Tag Archives: Pride and Prejudice

Reading Challenge month 6 ~ A book your mom loves

paddle-to-the-sea

Stumped, I tell you. I was stumped.

Mom loved to read. We all did. That was plain as day. My growing up houses had overflowing bookshelves and stacks of reading material on kitchen counter tops, desks, and bed side tables. Mom always had a half-devoured book by her chair and a to-be-read shelf in the bedroom. We exchanged books through the mail in regular shipments between Florida and Vermont. “This one’s worth reading,” she’d say. “Have you read the latest Khaled Hosseini?”

But one she particularly loved? A treasured book? A favorite book?

I skrinched my brain hard to think of one and felt so deeply sad that I didn’t know. Isn’t that something you should know about your own mother?

I could make an educated guess. She had favorite authors: Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Carl Hiassen. As a kid she loved dog and horse books: The Black Stallion, Black Beauty, Lad a Dog.

Then I remembered Paddle-to-the-Sea, a book she had given Hyla years ago. I mean, she gave Hyla books all the time, but those were ones she found in her travels that she thought would appeal to Hyla’s interests. This one was one she’d also had as a child.

A loved book.

Paddle-to-the-Sea is the story of a little wooden canoe carved by a boy in the Canadian wilderness, just northwest of Lake Superior. He sets the canoe (and its carved paddler) onto a snow-covered hill near his home and waits for spring. When the melt begins, Paddle slides down the hill into a river that feeds the lake, and so begins his journey through the great lakes and out to the sea.

He follows the river, the waves, the currents, the storms, the waterfalls, the locks. We follow along.

Paddle doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have thoughts that we’re aware of. It’s always clear that he’s a something—not a someone—and yet I developed such a fondness for Paddle. I was rooting for him all the way. I worried for him when he was temporarily trapped in a beaver pond, or approaching the blade of a river-side saw mill.

It’s a short book. I read it in half-an-hour in a dwindling afternoon in July. I read it with a voice in my head. A voice something like my own, reading her child a story on some long gone July afternoon.

A story is a current. A story is a voice. A story is a wave, a journey, a seeking. A story is a memory and a thread. A story is the way someone’s love is joined to someone else.

I’ve got a cat on my shoulder as I type this. And my own girl on the porch swing. She’s deep in her own book on a perfect summer afternoon. What’s her favorite book?

I’ll go ask.

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Our books for month 6:

We’d love to know what you read this month. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

Month7

We’ll see you back here on August 11!

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This post is part of our multi-year reading challenge. We’d love to have you join us for the whole challenge or any portion. Take a look at the checklist to see the current category (in green). We’ll announce the next category on the 9th of each month.

Reading Challenge month 3 – A classic romance

Romance

When H chose this category last month, the image that immediately came to my mind was that rack of pink-covered Harlequin Romances at the book store when I was a kid.

That rack that I passed with barely a glance on my way to the brown clad books: dogs, horses, reference.

In fact, I went in search of that rack for a picture for this post and you know what I found? Fifty shades of grey. Quite literally. To be sure, there’s still a scattering of covers dressed in pinks and purples depicting clutching couples, shirtless men, and gowned damsels in distress. But most of the romance covers are unlike those of my dusty pink memory. They’re blue and black and grey, with motorcycles and vampires and empty landscapes. Old houses, space ships, jewels, and, of course, blindfolds.

And still, between the covers, it’s almost always that same long-told, reassuring story: one meets another, there’s the spark (love, hate, disdain, attraction), there’s the longing and the eventual coming to terms, there’s the obstruction (cruel step mother, overseas job, old girlfriend, different species, different planet), there’s the long montage of return to each other. And then there’s the ending… together or apart, with some hope that there will be love at some point, if only in a different time and place.

For this challenge, all I really wanted to do was read my favorite Jane Austen (Persuasion), which has all of the above elements in abundance, plus (to my mind) a heroine who truly deserves the happiness she attains at the end. Instead, I read a more recent classic: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, by John Fowles.

It was fine. It had most of the elements. It had Sarah in her dark cloak at the end of the Cobb being buffeted by the wind and waves (the Cobb, in fact, makes an appearance in Persuasion). But it was no Persuasion. And now I’ve learned that the crucial element (for me) is the ending: Elizabeth and Darcy must end up in incandescent happiness. Anne and Frederick must end up on the deck of his ship, setting out for adventure.

