I was doing some sewing research on patterns when I came across a blog. The person behind the blog was a sewist and knitter, but also, I discovered, had just released a new book. I usually stay away from suspense novels because they tend not to be great for bedtime reading, which is when much of my pleasure reading happens. They are hard to put down and they mess with your head.
But a maker who writes books? And blogs about knitting, sewing, and writing? I was intrigued. I could tell from the blog that the author was doing some of the same hard, good work I’m doing as I enter the mid part of my life. So I requested R.H. Herron’s Stolen Things from the library.
My dad introduced us to Star Wars early on in our house. We watched the original films over and over as kids, and when we got older, religiously went to see the subsequent movies (We still do!).
I went to a midnight showing of one movie. Since it was actually at midnight, I have no idea which movie it was, because I dozed through parts of it. (I checked with my brother, who was with me that night and is a better historian when it comes to Star Wars movie watching. The episode I dozed through was Revenge of the Sith. I was a young single mom of a two-year-old who was still getting me up at night when that movie came out. I did watch it again later with my eyes open).
I’ve passed down my interest in Star Wars to the kids, although the franchise and its size have started to alienate me a little. It’s not the same, special thing it was when I was a kid, with a limited number of movies to enjoy. Someday there will be so many subplots and new characters that I won’t have any idea who half of them are (that may already have happened, as indicated above).
Two knows I’m a nerd, and she handed me Don’t Cosplay with My Heart, by Cecil Castellucci, after she’d read and enjoyed it. She’d read the “good parts” to Three along the way and thought I would like it, too.
Like her sister, 10 year-old Three lets me know when she reads a book she likes and wants to recommend, but she shares fewer books – although the number may increase as she sees me reading her picks. One of her recent and rare recommendations was Ghost Boys, by Jewell Parker Rhodes.
Back when I was on Facebook, I participated in an internet pyramid scheme where participants each sent a used copy of their favorite book to the person at the top of the list. Just like the chain letters of old, your name would keep getting bumped up the list as more people were invited to join in. When you reached the top of the list, you would get books in the mail from the other participants.
I hope the others who signed up did as well as I did. I received 7-10 books out of the deal. I was sent classics, nonfiction, and books I’d never heard of. I received a historical fiction novel I’d already read and loved. I am still working my way through the stash.
One of them migrated over to the Chaplain’s reading pile early on and I forgot about it. It floated to the top of his pile and I caught sight of it and asked him about it, not remembering where it came from. “Oh, I borrowed that from you,” he told me. I took it back and started reading.
When I was in college, I took an American Lit class with a new teacher. He had been hired upon the retirement of a beloved professor and I disliked him simply because he wasn’t his predecessor.
The only thing I remember from the class was the day our professor asked a white student to read a passage from a Flannery O’Connor book that contained the N-word. The room was tense, and a Black student in the back of the room (the only one?) walked out when our fellow student said the word.
We also had a Toni Morrison book assigned that semester.
