Gilmore Girls – Sally Allen

July 12, 2017August 16, 2017

Reading wrap-up: June reads and purchases

My June reads focused on my two reading projects: Ancient Greek literature and the Gilmore Girls reading challenge (which we’re doing at Books, Ink). Perhaps unsurprisingly, my library holds many of these titles already.

I apparently have a lot to say about my June reads, so we might as well jump right in:

Books read:

Blue Nights and Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Joan Didion is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. It was a treat to read/reread her work for the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge. (My piece for the challenge is here.)

Blue Nights has been languishing on my bookshelf for years. Who knows why? Maybe I wanted to wait, to savor it. Maybe I was scared of how sad it would be. She wrote it after her daughter’s death, which followed shortly after her husband’s death. As you might expect, it explores grief and loss—both of others and, as we age, of the self we have known. The blue nights of the title provide an overarching metaphor for how brilliance prefigures its own end. This notion is threaded throughout this moving, poetic memoir.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem may be my favorite essay collection of all time. It’s Didion’s 1968 nonfiction writing about, among many other topics, the Haight-Ashbury, Las Vegas weddings, morality, self-respect, and writing. It’s gorgeous and awe-inspiring—a must read for nonfiction writers.

In the Preface to the collection, Didion writes that being “so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate” may invite others to overlook her, to their detriment. Because, Didion continues, “Writers are always selling somebody out” (italics in the original). It’s harsh, but possibly too often accurate. What I love so much about Didion’s nonfiction is, she never lets us forget that she’s there. She never lets us forget that what we’re seeing isn’t objective truth but what she saw and experienced. It’s a kind of integrity I aspire to, and not just in my writing.

Jason and the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes (bought this year)

In this epic poem (dating to the third century BC), Pelias, the king of Iolcus, sends Jason on a quest to recover the Golden Fleece from Colchis. This is because Jason is the rightful heir to the kingdom, and Pelias wants to get rid of him. Hence the impossible quest. Jason gathers a group of heroes, and they face treacherous challenges and setbacks along the way (obvi).

I might love this more than The Odyssey, for the following reasons: Continue reading “Reading wrap-up: June reads and purchases”

March 12, 2016May 30, 2017

What I learned from reading a big book

Earlier this week, I wrote about a big book that I doubt I will ever read cover to cover, in the process arguing, essentially, so what? Since I don’t want to give the impressive that I believe it’s always okay to abandon or only partially read big books, today, I want to argue for reading them all the way through. Continue reading “What I learned from reading a big book”

February 26, 2016May 30, 2017

On reading Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree

I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to figure out which Gilmore Girls episode features The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby’s delightful collection of book pieces.

Music by The Polyphonic Spree is featured in “Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller” (season 5, episode 1), but I have yet to find a reference to Hornby’s book. Was its inclusion on the official Gilmore Girls reading list a mistake, or does the book appear without a verbal reference? I dunno, but if you do, you are cordially invited to enlighten me.

In the meantime … whatever. The Polysyllabic Spree is on the list, and I embrace any opportunity to (re)read Nick Hornby. Continue reading “On reading Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree”

September 7, 2015May 30, 2017

Why Charles Dickens?

A few weeks ago, I committed to explaining why I’ve been reading so much Charles Dickens lately. Here is where I make good on that commitment:

It started over at Books, Ink (the books website I edit), where we’re doing the Gilmore Girls Reading Challenge. If you’ve never heard of it, the objective is to read all 339 books referenced on the Gilmore Girls series over the course of its seven seasons.

My brilliant contributing editor, Jessica Collins, suggested undertaking the project collaboratively. Since the show and Books, Ink are both based in Connecticut and Jessica and I are both fans of the show – and books and, like the eponymous Gilmore girls, coffee – well, let’s just say the challenge felt like the perfect fit.

For the Books, Ink version of the challenge, we feature one book from the list per week, and whoever read it writes a short piece about his or her experience of it. So far, we’re 18 books in, and the best parts have been sharing the challenge with fellow book lovers (local readers are invited to participate) and being inspired to read books that have been languishing on my reading list.

This is where Charles Dickens comes in. When I first looked over the list, the books that caught my attention because I’d always meant to read them (but hadn’t) were mostly classics. Specifically, “David Copperfield” and “Little Dorrit,” two of six Dickens novels on the challenge list. Continue reading “Why Charles Dickens?”