What Will You Read Next?

I’ve just started reading Dan O’Brien’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch. My father received it as a gift from a recent visitor. It’s been shuffled around from table to table, but never shelved—largely because I held out hope that my father might want to thumb through it if he kept noticing it.

Instead, I thumbed through it. Well, not really. After reading the dust cover and the first page, I was hooked. Which surprised me because I have no interest in ranching or bison (beyond the fact that it used to be on the pooch’s menu). But O’Brien masterfully weaves details into the first 50 pages about prairie ecosystems and history that probably should be required reading for every American.

Also in the first 50 pages was this sentence, which I know most Lull readers can relate to:

“I had just finished a particularly good book, Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, and in addition to other depressions was suffering from literary postpartum and troubled by the daunting task of finding a book as good as the last one.”

May you never dwell long in literary postpartum.

[Photo from the American Prairie Foundation taken by Diane Hargreaves.]