This summer I'm completely incapable of actually finishing anything literary, so I don't have much to update on...but I have been finishing listening to Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens, which I started listening to on my drive home from work in May and simply hadn't finished. If anyone out there in BlogLand can give me some encouragement on that one, I'd appreciate it...the plot is interesting and I'd like to know "who done it," but the writing simply wasn't made for audio...to the point that I've fallen asleep listening to it poolside recently. It doesn't help that I know I have an audio Erdrich book waiting for me on deck.
Upon lots of encouragement, I also finished Ron Clark's The Essential 55, which is a book about making rules for a classroom. I think anyone into education and/or working with kids (including teenagers) would like this book.
On a side note, at least I'm learning one thing this summer regarding my writing: texts must be 160 characters or less in order to count as a single text; thus, my concision is improving exponentially. :)
Monday, June 28, 2010
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
19 Minutes...and into the Summer...
Okay -- change gears. No poetry at this time, but I did finish a book, so I thought I'd share. :)
I read Jodi Picoult's 19 Minutes, which revolves around a high school shooting. Our book club at work decided to read it because we thought it would be good to read something we might be able to identify with.
And that's the reason why I sometimes dreaded picking it up.
It was very moving and disturbing, as it should be, even though there were a few plot lines that I felt were simply contrived. But it definitely made me stop to consider what I do at work to stop bullying.
Now I'm moving on to more summer reading, which I needed to be a little lighter after such a heavy story. So, I'm reading the chick-lit Friday Night Knitting Club and reading a little bit of Anne Sexton's poems in Transformations, which are all her own versions of traditional fairy tales. I also started Margret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, which is a terrifying dystopian story of a new government with very different roles for women, but alas, it was too deep to directly follow 19 Minutes and will have to wait. Oh, and I've checked out yet another one of Louise Erdrich's books from the library, but this time on CD, so I can listen to it while hanging out at the pool.
I read Jodi Picoult's 19 Minutes, which revolves around a high school shooting. Our book club at work decided to read it because we thought it would be good to read something we might be able to identify with.
And that's the reason why I sometimes dreaded picking it up.
It was very moving and disturbing, as it should be, even though there were a few plot lines that I felt were simply contrived. But it definitely made me stop to consider what I do at work to stop bullying.
Now I'm moving on to more summer reading, which I needed to be a little lighter after such a heavy story. So, I'm reading the chick-lit Friday Night Knitting Club and reading a little bit of Anne Sexton's poems in Transformations, which are all her own versions of traditional fairy tales. I also started Margret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, which is a terrifying dystopian story of a new government with very different roles for women, but alas, it was too deep to directly follow 19 Minutes and will have to wait. Oh, and I've checked out yet another one of Louise Erdrich's books from the library, but this time on CD, so I can listen to it while hanging out at the pool.
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