You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'books' category.
So what’s better than a new pair of impractical fushia shoes?
A library card! I finally made it to the library during operating hours and have officially checked out my first books in the county. I’ve had a library card since I was 8 years no matter where I have lived. Since I am officially banned from buying books (a decree from my dear husband who finds my reading pace obscene), I must have that lovely piece of plastic that gives me entrance to the world of books.
Today’s treasures are a book by Chris Kuzneski (He’s adorable and answers his emails!) and book about Bosnia. I recently found out that one of the sisters in the novel I am writing is married to a Bosnian refugee. (I just love when the characters spring things like this on me.) Now I need to do some catch up on the history of the region.
My to-do list is growing, and my receipts don’t really look anything like the shopping list I took with me this morning. I did pick up the bok choy and trouser socks. I also came home with an inflatable punching bag and two bracelets. My toes are now purple instead of red. I just finished watching Superbad on my will-have-to-do-until-I-get-to-Wal Mart DVD player connection.
I sure know how to rock a Saturday.
I’m sure my header picture tells my current story (check out the two month old date!). Since I don’t have internet access at home, I am limited to posting whenever I have some free time at some other place. I’ve posted some on my other blog, and keep thinking that I need to put something over here. So here’s some of what’s been going on.
In case you didn’t know, today is August 7. I have been waiting for this day for months now, thinking it would never get here and wishing it would take its time because the new school year was just around the corner. Eclipse was released today. My Barnes & Noble gift card has been burning a hole in my wallet waiting for the moment I crossed the threshold into the store.
Everyone who knows me well knows that although I love learning and reading, I don’t particularly care for fiction. Never have. I still read it from time to time, i.e. when I find something that resonates with me or truly revolts me. Poor Nadia has had to listen to me complain about the crap that gets published and I waste my time reading. (I owe you for that.) The exceptions for my anti-fiction rhetoric have been the Left Behind series and the Twilight series (Stephenie Meyer’s fantastic vampire series). Eclipse is the third book.
Finally holding this book in my hands was like smelling a freshly showered man after being separated from all humanity for years. I bought it this afternoon (along with another page turner: “Eight Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World”). I read two chapters sitting in my driveway cooking in my turned off vehicle.
I collapsed on the couch and continued reading until my eyes were blurry and the dogs were circling me with their legs crossed. I forced myself to come up for air and take care of some necessities around the house. I’m halfway done. For those of you counting, I read 3 pages per minute. Yes, it’s that’s good, and I read that fast.
While I’m sitting here ignoring the boxes that are waiting to be packed and the sink from the new place that I need to scrub, my darling husband has been pulling up floors, installing new air conditioning ducts (we don’t have a/c there at the moment), and stressing about how all this will come together. He’s a worker, that man. I’ve never seen anyone so dedicated to the task before him. In less than a week, he has pulled out kitchen cabinets and over 1,000 square feet of tile flooring, mowed 3 acres of the property, bought several truck loads of supplies, and annihilated several species of stinging insects. Part of me is enthralled by his dedication. Part of me feels guilty for not helping more. All of me admires him.
Weird little tidbit about me: I don’t care for fiction. Maybe one day I’ll get into all the ins and outs of it, but the bottom line is that real life is just infinitely more fascinating to me. Hmm…I get the feeling I’ve mentioned this before.
So I’ve been having fun spending a little bit of my gift card each Tuesday, which is the only day of the week I am anywhere near not one, but two Barnes & Noble stores. Here are today’s purchases: a vegetarian cookbook, Kurt Cobain’s journal, and a book on the history of the calendar/seasons. I forced myself to leave behind a book about the “bloody history of knights and pirates” and a collection of poetry.
Sigh. I can’t read any of them yet because I had a stack of papers to grade and international shipping to figure out.
Today’s Bliss: Reading my students’ spontaneous prose on the topic “NAMES” and telling the story of the time my name was Shaniqua.
Part of teaching 8th grade, I’m told, is that I am required to do a unit on the WW2 Holocaust. I put this off until the very end of the year because I had a difficult time deciding just how to present the topic in an unbiased way. The heart of my teaching method is showing my students how to find facts in emotionally charged arguments and form their opinions based on the facts.
I finally decided to let them read “The Diary of Anne Frank.” The play presents a perfect opportunity to discuss how dramatizations are adapted. We’ve watched interviews with survivors and will be reading some of Anne’s essays that are not part of the diary. Next week we will wrap it all up with a exploration of genocide around the world and more discussions about free speech.
We all really needed a break the last few days; this topic is draining. Yesterday and today I showed them the black and white “Diary of Anne Frank” movie. You know the one. I have quite a personal history with the movie beginning in the 6th grade when I saw it at school. In 8th grade, I read the play and watched the movie again. That same year, I taped it off the Disney Channel (back in the day when it was a subscription channel and they ran those free weekends for you to preview the quality programming). I LOVED that movie, and for the following year, I woke up just about every Saturday morning to watch the tape and write in my own diary. The story captivated me.
It’s fun to see that kind of love spread to another person. Five of my girls–the tough, street wise ones–spread out on the floor and violently “shhhd” everyone during the movie. They were captivated. Their mouths curved into smiles as the love story between Anne and Peter progressed. Their eyes grew wide and mouths gaped when they thought the families had been caught by the police. They laughed at Anne’s antics and screamed at her when she was mean to her mother. I think I almost saw a few tears.
The afternoon was just as much fun. It’s a large group filled with such a wide array of characters that I could never completely describe them. Like me, they are verbal…and quick…and downright funny. Here’s some of our exchanges:
During the scene of Anne and Peter’s first “date”.
“What’s he doing to her hand?”
“Um, isn’t he holding it?”
“No, he’s moving the pen across it.”
I had to get up and see just what was going on. “Oh, come on, that’s the poor boy’s move!”
Burst of laughter. “What kind of move is that?”
I look around to see a few of them experimenting with this technique and reporting to me that it didn’t work. The scene ends shortly after this. One boy exclaimed, “THAT was a date? That’s the shortest date I’ve seen.”
I couldn’t resist. “Really? And just how many dates have YOU seen?
We laughed even more just a few minutes later when just as Anne and Peter were about to kiss (all I heard today was, “Are they going to kiss?”), someone on the floor adjusted the backpack under their neck and unplugged the t.v.
On top of all this, three girls ran up to me between classes, just bursting at the seams, with comments about “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This is my all-time favorite book, and it was so much fun to get into such fascinating discussions as how much we dislike Aunt Alexandra, Atticus’ parenting styles, and the creepiness of Boo Radley wrapping a blanket around Scout during Miss Maudie’s fire.
There’s my bliss today…my hope for next week. And I so desperately need these moments in the midst of my chaos.
