Ann Fairbairn

My mom, who dropped out of school in the 8th grade (but later got her GED), was quite a reader. She introduced me to some great books very early on: Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man, John Gardner's Grendel, Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Lots of others.

Lately I've been thinking about some of the books that she loved that I didn't get around to reading. I remembered one called Five Smooth Stones that had a cover that looked something like this:

But I couldn't remember who wrote it. "Edna Ferber" kept popping up in my head, but I knew that that was wrong. Of course it only took a few seconds of Googling to find out that it was Ann Fairbairn. Which is really not that far from Edna Ferber, so I guess that's why my memory latched on to her. Armed with the name, I thought I'd take a look to see if the library had a copy of the book, but no such luck. So I took a quick look at the usual suspects (Amazon, Alibris, Abebooks, and eBay) and found a plethora of copies, ranging from quite reasonable ($5.44 for a hardback on AbeBooks, which includes the cost of shipping) to some pretty seriously expensive tomes. I also took a gander to see what else Ms. Fairbairn had written, and was surprised to see another title that I recognized: That Man Cartwright, which I also remembered my mom reading. So I guess mom was quite the fan. (By the way, as far as I could tell, the only other book Ms. Fairbairn wrote was a biography of New Orleans jazz musician George Lewis, Call Him George.)

Hmm. I'm kind of itching to read some Ann Fairbairn. I wonder if my sister still has those books? I think I'm going to have to check on that.