I’ve been meaning to read A Tale of Two Cities
Cue the confetti!
If you’ve never read it, A Tale of Two Cities
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens
In which I devour “Voracious”
One awesome thing (among the many) about being a book lover: We are everywhere. You meet us in all walks of life. We’re baristas and hairdressers and rock stars. We’re actors and athletes and foodies. Sometimes we’re writers or college professors or artists. We might be wide-eyed babies or angst-y teens or multitasking moms or serene middle agers.
Basically, books are for everyone.
I love this about books. Continue reading “In which I devour “Voracious””
For a fun family read-aloud: Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye
Thanks to my dear friend Jessica Collins and her column “On the Children’s Shelf,” I’ve been, over the last year, rediscovering my love of children’s literature. In a recent piece, she shared a related reading resolution that is dear to my heart: Making time for family reading and reading aloud together.
Family read aloud time is my favorite time. I love the shared experience of the words and images and how the shared experience invites us to slow down. I love how it changes the way we receive and process a story. I love talking about the characters as if they’re our mutual friends and rehashing what parts of the story we each connected to and what parts most resonated. I love sharing my favorite pastime with my favorite people.
My last read of 2015 was a book that would make a lovely family read aloud: Warren the 13th and The All-Seeing Eye
“I Felt Like I’d Never Be Cheerful Again,” Or: Reading “Ethan Frome” by Edith Wharton
Years ago, I took a Victorian poetry class with a professor who looked like Satan dressed up as Colonel Sanders. He was elfishly tiny and wore an ecru linen suit, complete with black string tie. His neatly trimmed beard created a perfect “V” from his laugh lines to his chin. Among these distinctive features were two more: his southern drawl and his assertion that “There is no such thing as American literature.”
As it happens, I was, at that same time and university, enrolled in a course in post-Civil War American literature. While I didn’t exactly agree with Colonel Satan, I could see why one might wish to renounce American literature, at least of that period. My goodness, it’s an endless parade of horrors with no relief (as Dickens uses humor, for example): Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: “The Marvels” by Brian Selznick
As previously mentioned, the hashtag #ReadMyOwnDamnBooks captured my attention in a big way. It inspired me to take a good look at how many books I own that I have not yet read, and the results were sobering. Which is to say: I own too many books that I have not yet read, and it’s time I gave those books my attention.
I’m ambivalent about annual reading challenges, as I’ve seen they can sometimes have unintended consequences, of the undesirable sort. For the foreseeable future, I won’t be doing any challenges that involve reading a particular number of books per year. But a challenge that invites me to rediscover the books I bought that have somehow managed to disappear into my tottering stacks (before being read, I might add) sounds excellent. The temptation to purchase wonderful, intriguing new books will be fierce, I expect. But I will do my best to keep tackling those existent stacks.
To kick things off, I began by compiling a list of five recently purchased titles and plan to update with more as the year goes on. I’m quite excited to see what I’ll discover. I’m equally excited to be able to announce that I dove right in on New Year’s Day by reading Brian Selznick’s beautiful, moving The Marvels
Rereading “A Christmas Carol” at Christmas Time
By the time I moved to Connecticut, I had already made a habit of reading Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol
The decision to commit to rereading it every year began the snowy winter we lived in a one-story cottage dating to the mid-18th century. It had a huge picture window overlooking the backyard, which had a creek running through it and, on the opposite bank, a nature preserve. In the living room, a gigantic stone fireplace (about the size of the studio apartment I had once lived in) dominated one wall and featured a cooking arm dating to the colonial period. Continue reading “Rereading “A Christmas Carol” at Christmas Time”
The Wit and Wisdom of “Northanger Abbey”
Before 2012, “Northanger Abbey
At any rate, I reread this sparkling classic novel recently for a book group and fell in love with it all over again. What makes it so special, to me at least, is that it’s both a witty send-up of gothic novels and a serious defense of novels as an art form. In the process, Austen reminds us that the issue isn’t form as much as it is substance. It’s what we do with what we have that counts. Continue reading “The Wit and Wisdom of “Northanger Abbey””
Rereading Homer’s “The Iliad”
Since Stephen Mitchell’s 2011 translation of the The Iliad
Four years after purchasing Mitchell’s translation and reverently placing it on my bookshelf, I finally got around to the task of reading it. Turns out, I wasn’t so off the mark with my initial assessment. Also: It’s one of the saddest books I’ve ever read, and an absolute must read for anyone who wants to understand the human condition.
