Read or Dare

So here’s the deal: Our young heroine was sitting on the couch. Possibly eating bonbons. Definitely watching Jeopardy. I’m imagining her wearing something fuzzy and comfortable.

The phone rang. She muted the sound.

It’s a man. And he’s asking for her by name. “This is I,” she basically said, though I paraphrase. “She is me.”

And then he told her that he was calling from the National Endowment for the Arts and that she had just been awarded a $25,000 creative-writing fellowship.

“This seems like a great deal of money to me,” Cornelia Read wrote in a post on the Naked Author blog earlier this week. “I am tremendously grateful both to the NEA and to my fellow taxpayers for their largesse. I feel kind of guilty.”

So guilty, in fact, that the author of the highly acclaimed Field of Darkness (2006) used most of the rest of that announcement posting to talk about the cost of war. (“And that assuages my guilt a little, you know? I mean, writers are cheap, compared to the price of war.”) Which leads her to a riff on war in general (“And then I get to thinking about what the WHOLE war is going to cost. I’m hearing something like $1.2 trillion dollars. Let’s write that out all the way so we can look at all the zeros, shall we? $120,000,000,000,000.”), and to what would be a better thing to spend all those zeros on (“Think about how much cancer research that would buy. Or college tuitions. Or teacher salaries.”). And all of it reminding friends and fans of how really delightful this author is, and what a pleasure it is even to read the stuff that just falls out of her head for fun.

Read’s second novel, The Crazy School--the second as well to feature former debutante Madeline Dare--will be published in January by Grand Central Publishing. Kirkus calls the book “[a]nother bitterly amusing mystery,” saying it is “[c]austic, gripping and distinctive--intelligent entertainment.” “Once the action starts,” adds Publishers Weekly, “don’t even think about putting it down.”

If it wasn’t already a forgone conclusion (and I think perhaps it was) the NEA Fellowship should ensure that Read’s growing army of followers can look forward to still more Madeline Dare mysteries from this talented author’s pen.