My Blind Date with a Book

As a single girl trying to forget that Sunday was Valentine’s Day, I was super excited when TCU Press hosted a “Blind Date with a Book” sale.  I knew that if I needed to I could just say “yeah, I have a blind date” when people asked about my un-exciting Valentine’s plans. Part of the thrill of getting a new book is not knowing what’s going to happen in the book, and the event just added to that excitement. And man, it was hard to choose a book! I wanted to take the entire table home with me, but that seemed a little unrealistic.

But it turned out that I was really lucky. I wound up getting the book that I had stared at a dozen times at the Press and had wanted to read. And no, I didn’t cheat and look for this book before it was wrapped up (though I was tempted to). I was good and made sure that I chose a book that would be a surprise.  But the best surprise was that Dearest Virginia just so happened to fit perfectly into our #20books16 challenge! Our TCU Press #20books16 challenge is an awesome list of challenges that range from “a book with a purple cover” to “a book from your home state,” and as a native Texan and a Horned Frog, I could cross that one off of my list. Dearest Virginia, edited by Gayle Hunnicutt, is about her family who lived in the Fort Worth area. The letters in the book are from the 1940s, which I haven’t read about much so I will be getting a new narrative from my “adopted hometown” (though I’ll still always be a Houston girl).  

Now I’m not going to lie and say that I have the book all finished, with my English-major class load I’m already swimming (or drowning) in books. But Dearest Virginia has been a wonderful book to use as a break from my studies. It's a wonderful story composed of letters from a solider home to his wife. I look forward to getting to know the story more and, of course, for my next book challenge on the list!

-Kit