My big book this year wasn’t planned. An airline departure and no reading material except for what…Middlemarch…on my phone!!! Yes, it took awhile. My first foray into George Eliot. Oh that clever, wicked (deliciously so) woman! The velvet hammer smashing human foibles, truths, untruths and the greys in between. Onto 10th century Japan and The Life of Murasaki by Liza Dalby. What a wonderful tale Ms. Dalby tells. She herself was a western woman trained in the Geisha tradition so very authoritative on the layers and layers of social distinctions, classes and manners. Not to mention the messages of kimonos which the author also mapped out in a non-fiction book on the same subject. Not easy to find but worth that valuable inter-library loan service at our wonderful public libraries.

Finally a sobering read into a slave owner’s life. The Secret Eye-The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas 1848-1889. Ms Thomas from Augusta, Georgia lived a privileged life thanks to over two hundred enslaved people on her father’s properties. Her diary details the years before, during and after the changes that emancipation brought on to their lives. She hauntingly refers to children born to enslaved women with “familiar faces” of her own family. It is a candid portrait of a woman who adjusts to a new world whilst longing for an easier path. She doesn’t like, and is unaccustomed to washing dishes.

I ran across this title thanks to Nell Painter’s Old in Art School: a memoir of Starting Over. She wrote the insightful forward to the Thomas memoir.