Born in Chicago in 1972, Emily Giffin is at the height of her literary career. She earned a law degree but decided she wanted to write. Fortunately, she concentrates on the human condition and not the crowded mystery genre. Her ninth novel will be published in June. I just finished her fifth,
Love the One You're With. Unlike the Stephen Stills' song, it is not about a freewheeling philosophy. Set in NYC post 9/11, it is the story of a thirtyish photographer, happily married less than a year, who experiences turmoil when happening upon an ex-lover, a magazine journalist she hasn't seen in eight years. It begins an odyssey of the exploration of feelings that goes into overdrive when the two work together on a couple of projects. Whom will she choose? The author avoids sordidness. She presents the dilemma as that of good persons struggling with doubts, to do right. At 342 pages, it becomes tedious. Although I guessed whom the protagonist would choose, I was kept in suspense until the end. After all, it is a modern novel by a modern woman. The prose and dialogue are first rate. The observations are keen. Although not lacking in psychological depth, it is not up to the standard set by those who plumb the deepest. Still, she must be applauded for going farther than most novelists. 699 users at Amazon have rated
Love the One You're With, forging to a consensus of four on a scale of five. I rate it three. Published in 2008, it is still selling modestly, ranked 118,000+ at Jeff Bezos' behemoth, where at least 13 million books are listed. Giffin's books have cracked the
NY Times Best Sellers list. Here's a pic of her promoting her 2017 effort:
Yesterday, one of those neat rarities that occur in MLB's long season happened in Anaheim. Angels' starting pitcher Jaime Barria, a rookie, engaged in an epic duel with Giants' first-baseman Brandon Belt, a left-handed batter - a 21-pitch at-bat. Belt fouled off eleven pitches with the count at 3-2 before finally lining out to right. The battle lasted twelve-minutes-forty-five-seconds . It set a new record. In 1998 Bartolo Colon struck out Ricky Guiterrez on the 20th pitch. It wasn't until 1988 that it became an official stat.
Thrillers were the order of the day at the floating book shop, a rare session when fiction outsold non-fiction 3-0. My thanks to Marie, who bought Eric Van Lustbader's
The Miko, to the elderly woman who purchased Peter May's
The Black House, to the gentleman who selected David Wellington's
Chimera, and to the elderly woman who made a three for one swap of Russian books.
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