Comments on: Masterpiece Theater engineering romance

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:10:16 +0000

Hi Michelle:

I found the link to your blog through Savvy Authors. I’m a huge fan of Masterpiece Theatre and BBC costume dramas. I’ve read almost every book Neville Shute wrote. Some of them are so old and tattered that I keep them in plastic sandwich bags. A Town Like Alice is my favorite but I loved The Far Country, Pastoral and The Pied Piper too.

I “identified” with the the protaganist in “Behind the Scenes at the Museum” so much that it was kind of eerie. Loved that book!

Great blog!
Jennifer

By: Lynn Dean

Lynn Dean — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:01:16 +0000

Love your last question about what makes a story timeless. I think sometimes we respond emotionally to characters BECAUSE their settings are different. When we strip away the dailyness of life, what’s left is the human essence–the things that make us the same despite our differences. That’s where we find the true questions of the human experience, eh?

By: Michelle Ule

Michelle Ule — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:14:49 +0000

Wow, Brian, who would have thought a story, a movie, about families in the Jewish ghetto during the end of the tsar’s reign would resonate with a missionary family in Colombia. Thanks for sharing.

And Elizabeth, I, too, began a life-long love affair with Russia after seeing and then reading Dr. Zhivago.

(Though we’re more like Tevye and Golda than Lara and Yuri).

I’ll look for Atkinson; she sounds something like Barbara Pym.

Perhaps the real question is what makes a story timeless–that we respond emotionally to tales set in places so very different from our current homes?

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:05:43 +0000

Oddly, or not so oddly, I become immersed in the world of almost every writer I read. Russian for Pasternak and very Englis for Jane A.
Have you read Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum.
Wonderful about English middle-class life in the 1950′s.
Snowy STILL in NY

By: Nicole

Nicole — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:53:03 +0000

Oddly enough, in Kristen Heitzmann’s Secrets and Unforgotten I could’ve lived in the protagonist’s (Lance Michelli) skin. He captured my heart both as a the romantic character that he was but mainly my heart as a Christian. It was his passion, his love for Jesus, his desire to do the right thing which sometimes led to the wrong thing–it was me in male form.

By: Brian T. Carroll

Brian T. Carroll — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:44:52 +0000

It wasn’t a book, but a movie: Fiddler on the Roof. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, we lived on a Bible translation center in Colombia. We were a tightly-knit, identifiable minority in a sea of the ethnically and religiously different. Due to political unrest, we knew we could be uprooted and deported on short notice. After high school graduation, most of our kids went away, usually to another continent. We loved the life we were leading, but the emotional touch-points to that movie were so strong that we sang its songs at our talent shows, and watched it time-and-again at our movie nights. I can still watch just a few minutes of it and feel myself close to tears.