Bob, Birds, Brontë, O'Brien

I was standing in Square Books the other day thinking, "Should I read a book by Edna O'Brien? She had a fling with Robert Mitchum!" That is a terrible reason to read a book but maybe no worse than lots of others. I picked O'Brien's novel WILD DECEMBERS because they compare it to WUTHERING HEIGHTS, my personal fave, on the back. Of course you can't always trust the back of the book to give you the best information. But O'Brien's epigraph is from Emily Brontë, and the title of the book comes from it, so okay. And it's really good so far! The book, I mean, not the epigraph, although the epigraph is just dandy. As soon as the second paragraph of the first chapter I thought we were going to get an owl: "There were birds always," writes O'Brien, and then she lists some birds, but owls are not among them. Still, I'm only on page 22 and there have been tons of birds so far and much talk of birds. I believe there is a fair chance of owls.