A bit of belated blogging!

August is upon us and school will be coming back into session in just a few short days, so it's time to hit the books! I'll be guiding my students through some exciting titles this fall, but I admit that my own reading has fallen a bit short these past few weeks. My desire to buy books is as strong as ever, though! ;) These are the few titles I have managed to finish as of late!

My sister and I picked a few books to read this summer and my choice (regrettably) was Lincoln in the Bardo. I shied away from the title several times, but I kept reading more and more about it. It was set during the Civil War, for one thing, and being a Civil War buff, I was interested, of course. The writer was hailed as a modern day Mark Twain. So I gave it a whirl. What a waste of time! One third of the book is written in quotations (for which there is very little in the way of citation). The quotes were interesting in the sense that they demonstrated that seven witnesses can give seven different accounts of something as big and obvious as the moon - but one set of these would have been enough. By the second or third it felt gimmicky. The rest of the title was an inexplicable mess of characters who were grotesque and difficult to distinguish from each other and a total absence of plot. "I'm glad I read it," my sister said, "It's a book I will love to hate." Her thoughts pretty well sum up the experience!

I'm teaching The Scarlet Letter in American Literature this fall, so I reacquainted myself with Hawthorne and I remain a fan! The treatment of Pearl as demonic until granted salvation by "womanly tears" was twisted, though!

Sometimes I should stick with my first instincts about a book. I borrowed Berry's book from the library awhile ago and abandoned it once. Thinking I'd been too harsh, I borrowed it again, only to discover that I disliked the characters, found the ending twist to be really stupid, and felt the whole thing was just too long. The cover art remains lovely, though!

Stay tuned for books that have made themselves onto the shelves (I have a problem...)!