the three writers I'd like to meet

So we all know I'm a reader. The girl who got grounded from reading, who checks out 10+ books a week from the library, etc. etc. (I'll add that I often read junk. I love me some good junk).



But despite all my reading, I don't often come across authors that I recognize as kindred souls, as people I'd like to meet because we have stuff to talk about.



I can count three: Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Penny, and Pearl S. Buck.



I've always loved Kingsolver's fiction, but it wasn't until her essay book Small Wonder that I felt like I wanted to meet her....I think it was this line, "I do my best thinking looking out over a clean plank of earth"--- or something like that, I'm writing from memory, though the book is in the living room. Of course, why it took the woman nearly 20 years to move to a farm in southern Virginia from her adopted hometown of Tucson, I don't know. It brings out the handwaving in me... (what, you want heaven on a plate?) Because they had the farm the WHOLE TIME... gar.



Louise Penny writes mysteries from her home in Canada. They're wonderful. She's created what she calls an idyllic village populated with people she'd be friends with, and since I want to move to southern Canada every time I read one of her books (ME. ME!), I think we'd get along and enjoy many savory cups of hot chocolate together while talking about how much we adore our husbands.



And now, Pearl Buck. I read the Good Earth many years ago and re-read it probably once a year-- it's not at all one of my kinds of books...instead, it's a gem, and unlike anything I've ever read. Probably why she got the Nobel. But now, I'm reading her autobiography, and the woman and I agree on so much!!! She's writing in the 1950s about local and seasonal eating, raw milk, the evils of technology, the virtues of community.... so naturally I find her extraordinarily wise. She also admits to being really happy making a house and gardening, and that she could not write until her surroundings were in harmony.



Always fun to read someone and go, me too!