Don't Judge Me.

Yes, I have not been reading lately and am, therefore, a bad person. But you simply don't realize how time consuming being a teacher is. If you count the 500 papers I have to grade every week, I have been doing more reading than you.

Richard Russo: Empire Falls

this book got off to an amazing, hopeful start, which made the sluggish, awkward middle that much more disappointing. Russo clearly has a great grasp of what makes literature. The book is packed with nice imagery, layered meaning, and tightly packed themes that make one wish it was better written. I watched a painful travesty of a play the other night, one that stemmed from the abortive notion that being a theater critic makes one qualified to also write plays. David Skolnick, by the way. Miss it at all costs. But Empire Falls suffers from a similar problem. Russo simply can't write believable dialogue. Every time a character opens his or her mouth, one gets the impression that Empire Falls is peopled with greeting card writers. Thank goodness that the book ended on as powerful a note as it began. If one can overlook the writing and focus on the content, Empire Falls is a real delight.

Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye

I was supposed to have read this in college. Better late than never. Although the book is wonderfully epigrammatic and powerfully vivd, I can't help but agree with Morrison's own criticism of it. It doesn't quite work the way she wanted it to, she writes in the Afterword. The broken structure doesn't come create the effect she intended, and the theme is just short of consistent. Still, I don't regret reading it for an instant, and would do so again, which is a rare compliment.

Genesis

I am astonished at all that I failed to recognize when reading this as a fundamentalist. These men are nasty, greedy, vindictive, lustful liars. Whose idea was it to emulate them? This said with the exception of Joseph, whose powers of divination would have gotten him excommunicated in the church where I grew up.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: English Idyls and Other Poems

I could go on at length about the rich variety of love about which Tennyson writes, or about the sincerity of his passion, or the seeming ease with which he writes in the voice of characters wildly different in background, occupation and gender from hhis own. But it would be exhausting. If anything, I lke Tennyson too much. When I teach poetry to my students next semester, I anticipate that he will appear in the curriculum more often than is probably wise.

I will offer this obscure excerpt, appropriate as it is to the current political climate:

That these two parties still divide the world--
Of those that want, and those that have; and still
The same old sore breaks out from age to age
With much the same result.
(Walking to the Mail)

And this one, to which I personally relate:
Let this avail, just, dreaful, mighty God,
This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,
Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,
In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,
In coughs and aches, stiches, ulcerous throes and cramps,
A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud
Patient on this tall pillar I have borne.
(Saint Simeon Stylites)

BTD: 63. At least I've read more than a book a week. Don't judge me.