Books

I'm gonna start with a poem I had to memorize in third grade:

Book Houses
By Annie Fellows Johnston

I always think the cover of a book is like a door,
That opens into someone's house where I've not been before.
A pirate or a fairy queen may lift the latch for me.
I always wonder when I knock what welcome there will be.

And when I find a house that's dull,
I do not often stay.
But when I find one full of friends,
I'm apt to spend the day.

I don't really know why I started with that poem, except that it came to mind when I decided to write about books today. Also I wanted to tell you that I still have that poem memorized, and that it is probably taking up some useful space in my brain that I could use to remember something like where to set the pin on the weight machines at the gym.

Oh, and by the way, greetings from the library! Yes, I know I said I was going to go yesterday, but it turned out that I had to wait until today to rejoin society. I was just too afraid of my sad little compact sedan's ability to navigate partially-plowed streets with giant snow piles.

Not that things are all sunshine and roses on the roads today. It turns out, 8-foot piles of snow really limit visibility. And cars parked on the street have to be way farther from the snow-covered curbs, and so the streets are too narrow.

Anyway ... books!

Recently I tried to read a non-fiction, academic sort of book called Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle. I was thinking the book would discuss the phenomenon of having a lot of "friends" in social media and not a lot of close friends in real life, a phenomenon that was tragically exemplified by the story of a woman who left a suicide note on Facebook and none of her 1,000+ friends helped her. And maybe the book did talk about social media (though not obviously the suicide situation; it was published before that), but I didn't get too far into it. It turns out the book was largely about robots as a substitute for human companionship, and I'm not that interested in robots. (Though the book did include Zhu-Zhu pets in the category of Robots, and we do have a few of the boy-oriented battle hamsters in our house.) Anyway, I found the book too dense and boring for my late-night reading. (I should note that "late-night" for me is now about 9 p.m.)

Another book I'm reading right now is The Fran Leibowitz Reader. Fran Leibowitz was a humor columnist in the 70s and 80s, and my brother and sister-in-law gave me her book because they thought she reminded them of me. Which, I might be a little bit offended by. I'm not a chain-smoking stereotypical New Yorker who goes to discotheques. But Fran is funny, and I'm glad to be introduced to her.

I'm also reading a novel right now called Mudbound by Hilary Jordan. I picked it because it's the official "One City, One Story" book for my hometown of Pasadena, California. You know, where the whole city reads one book and then there are book-related events all over town? My current hometown, or rather the nearest big city, is Chicago, and it looks like they won't pick another book until spring. But I'm gonna read it. I mean, assuming it doesn't look dumb. Who's with me? Anyway, Mudbound is about a woman who gets married and reluctantly moves to a farm with her husband after WWII, and the farm is in Mississippi so all this awful racist stuff happens. It's sort of a cross between Half-Broke Horses and The Help. So far I like it, because historical fiction is my favorite genre, but man, the people in this book are racist. It's almost hard to read, even though it isn't like the author is advocating racism or anything. It's probably fairly accurate in terms of what things were like in rural Mississippi in the 1940s. But Saving Private Ryan is accurate, too, and that doesn't make it pleasant.

Who has some book recommendations for me? I know Leigh Ann recommended Young Adult book Matched, so that might be next for me.

Have a good weekend! Hope you get some reading time!