Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf is one my favorite writers. His books are such good stories. The first book of his I read was Plainsong and then its sequel Eventide. I still think those are the best of the lot. I believe I've read all his novels, and I hope he'll write more so I can keep reading them all.

Our Souls at Night is, like all his novels, set in the small town of Holt, Colorado. In this story, a 70-year-old woman, a widow, Addie Moore, asks her neighbor, a widower, Louis Waters, to sleep with her. Sex is not necessary; it's a matter of relieving the loneliness, and nights are the worst.

Both Addie and Louis (persuaded by Addie) decide they don't need to care what people think anymore. Louis openly walks over the Addie's house in the evenings. They enjoy the companionship of sleeping in the same bed and their lives become more engaging by getting to know each other's life stories. Both the characters are people I enjoyed getting to know.

Haruf does not tie everything up in happy endings. I wouldn't call his endings sad or at all depressing, but they feel real. In this book, too, the good thing that Addie and Kent have going is messed up by Addie's grown son. At the same time, the interaction between her son's son and both Addie and Louis is a highlight of the book. So there's good and bad that happens as a result of the connection between Addie and her son.

I highly, highly recommend Our Souls at Night and all of Haruf's novels.

After You by Jojo Moyes

I heard that the sequel to Me Before You was even better than the first. I did enjoy it just as much.

The book picks up when Louisa is working as a waitress again, after her travels that began at the end of the other book. She enjoys waitressing -- which is hard for me to imagine since I am, I believe, pretty much the worst waitress in the world. I'm too forgetful.

It continues with Louisa trying to figure out what to do next in her life. She liked traveling but after a while decided she had had enough of that. She starts going to a grief therapy group and those people become her friends. Also through one of them she meets a new man who becomes an important part of her life. Her parents go through a crisis but they also grow close to her again through a close call that Louisa goes through. And Louisa meets a daughter of her previous love who neither he nor anyone else knew about it. This leads to more connections with his family.

So, as you can tell, it's an eventful book. It kept me turning the pages. I was interested in what Louisa would do and her thought process for making decisions about what direction to go. Besides being event-filled, Moyers writes with some humor as well. I definitely recommend both these books.

Felicity by Mary Oliver

I have just started reading this book of poetry by Mary Oliver. It's wonderful. Here's one for you to enjoy, and I have a few questions, too, you can weigh in on.

Roses
by Mary Oliver

Everyone now and again wonders about
those questions that have no ready
answers: first cause, God's existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing,
not going to the mall, not the Super
Bowl.

 "Wild roses," I said to them one morning.
"Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?"

The roses laughed softly. "Forgive us,"
they said. "But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses."

I love the image of the wild roses, of them laughing and talking. Their answer is so good - "entirely busy being roses."

There's one part that I don't understand. Where it says "what happens when the curtain goes / down and nothing stops it, not kissing, / not going to the mall, not the Super / Bowl." I think that the part about the curtain going down is one in the list of "questions that have no ready answer," like "first cause" and "God's existence." Then it seems like the phrases about not kissing and the mall and Super Bowl would be things that don't stop the curtain from going down.

But that's what I don't get. What do those actions (kissing, going to the mall and the Super Bowl) have to do with stopping the curtain going down, with stopping one of the hard questions to answer?

Maybe she's saying actions of that kind don't stop life from continuing on to death (death being the curtain going down)? Not understanding doesn't take away how much I like this poem, but it does make me curious.

Any thoughts?