When I finished what I was reading on Saturday morning and had to select a new book to read on my way out the door to Italian class, I thought maybe it was the moment for me to finally start John Berger's Into Their Labors trilogy. I brought Pig Earth with me and over my commute to and from Italian and yoga classes that day, I read the (excellent!) introduction. Then when I woke up yesterday morning realizing I had no plans and could devote most of my day to a book if I so chose, it turned out Pig Earth was not what I wanted to be reading.* So, at around 10:00 a.m. I started Jasmine Guillory's The Proposal and just after dinner last night, I finished it. Last March, I spent a Sunday reading its predecessor, The Wedding Date, from start to finish. Before reading The Wedding Date, I'd never really read a romance novel -- certainly not contemporary romance -- but I follow Jasmine Guillory on Twitter, so I kept hearing about the book, and it sounded fun. Plus, I do love rom-com movies, so why not try one in book form? It was a delight, and I think The Proposal might have been even more delightful. I was literally beaming through the first few chapters, and I cracked up while reading a particularly satisfying passage, in which the main character decks her ex, while on the bus home from yoga last night. It was especially fun to read The Proposal, which is set in LA, having just gotten back from there. Everything felt freshly familiar. Completely by chance, I was using one of the Skylight Books bookmarks I was given when I bought two books there a couple weeks ago and -- wouldn't you know it! -- the romantic leads, Nik and Carlos, run into each other at Skylight early on in the book. Carlos lives in the same neighborhood where my friends in LA live, and the first restaurant where Nik and Carlos have dinner together is around the corner from where these same friends lived previously. And this is another thing that makes these books so fun: the characters feel like people I know; like they could be my friends. I don't read a lot of books where that's the case (for instance, Pig Earth centers around peasants in the French countryside) and this was a refreshing change.
* I returned to Pig Earth this morning on the subway, in which context I found it to be a fine book to be reading.
