I'm still reeling having finished Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop only this morning.

And this is a statue of the real Bishop of New Mexico whom she barely disguised in the novel. Is it a novel? ... Cather called it a 'narrative' and it unfolds slowly, as time does in real life, the little events carrying as much weight as more dramatic ones.

I'm glad that I've only recently discovered Willa Cather; I don't think I would have appreciated books like this and The Professor's House when I was younger. All I can say is that they are masterpieces. She writes with the force of a man and the sensitivity of a woman. And now I want to visit New Mexico. As I was reading, I was picturing Georgia O'Keeffe's landscapes, carnelian-red hills and parched bones.

'Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!'