Okay, I haven't been keeping up with this blog the way I should, and I feel kinda bad about it. Truth is, I've been torn between going out and doing stuff - we realized yesterday that in two weeks we'll be back in the U.S.! - and blogging, and...reading!
I started off reading books in preparation for teaching next year. Great stuff. Then John Conlee suggested that I read the first of the Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy. I don't generally go in for fantasy novels - Anna B is disappointingly familiar with my lack of interest in the genre (I fell asleep while reading The Fellowship of the Ring, never got beyond it, and even fell asleep in the MOVIE!). So I was skeptical.
But...I read the first, then the second, and am now on the third, and it is seriously skewing my days to the "where's a good spot to sit down and read?" mode. (And there are LOTS of good places to sit and read.....hmmm, sounds like a good topic for a blog post....)
So that's my story , and I'm sticking to it. Thank God this is the last one. Anyone else read these books? Any comments?
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7 comments:
What are you teaching next year?
I will be teaching high school English! 10th and 11th grade, which means world fiction and American. So...one of the books I read this summer, which I remember reading when I was in 11th grade, is Black Boy by Richard Wright. Wow! Overlong, perhaps, but a potent - nay, searing - portrait of how racism has dominated life for blacks, of the scourge of it, of white hatred...it really knocked me out. nd I'm gonna get to Hemingway as soon as I finish...Pullman!
How great - what a change from special ed.
Damn your eyes! It takes John C to convince after I've been BEGGING you to read--"Oh, please, trust me, trust me, Lanaux"--for how many years to read these books!?! Are they not fun? are they not magnificent? Are they not crazy-weird on the subject of whether or not they ought to be considered children's lit? Isn't it utterly berserk that these books should be made into children's movies to be released at Xmas?!
You owe me an explanation why you believed John and not me. Ahem. Girlfriend.
And PS, anytime you want to hunker down with me and John C to dissect Pullman's analogies with Milton and other med/ren niceties, you know where to look. We've been parsing 'em out between us for years. The movie is fun, but popcorn, of course.
Don't you love how he scooches the accents and the scenery around?!
Woo Hoo!! New book ideas!! And a trilogy..SCORE! I'm putting them on my library list.. and Lanaux.. Frank will be horrified about that whole"falling asleep while reading The Fellowship Of the Rings" comment.. he read those books obsessively from say 10 or 11 all through junior high and into high school.. But back to these books.. I'm taking you girls advice, but are they kids books?
They are purportedly kid's books, I guess, but...not so much, really! See Anna's comment above! They are ripping good fun for adults - when I got the second in the series, the nice lady in the bookstore said, "Oh, yes, I was the same way - I HAD to have read them all!" The third in the series is the weakest, in my opinion, though. As far as the Ring trilogy is concerned - I know, I know! Frank, GiGi, Anna - they are all appalled by my utter lack of interest, but I'm just saying - I found those books to be snorefests. It's a deficiency in me, Anna for one is convinced. *sigh*
By the way, are your kids into Dr.Who? We are going to see David Tennant, the new Dr. Who, in Hamlet on Monday - our last night in Britain. Apparently he's big stuff - we will probably be the only people in the audience who have never seen the show. He has gotten great reviews. Tonight we saw a play about Edith Piaf, and the woman who played her was AMAZING! Her voice was ...it was Piaf. But not. Wow - a bravura performance.
And she was no bigger than a minute - like the real Mome Piaf! We left utterly dazzled.
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