Reading Journal

I read quite a considerable amount more during October than I did during September. That's because in September, I was busy finding a place to live and moving there. Once moved in, there was no television to speak of. It's all digital out here, and we didn't have a way to watch digital. So I read and crocheted a lot. Harnessed my inner old lady. (And loved it, btw.)

Oh, and I didn't have much internet, either, so the lit blog got a *tad* neglected. It happens. Needless to say, I need to update the reading list on the sidebar.

I finished "Our New Nation" as well as "Sense and Sensibility."
I also picked up "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" as my New. I literally laughed out loud for minutes at a time upon reading the first chapter. However, it started dying about half way through. The story changes a little bit and I had a difficult time getting over the author doing that. Besides, the whole bottom half of the book felt like the author was rushing just to be done with it. It lost a lot of the flavor of the original that he had managed to keep in the first half. Which I considered a shame. I've heard there's "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" out, though. Not sure I'm ready to pick that one up, seeing how disappointed I was with the last of PP&Z.

I had some help picking out a Random. Pulled all the books from my bookshelf that I hadn't read yet (one of my goals is to have read all the books that I own) and narrowed it down to a couple. I was on the phone with a friend and asked them to pick right or left or 1, 2, or 3 or something like that. Didn't say what the titles were, so it truly was random. And it was a rather dry choice. Freud's "The Psychoanalysis of Everyday Life." I didn't even make it 50 pages before counting my breeze through "YHWH is NOT a Radio Station In Minneapolis" as my Random Read. (It's a short humor book. Sort of like the ABC's on Jewish beliefs.)

Then I picked up "The Greatest Virtue" by Pat Robertson as my True. (The answer is humility.) It's been okay. Not the most interesting thing I've ever read, but it does get me thinking about things while I'm reading it. Deciphering what I agree with and what I don't agree with.

For my Old, I'm doing a re-read of one of my faves: O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. I bought this book in the fall of 07, after I had been in Nebraska a short while. I had liked "My Antonia" well enough and assumed I'd like this one, too. I was right. I decided last November I wanted to read through it again. It's become an annual tradition of mine, I guess you could say. Because I picked it up just the other day (Nov. 22) and discovered a break-out slip from work that I must have been using as a bookmark the last time I read it. It was dated Nov. 21, 2008.

O Pioneers!
In the Barnes & Noble edition, there is an introduction by Chris Kraus which I browsed before reading this time. (I've probably read it before, though.) And one thing that he said shed some light as to why I enjoy this book so much. He spends some time talking about Cather's distaste for women authors because all they write about is romance.
"But as Joan Acocella points out, one of Cather's greatest achievements was to write fiction in which love and marriage comprise only partial aspects her female protagonists' destinies. Alexandra does marry Carl, but this isn't the point of the story. By the time they marry, Alexandra's character has already been formed--by her relationship to the land, and to others; she is not defined by her marriage."

Reading through it, I've recognized some quotes that often run through my head so often that they're memorized.
p.11
"There is often a great deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon."

p. 27
A new favorite comes just before an old one here.
"A steady job, a few holidays, nothing to think about, and they would have been very happy."

"A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves."

p. 29
The exchange between Carl and Alexandra when he tells her his family is moving back to St. Louis; I have obtained more understanding about human emotion from this scene than probably any other literature I have read.

"She brushed the tears from her cheeks, not trying to hide them."

Alexandra to Carl: "It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you've helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another." I actually used that in a letter I wrote to someone.

Carl to Alexandra: "We've someway always felt alike about things."
Alexandra to Carl: "Yes, that's it; we've liked the same tings and we've liked them together, without anybody else knowing....We've never either of us had any other close friend....and now I must remember that you are going where you will have many friends."

p. 35
"For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious....The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."