Fiction has always been among my greatest loves! The contemporary protagonist in Horse: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks is a Georgetown PhD candidate in Art History. When he is assigned a piece on Mark Bradford for the Smithsonian magazine I exhaled with delight! JP said that this book was made for me: horses, paintings, running, New York, New Orleans, and all different sorts of museums. And, at the very end, there is the reiteration of a core value of the book: art matters. The book is of course about a horse—an incredible, majestic, extraordinary creature—and it’s also about the relationships between horses and people, people and paintings, artists and subjects, and people with each other. It’s a beautiful reminder about why and how spending time reading, looking, watching, and riding contributes to a joyful life, sometimes for the most unexpected reasons.
