Just finished “Under Enemy Colors” by S. Thomas Russell. And yesterday saw the end of “Murder at the Vicarage” by Agatha Christie (my second Agatha Christie mystery – it won’t be the last). I have been wading through the beginning of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past”, a 6-volume tome of over 4000 pages, and I needed a break. Christie and Russell provided it.

I call it reading for plot, which means I don’t much care for niceties of form or structure – let the pace bear me irresistably onward! Nearly any contemporary author provides it, because we won’t stand for anything less than a screenplay in 2008. No point in naming them. These novels provided the break I needed, but like cookies and brownies, they were not nearly as filling or as satisfying as Proust… or Tolstoy, or Dickens, or Elliot… et cetera.

Not nearly as daunting, either.

Russell took me aboard a ship of the line in the British navy, and I sailed the Atlantic in search of French merchants and frigates. Christie acquainted me with any number of suspects in the murder of a cantankerous church deacon in a little inconsequential hamlet of England. And though it was not memorable, it was fun. And reading for fun is nothing to be ashamed of.

Tomorrow, back to Proust, I’m afraid… and lines like “the faith to create”. Read that, and plot seems to fade into oblivion while a vast vista opens and takes your breath away.