Currently Reading (Take 2) — Page 15

"The Love Machine" by Jacqueline Susann, followed by "Once Is Not Enough."

Perfect bedtime reading.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in Hebrew.

Updated On: 10/6/10 at 10:38 AM

Finished Franzen's FREEDOM, and find it easy to not think about, as time passes and the hoopla dies down. Some good writing, admittedly, and I can't deny that I was identifying with those characters, but it just felt too narrated, somehow. Too many things were being described and only described, in a "he felt that he was no longer the same person" kind of way, without going into too much more detail than that. It kept me at a distance, which is fine, but too much distance can lead to me just shrugging off the whole thing.

I've been reading Rafi Zabor's THE BEAR COMES HOME, and have been enjoying it far more than I ever enjoyed FREEDOM.

---

Rucka! There's another rare thing we agree on, Spidey.

And yeah, Sorcerer's Stone definitely...feels different in Hebrew. It actually makes it easier for me to hear the characters as little kids for some reason - maybe because I was a kid when I left the country so my linguistic development sort of froze there. :)

Updated On: 10/21/10 at 10:57 PM

I just started The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. Sort of a Dickensian backdrop with some of the standard characters, but with a contemporary edge in its frankness. It's quite fascinating. Not at all what I was expecting.

---

---

Finally finished reading "Obama's Wars" by Bob Woodward. Had to put it down for a bit to digest it. For anyone interested in the wars, it is a good read. Had to use the back of the book a lot for all f the abbreviations they used. Came away with a little less respect for some of the people running the military.

Next up is Marlo Thomas' "Growing Up Laughing". Something lighter. I just picked up David Nicholls' "One Day" at the library so that will be the next book after Marlo's.

---

The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly. I recently read The Poet & The Narrows which were his others in his series with these characters. But I am such a sucker for crime/psychological thrillers.

My new Grisham comes out next week so that will definitely be on the agenda.

---

I just started reading Terry McMillan's latest book Getting to Happy. It's her sequel to Waiting to Exhale.

>>>"My son is reading The Catcher in the Rye in English class, so I'm rereading it now, too. Gotta say, it's quite different reading it at ... this age than it was on first reading at age 13 or 14."<<<

When I first started teaching, about 40 years ago, CATCHER was a book that would capture the students from the very start. It was the kind of novel that they'd finish in a night, even though I'd assigned only one or two chapters.

Toward the end of my career, I was working in an urban school that wasn't exactly "inner city" but came real close. At that time the students found the book to be "whack" and "corny" (their term for 'boring').

Just today I was asked to fill-in for an ailing English teacher in a suburban, upper-middle class school and the students were reading CATCHER. Although they were plowing through the book, they told me they found it to be inane and pointless.

What might have captured the students' attention 40 years ago might have been the profanity and they read along to discover when it would pop up next. Profanity has become so casual in today's world that it means nothing to today's teens.

Sad. Terribly sad.

---

I get impulsively snagged by interviews with authors. Hence, I am now listening to the audiobook of Eighteen Acres by Nicolle Wallace, and so far, I'm enjoying it.

READING reading? Tim Gunn's book. And Earth (our resident bathroom book...it's hilarious and perfectly suited for a 3-5 minute indulgence.)

Not my "heaviest" reading week. More escapist, if you will.

---

danmag, I tried so hard to get into the Corrections. I just found my eyes glazing over and my mind wandering. I got about 1/2 way in and returned it to the library. It was just too tedious.

Right now I'm reading a silly little book called Savannah Breeze by Mary Kay Andrews.

---