, in part from reading her blog and I have finished drafting my very first short story based on one of the brief "writes," I did in her class.

Since my last post, I've attended two weeklong women's writing retreats led by Peggy Tabor Millin of ClarityWorks. I've discovered some wonderful new favorite poems--partly because Peggy starts our perfect days off by reading us a poem and sometimes gives us poetry exercises (some are from a fun book she recommends called poemcrazy by Susan Wooldridge) and partly because I tend to read poetry during these weeks. Many are in Roger Housden's two small books, Ten Poems to Change Your Life and Ten Po,ems to Change Your Life Again and Again (especially Jane Hirschfeld's “Each Moment a White Bull”).

Peggy recommended a terrific, unheralded novelist from North Carolina to me. His name is Ron Rash, and once I had read one of his books, I went on to read several more in succession, which says more than any gushing I might do here. First was Saints at the River, which you might briefly characterize as a story of environmentalism and loss; then The World Made Straight, which might be my favorite among them, perhaps because it adds in touches of what reading and learning can mean in a life; then One Foot in Eden, which is also amazing, a kind of psychological mystery turning on loss and identity. I stopped with Serena. The truth is that I couldn't put it down while reading it, but when all was said and done, I felt it had gone slightly over the top. Except for some of the lyrical descriptions of nature, it felt different from his other books in that the characters seemed like caricatures.