What to Read First: A Reader's Guide to Unfamiliar Literature
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User Jane Kirkpatrick report user

What I'm Currently Reading

Clay's Quilt by Silas House
Sharing Fencelines by Linda Hussa et al

About Me

I'm an author of two non-fiction and thirteen fiction titles. I have essays that have been included in some anthologies. Most of my stories are based on the lives of real historical women and their lives and I try to glean from the bits and pieces of their histories a story that can speak to contemporary readers. I build landscape, relationship, spirituality and work on a frame of women's history. As a first book of mine, I'd recommend A Sweetness to the Soul. It was named by the Oregon Heritage Commission to the Literary 100 list, 1800-2000 as one of the 100 best book published about Oregon in the past 200 years. I'm listed between Ken Kesey and Bill Kitritch. Location, location, location! This book also won the Wrangler Award for best novel of the West from the Western Heritage Center.
As part of a series, I'd recommend reading All Together in One Place. It's based on a diary entry about a man who met eleven wagons of turned east (returning) on the Oregon Trail in 1852. All the wagons were driven by women, their men having died "and been buried on the trail." It's the first in a Kinship and Courage Series.
People also suggest HOMESTEAD, our memoir of moving from suburbia to rattlesnake and rock ranch as I call it in the 1980s as a good introduction and also a book that encourages one to follow their dreams no matter what others might say. It was deciding to leave a job as a mental health director and move to that piece of property on Starvation Lane that got me in to writing.

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Author Comments

about Laurie R King 2007-04-01 17:36:53

Laurie R. King has created a wife for Sherlock Holmes. Her name is Mary and she is an expert in manuscripts and religion and she is a feminist by nature. Sherlock is some 40 years her senior but together they solve crimes set in post WWI England. This author not only had to know everything there is to know about Sherlock Holmes but she has created another dimension to him by giving him a wife who is a rich and complex character herself. I'd start with A Monstrous Regiment of women because of its intricate plot and complicated relationships explored between men and women, religion and war, husbands and wives. A great read! And if you get an opportunity to hear Ms. King speak, take advantage of it. She is an insightful author and articulate master of the writing craft.

Title Comments

about Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner 2007-04-01 17:27:22

This Pulitzer-winning book is one of my favorites. It captures the great western landscape and the relationships of men and women to each other and to that landscape. I guess there was some controversy about this book as it is written from a woman's perspective and someone suggested that Wallace Stegner used the diaries on which he based the book without proper permisson. But I think that could make for additional discussion in a book group, for example. I read this book probably 25 years ago. It has remained with me and I will read it again one day. When I finished it I said to myself, "I want to write like that one day." A finely crafted, deeply felt story. Jane Kirkpatrick www.jkbooks.com