I’m sending out a big “Thank You!” to all who helped broadcast the special Amazon free download. 488 seems like a pretty big number to me. It means that many people have the book that didn’t before and it can sink or swim on its own merit.

Our book club is reading Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and I marked this passage to share with my gardening friends: “He liked the clover, evidence of the country always pressing in close, quietly sabotaging anyone who tried to manicure nature into suburban submission.” The book was written by Helen Simonson. I hear echoes of Remains of the Day in the staid, buttoned-up British “stiff upper lip”, but the Major’s humanity wins out as clashes of generations, cultures and religions buffet him, nudging him ever farther away from his comfort zone. Our group trends toward gentle fiction, though we have veered into the likes of Choke by Chuck Palahniuk and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larssen. Simonson’s book is filled with lyric passages that create the atmosphere of an English village on the cusp of an invasion of modernity: bittersweet, thought-provoking stuff.