celebrating books & the literary lifestyle
Books are always a great gift for the fathers in your life…(except for my dad who has already read everything and my husband who rarely finishes a book anymore…) But for everyone else…here are five recommendations from my own bookcase for Father’s Day gifts:
Once upon a time I announced my goal to read 40 books out of my own bookcases.
Thankfully I put no time limit on that goal because months passed and I had only read exactly five. That’s right – five books in 10 months.
I loved Book #1.
I loved Book #2. Continue reading
I was only a few chapters into The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when I knew it would break my heart. I just didn’t know how.
The book was building towards something. But what? What horrible thing will happen? And to who?
I knew it wasn’t going to end well. But I kept reading.
When we were house hunting, it came down to two houses. One had a three-car garage, was on a lake, and had built-in bookcases. The other, which we now live in, didn’t have these particular things, but was great in other ways.
My husband gave up his dreams of fishing out of his back yard and keeping all his trailers and boats on-site.
And I thought I was giving up my bookcases.
Dr. Suess’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go was a gift from my fifth grade teacher; he brought it to my high school graduation. He brought this and a roll of toilet paper, signed by my fifth grade class, but that’s a whole other story.
Before leaving my house one day, my dad left a copy of The Atlantic on my coffee table and said I should read an article on such and such. (He didn’t say such and such but this is how I heard it at the time as I was busy doing something.)
So I took the magazine on our 10+ hour summer vacation road trip.
I was quickly sucked in by “The Gigolo” where the author invites the star of a reality series over for a party with her friends to be interviewed about the growing male escort service. Ok, this definitely wasn’t the article my dad was referring to, but it was fascinating.
Once upon a time I did not read literary criticism. My internal contemplation, profound or not, was enough.
Returning to this mindset during a recent reading of Jane Austen’s Emma, I indulged myself in some (not so) deep thoughts:
The only books I generally check out of the library – for myself – are “walk-by grabs.” This means I grab the book off the shelf while chasing two preschoolers to the kids’ section.
Using this precarious selection method, I ended up with a cookbook titled Skinny Italian.
I don’t want to spill the secrets of Rebecca, billed as “the classic tale of romantic suspense” to anyone who has not yet read it, so I won’t focus on the plot here. Instead, I’ll just note the story reminds us that situations, and people, aren’t always what they seem, and, as the narrator learns, we shouldn’t waste our time “building up false pictures in our mind” to sit before and obsess over.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been living in two worlds: my usual world, of course, the one with the two lively preschoolers, and another world, the one of 15th century England, with its restless struggles for not only a kingdom’s power but its respect.
Many a night I escaped into this second world of Philippa Gregory’s The White Princess, but it is historical fiction rather than escapist literature. For one, this second world is much more stressful than my own world and not really a situation in which I’d want to live: A nice girl, with whom I can somehow relate even though she is born a princess, falls in love with a king (who I think may have also been her uncle but I’m still not totally clear on this), is forced to marry the new king who killed the king/lover/uncle, ends up loving the new king and having his children, and then has to worry about an invasion by her long-lost brother. Because kings with little support still have no intention of giving up their power, it’s really a no-win situation for her – either her husband dies or her brother dies.
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