Otherwise, what’s the point?

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Our books for month 3:

We’d love to know what you read this month. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

Month4

If you need help finding a book, here are some good resources (note, however, that just because a book was popular or best selling in a particular year doesn’t mean it was necessarily first published in that year; check the information for the particular book you want to read):

We’ll see you back here on May 9!

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This post is part of our multi-year reading challenge. We’d love to have you join us for the whole challenge or any portion. Take a look at the checklist to see the current category (in green). We’ll announce the next category on the 9th of each month.

Reading Challenge month 2 – A book you started but never finished

Reading challenge - month 2

[Ed note: This month’s post is brought to you by M, one of my favorite guest bloggers.]

There’s a book I’ve been trying to read for over half my life, and by that I don’t mean a book I’ve always meant to get to but haven’t yet (that would be the Brothers Karamazov), or a book I’ve occasionally thought about getting to but maybe never will (Stephen King’s IT), or even a particular title from the list of books we’re all supposed to have read at some point or another (too many to count).

Instead I mean a book I’ve picked up and plowed into with the best intentions, time and again, only to spectacularly and convincingly fail to make any headway with, every time. My sister Anne gave me this book for Christmas or a birthday, probably around 1980, or 1982. I think she found it on the shelves of a bookseller friend of hers in Ann Arbor, but that was long ago and I may be way off. Certainly it was the sort of book you’d have expected to find in a used bookstore in Ann Arbor, then and now. It wasn’t Borders, by the way, but Borders was there then, just the one shop (that’s how long I’ve been trying to read this book: Empires have risen and fallen).

The book was called – is called – “Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts”, and was compiled and edited by a man named James J. Murphy who in the interval between my being given the book and the present has become Googleable, though back then he and his book seemed beyond arcane, and that seemed right up my alley: fairly short (235 pp) and made up of modern English translations of three early medieval prescriptive essays on Letter Writing, Composing Latin Poetry, and Sermonizing. It seemed like an important book to have, and to read.

Unfortunately, the book put me to sleep. Repeatedly and predictably, once or twice every year or so for 30-odd years. It was always on a shelf in plain sight – no forgetting it or shoving it away in a spare bedroom — but on some long winter afternoon or a slow summer evening — sitting up or lying down, quiet or with music playing, indoors or out — I’d pick it up and have a go: zzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZ, and always in the first few pages of the first essay, or even somewhere in the short introduction. It was fairly ridiculous; sometimes it bothered me, sometimes it didn’t. But the pattern never changed.

I packed the book up and moved it eight times. It survived the periodic book purges between then and now because it was on that short list of items you’d feel not quite like yourself if you got rid of it — like some small but irremediable change had occurred. But only if I eventually managed at some point to read the thing at least once– never getting to it would have been just depressing.

All of which means that when we started this project and I saw this category listed I thought Oho!, and it doesn’t surprise me that this is the first category I chose.

And hey guess what, I read it. Finally it was easy, and not because I’d given myself a deadline (I’d tried that one before). Or because I thought “OK, if I can only average 10 or so pages a day for a month, that’ll do it” (I’d tried that angle before, too, along with “You don’t have to even enjoy it, just read the book and then tell yourself you did it.”)

What finally worked, oddly, was concentrating on it. I told myself I wasn’t going to skim, I wasn’t going to let my mind wander as i glazed past a paragraph and say that counted. I used a highlighter and a pen, read slowly, took notes, and stopped to think about what I was reading or to look something up. It turned out easy that way, and the book paid me back, as they usually will– I learned a ton of stuff, a lot of which I’d have been happy to have known 20 or more years ago. I laughed a few times. There were interesting connections to works I already knew, and generally it was a light shining into corners I’d spent a lot of good times in long, long, ago. I’m happy to have finished it: introduction, appendices and all.

Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, 235pp., James J. Murphy, Ed., © 1971 by the University of California Press (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London).

Highly Recommended for Students of Early Medieval Epistolary, Prosodic, or Homiletic writing, for the General Reader interested in a challenge, or for anyone who likes a good long nap.

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Our books for month 2:

We’d love to know what you read this month. Please leave a comment telling us about it!

The category for the coming month is:

Month3

We’ll see you back here on April 9!

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This post is part of our multi-year reading challenge. We’d love to have you join us for the whole challenge or any portion. Take a look at the checklist to see the current category (in green). We’ll announce the next category on the 9th of each month.