"Filmed in Europe between 1958 and 1966, this set of Jazz Icons™ DVDs features concerts by seven of the most influential jazz artists of the...

This story comes to me courtesy of two of my all-time favorite guys. For the sake of anonymity, we’ll call them Ken and Nick. My two pals were traveling by bus, southbound on Interstate 65, somewhere between Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama with a horde of cub scouts…when Nick glimpsed a familiar sight out of his window.

As a black minivan passed the bus, a thirty-something female could be seen reading a copy of My Name Is Russell Fink. At first my friends assumed the lady was part of the scouting convoy. But alas, the van with the Texas plates sped away, never to be seen again by any other Friends Of Fink. I happen to like that story quite a bit.

In other Fink news, check out with this nice man (I don’t know him, but I sure do like the way he thinks!) had to say about our boy Russell. Thanks, Mark.

These were the nice (and enthusiastic!) folks who traipsed around downtown Nashville accosting passers-by with free copies of Fink.

I'm pretty sure it was Brad Whittington who encouraged me to Leif Enger's debut novel, Peace Like A River. And it's a good thing it was Brad, because based on the title and cover alone I'm not sure I would have ever picked that one up.

I don't know a lot about Enger. But it does seem like I heard somewhere along the way that his sophomore effort was going to release years ago...several years ago. Every so often, in yet another fit of rampant procrastination, I would consult amazon and check the release date.

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Gooberific Novice Author Alert...when So Brave, Young, and Handsome did finally release, I ordered a copy from amazon along with a copy of my novel. I wanted to see my book next to his in that 'customers who bought' this book also bought that book column. And it worked too!

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Anyhow, I'm about 80 pages into the latest Enger effort and the experience is better than I imagined. Quite by accident, I'm finding I don't sit down to read the book, but rather sit down to savor it. And I'm pretty sure that has something (everything?) to do with the amount of time Enger took to write it.

Again, I don't know the man. He could have spent those ensuing years between novels learning shuffle board or trying to figure out how to make Slinkies climb stairs. 

What I do know is that the prose is pitch perfect. And this is not what I would consider my kind of novel--not by a long shot. Yet every word of every sentence feels right at home, grounded, settled, even nestled. In the hands of a lesser writer (me?), I can't help but think that telling this story would slip into contrivance or melodrama. But so far, Enger's only crime is calling me back to the book when I should probably be doing something else. 

Anybody else reading this one? And what do you think?