Oh look!

It's me, crawling in after months, (months!) of not so much as darkening Blogger's doorstep. It's not that I didn't want to blog, it's more like...well...what it's like is I didn't want to blog. I didn't have anything to say about anything I'm even remotely interested in, and so I didn't say anything at all. I couldn't think or feel or try on anything more than I was already thinking or feeling or trying about.

A big load that has been part of my life for the the last couple of years has been removed from my shoulders and I'm breathing a sigh of relief. Get it? Relief? I got released from my Relief Society president job at Church a couple of days ago, and although the responsibilities are no longer mine I still feel some of the weightiness of it. My friends who have been in my shoes promise that that is normal and that within a couple of weeks those feelings will begin to fade.

Blogger has changed, and I will have to learn all over again how to make my blog look like I want it to. That is a task I'm looking forward to, but I'm not going to wait until I know how to do it exactly right before I start clicking on "Publish". I'll just let it all out there as it happens until I figure it out, so things may look a little strange for a while.

So that this is not a typical "I haven't blogged in forever but I promise to do better" post I will now review a book I've been reading. I checked out of the library a couple weeks ago a book that has three books in one, all by Rosamund Pilcher. The reason this three-books-in-one caught my eye is that she wrote another book that I enjoy and re-read once in a while called The Shell Seekers. It's the sort of book that tells a story about normal people living their normal lives, and it shines a light on the beauty, love, and magic of a regular person's life. You don't have to invest a lot of thought or time into her books, and you aren't left feeling emotionally wrung out or sad or intellectually challenged in any way after you're done. It's just a nice, generally peaceful story with events that might happen to anybody. People do die, or get hurt, or betrayed, but it isn't heavy-handed or graphic. It's the kind of book you might read while you're eating your Cheerios in the morning. I finished the last of the three books earlier today, and here is what I think:

• She must have written these books earlier in her career. The writing isn't as smooth as it is in The Shell Seekers. There are also quite a few typos; I don't know if it's her fault or the publisher's but there is a big difference in the meanings of "about" and "bout".
• All of her books are the same. They are all the same kind of story where everyone is at peace with things at the end of the book, and the right people turn out to be in love with each other. There is always forgiveness for wrongdoing which was done under the best intentions. All of which might make for boring stories, but it's just the sort of boring I've been looking for.
• I can trust Rosamund to not make everybody unhappy at the end. Only the shallow, greedy, deceitful people are unhappy at the end, and they aren't any more unhappy than they were in the beginning, and any real trouble is always of their own making so it seems just.
• She uses the same locales (Cornwall, Porthkerris, London, and Scotland) and many of the same surnames for the minor roles of various townspeople in many of her stories, so it feels like her different books are part of the same story but from another person's perspective.  I don't know if she just wasn't all that imaginative or if it is part of her writing strategy, but it works for me.

Until tomorrow, it's me, AmyDubDub, signing out.