Storytime

Cousin R. reading "There's a Monster at the End of this Book" to her niece and nephew.

Promises to keep

My New Year's resolution for 2010 is the same as it was for 2009 with a slight amendment:

Read and keep a reading journal.

I'm pretty sure I won't stay true to that amendment, but I would like to savor my reading more and make note of the interesting ideas I come across.  Taking notes, even if it's just quotes or brief summaries, is a great way to remember the content of a book, long after you've put it down.

Getting to know your own library

From Susan Hill’s new book Howards End Is On the Landing:

"It began like this. I went to the shelves on the landing to look for a book I knew was there. It was not. But plenty of others were and among them I noticed at least a dozen I realised I had never read.

I pursued the elusive book through several rooms and did not find it in any of them, but each time I did find at least a dozen, perhaps two dozen, perhaps two hundred, that I had never read.

And then I picked out a book I had read but had forgotten I owned. And another and another. After that came the books I had read, knew I owned and realised that I wanted to read again.

I found the book I was looking for in the end, but by then it had become far more than a book. It marked the start of a journey through my own library.

I really should do something like this. I don't think I've read even a quarter of the books I own...and yet I still check books out from the library."

What's past is past

Things we've done lately:

• cooked hobo sandwiches in embers from J.'s perpetual woodburning in the back (we have a pile of deadwood to get rid of)

• planted coneflowers, coreoposis, asters, bee balm, and "oranges and cream" (not sure what the real name is)

• painted the living room

• saw the movie "Up," which is really, really good

• shared a pasta arrabiata dish and chocolate souffle at Bella Notte

• watched the cats pounce each other

• started reading "Atonement" (just me)

• competed in a bike race in the Red River Gorge (where J. was disqualified for doing something that protected him and the other riders: classic case of disobeying the letter of the law, but fulfilling the spirit of the law)

Books in time

I tend to have odd associations between places I've been and the books I was reading while I was in those places.

Most recently, when Jon and I were getting onto the interstate after a time trial just outside Shelbyville, KY, I had an intense recollection of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I had been reading the last time we were in Shelbyville for a bike race. We were on the merge lane, a scrappy bit of pavement with humps of broken asphalt littering the shoulder. I glanced at the grass and scrubby bushes bordering the lane, and the black and green cover of American Gods popped to mind, down to the part of the book I had been in the last time we were on this merge lane (the protoganist had died and was making his way through the underworld before being called back).

Here are some other associations I have:

Whenever I pick up my tattered, yellowed 1970s paperback copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, I am mindful of my parents' family room: the beige walls, nubby carpet, couch with the faintly plaid pattern. The window by the couch is covered with green ivy, and what light comes through is pale, weak with rain.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows goes hand in hand with our old living room from South Broadway Park. I remember tracking the progress of the sunlight across the hardwood floor every time I looked up from the book when I was reading it for the first time, and so this book comes with connotations of hardwood warmed with light, patterned by the shadows of leaves.

That's all I can remember for now. Until I pick up the next book.

Reader, I married him

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

According to this quiz I am not an obsessive-compulsive bookworm, though I think my family and friends would disagree. When the last Harry Potter book came out, I told Jon that I would not exist for the period of time that I was reading that book. He grinned and said, "Sure." I think that's one of the signs that I married well.
If "Settlin' In" is reading this, I am curious to know whether she picked up on the title of this post, given the book that she recently blogged about.

It's always books

One of my few accomplishments for 2008 : I read over 100 books.

My number one favorite: The Invention of Everything Else, by Samantha Hunt

Some other unexpected pleasures:
Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff
Passionate Nomad : the life of Freya Stark, by Jane Geniesse
Entering the Stone : On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, by Barbara Hurd
Rapture Ready : Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh
Enchantment, by Orson Scott Card

New favorite author:
Charles De Lint

Traveling to the ends of the earth

I took the Amtrak home to my folks for Christmas, for several reasons--caution and curiosity (an increasingly unreliable car and a simple desire to 'see what it's like').

The total amount of traveling that I did was almost double the amount it would have taken to just drive the eight hours home: 2 hours driving from Stanford, KY to Union Terminal in Cincinnati, OH; 10 hours on the Amtrak; 2 hours on the Union Pacific Northwest commuter train to Harvard, IL; almost 1 hour driving along Rte 173 to Rockford, IL. This does not include the number of hours spent waiting here and there. Suffice to say I left Stanford around 5 PM Friday night and got to Rockford around 3:30 PM on Saturday.

Would I have rather spent 8 hours driving in a car with nothing but my thoughts and vast cornfields to keep me company, or reading?

What I brought for reading material: Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope, Charles De Lint's The Ivory and the Horn; Laura Miller's The Magician's Nephew: a skeptic's adventurs in Narnia.

A reading list

The idea for this post came from "A Whole New Way with Memes" from the People's Republic of Mortimer.

This list was compiled in the U.K. by the BBC. The average adult has read only 6 of the books on the list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog. (This list in no way represents the top 100 books. It’s missing the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. For shame.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Oh, the horror!

I helped a boy with his homework. He came in asking for stuff on 19th century U.S. history. I asked what it was for, and he showed me the questions he had to answer at the back of a chapter in his textbook.

Everything he needed to answer the questions was there in the chapter--he could have copied his answers verbatim. His problem? He didn't want to read.

I forced him to scan the chapter with me. I even pointed out the sections that contained the answers to some of the questions, and asked him what he thought the answer was, but he still resisted the notion of reading.

It's a good thing I don't work all day with children, because such resistance to reading is foreign to me, and I would become highly impatient.

Till We have Faces--I must admit that I would never have thought that CS Lewis had written this. I guess Chronicles of Narnia still looms large as my main mental association with Lewis (the movie is coming out this fall, and actually looks like it might be decent. The effects appear Tolkienesque). Till We Have Faces is a retelling of the Psyche & Cupid myth, told in an earthy style that I enjoy.
The land is under a plague and the people demand to sacrifice beautiful Psyche to the shadowbrute, to the god-of-the-mountain. The narrator Orual is not sure whether the stories say that the sacrificial victim is devoured by the brute, or taken to be the bride of the god (to be 'devoured' by his love). She eventually realizes that either way, the term 'devour' is an essential term in relation to the gods. Its violent connotation is reminiscient of the behavior of the gods, who are so far removed from mortals that what they do is all too easily misunderstood by the people of the earth. Those of you who know the Psyche myth know there is plenty more to the story, but this is what I took away with this reading. (My style of reading calls for countless re-readings, with each reading plucking some new grain of truth to chew on).
I think what makes this brooding book stick is the fresh take on Greek mythology. Those stories have been told so often, and the gods are so whimsical, like mortals allowed to have everything their way, that the stories quickly became rote. This book made them intimidating again. It reminded me why mythology has remained even as the years fade away