After last month’s #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks fail, I wanted to do better in August. So far, I’ve read two books, one my own and one borrowed. This means I’m meeting the goal I set for myself: to read 50 percent my own books through the end of the year. Hopefully, I can keep that up!
As always, many thanks to Taking on a World of Words for the weekly inspiration of WWW Wednesday and to Coffee and Cats for introducing me to it.
What are you currently reading?
The bookish interwebs are buzzing today with fun and funny tributes to National Book Lovers Day, celebrated on Aug. 9 each year.
For some of us (like me!), every day is book lovers day. But I feel the spirit of setting aside one day a year to acknowledge and celebrate what you treasure. I mean, if grilled cheese sandwiches and yo-yos get a day, then books deserve one too, am I right?
To honor the occasion, I offer five great reasons to cultivate a love of books and invite you to share yours in the comments! Continue reading “For National Book Lovers Day, 5 Reasons to Read”
My sincere thanks, as ever, to Taking on a World of Words for the weekly inspiration of WWW Wednesday and to Coffee and Cats for introducing me to it. They have been so successful at inspiring me to read that I’m sticking with it despite just having written a monthly recap!
What are your currently reading?
I have three books going at the moment though haven’t managed to get very far in any of them.
It felt like a slow month of reading for me. For good reason: It was. With six books read, July was my slowest month of reading this year. And it’s even slower than it looks since I read Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in one day, that day being July 31.
On the upside, my low reading tally is the result of spending loads of my free time with friends and family. And you definitely will not hear me complain about that! Continue reading “The unabridged list of books I read in July”
I thought this was going to be a piece in which I gleefully recount my exploits as a book quitter. I say “gleefully” because I heartily advocate reading the books we want to read.
Outside the context of school or work requirements, reading isn’t a responsibility to anyone but oneself. So no one is obligated to finish a book or provide an explanation for why they didn’t. By all means, feel badly if you quit on hope and humanity. Feel badly for being hateful or impatient or selfish (to the extent that feeling badly inspires you to do better). But feeling badly about not finishing a book (or about what you read)? No. Full stop.
So there I was, all fired up, marching up and down my imaginary battlefield, brandishing my imaginary spear and, for whatever reason, imagining myself clothed in chain mail and a metal helmet. And then … a funny thing happened: I looked over my reading data and realized, Oh. I haven’t actually quit on many books this year. How inconvenient it is when empirical evidence contradicts what we want to believe. Ahem.
I stand by my message. It’s just that my lack of quitting has come as a surprise. At times this year, it has felt as if I was abandoning books with, well, abandon. Continue reading “I thought I was book quitter until I checked the stats”
If you’ve visited this feature before, you’ve perhaps noticed that my inspiration for these Wednesday reading roundups is Taking on a World of Words, who hosts WWW Wednesday, and Coffee and Cats, who introduced me to it. I mention it every week and worry that my thanks will come to seem perfunctory. It is decidedly not.
Over the last month, I’ve had many moments of wondering why … about so many things. It’s a question I’ve asked before, for different reasons. This month, I find myself despairing of the world around me, near and far. As you can imagine, it makes focusing on reading a challenge. What is the point of it all? I ask myself. This is especially so when the books I read feel so far removed from the very real and pressing problems of the world as to seem distastefully self-indulgent.
What I forget in these moments is how transformative books can be. Reading can remind me how resilient humans are, how much beauty and love can be found in the world. Books can remind me that human history is cyclical, not the linear march of progress we may wish it were. But there is hope in this too. Continue reading “Wednesday reading roundup: July 27”
A funny reader moment happened to me last week when I got together with one of my favorite cousins. “I remember how you used to devour books,” he said, as we reminisced about our childhood. “You’d carry around these big books. I’d ask you how far along you’d gotten, and you’d say, ‘I finished it.'”
I have no recollection of this happening, but it sounds legit. And a fitting memory to introduce this week’s reading roundup, yes? Now let’s get to the books!
As always, esteemed thanks to Taking on a World of Words for hosting WWW Wednesday and Coffee and Cats for introducing me to it!
What are you currently reading? Continue reading “Wednesday Reading Roundup: July 20”
With my annual summer relocation happening this week, I’m behind. I could let it go and plan to catch up next week. But I won’t. It’s like with working out: If I let myself go one week, it’ll be too easy to let it go the next one. And the next one after that.
So my thanks, as always, to Taking on a World of Words for hosting WWW Wednesday and Coffee and Cats for introducing me to it!
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finished reading?
It’s about high school students at an elite New York City ballet academy, where the pressure to excel pushes students to the brink physically and emotionally. The story unfolds through three first-person viewpoints. California girl Gigi feels the weight of being the only African-American student at an academy where “ballet blanc” is the unspoken code. June wants more than the understudy roles she’s been getting, especially since her mother has given her an ultimatum to get better roles or leave the academy. Bette, a legacy student, fits the prima ballerina description to perfection but struggles to replicate her older sister’s success.
The story begins with a student, Cassie, falling during a class, then fast-forwards to the following year. We discover Cassie is not longer at the school. She was injured in the fall. It turns out she was also the victim of intense bullying/harassment by other students, Bette at the head of the list. The bullies find a new target in Gigi, with the “pranks” becoming increasingly alarming. We spend the book not knowing exactly who is doing what. I raced to the end hoping to find out what was going on only to find the last page is the biggest cliffhanger of them all – sneaky! I guess I’ll have to read the sequel, Shiny Broken Pieces.
I also finished An Accidental Greek Wedding
What do you think you’ll read next?
So it remains to be seen what book lands on my “next up” list.
How about you? What books are on you read, reading, and to read list?
Ah, how I love Wednesday reading roundup day. Without it, I’d probably gorge away on books and forget to take a bit of time to think about what I’m reading. Many thanks as always to Taking on a World of Words for hosting WWW Wednesday and Coffee and Cats for introducing me to it!
What are you currently reading?
How do we define Great American Novels?
As we celebrate the 240th anniversary of the United States of America, it’s a question I’ve been pondering. Since I like to think on my own but not alone, I turned to The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly—150 Years of Writers and Thinkers Who Shaped Our History.
Published in 2007 to mark the Atlantic Monthly’s 150th anniversary, the book isn’t about American novels but rather about the larger idea of America, as a state of mind and of being. The doorstop-sized collection includes great American writing that has appeared in the magazine’s pages over the last century and a half: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride,” Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Ian Frazier’s “Stalin’s Chuckle.” Continue reading “The American Idea in 10 Great American Novels”
