Currently reading...

I had an email from the county library (their online request service is the best!) and I apparently had six books waiting for me. I hate it when I get all the books I'm in queue for at the same time. I already had A Feast for Crows at home...I was finishing up A Clash of Kings. For some reason, it takes me a really long time to read those books...not so with others. I read Don't Breathe A Word in two days. I really liked that one.

So what am I reading now?
I have A Darcy Connection, which is the book I need to read to keep up with the Pride and Prejudice reading extravaganza.
Also sitting on the floor next to my bed: A Feast For Crows, Legend, Daring Greatly (by Brene Brown), and another, I can't remember the name and I'm too lazy to get up and go look. I have three weeks to read five books. I'm thinking that Legend and A Darcy Connection will be quick reads for me. The other two are going to require pondering. They're books made to be "chewed and digested" rather than "swallowed", to quote Sir Francis Bacon.

And, I am starting Frankenstein with my seniors this week, and that means I need to reread it in order to teach it. Shouldn't be too much of a problem seeing as how I've been teaching it since 2008. No worries there. I like how every time I read it, I see something different, or at least my perspective shifts, if that makes sense. I love to go back and read books that were on my reading lists in high school and college (undergrad anyway). It's always amazing to me how different a book is when you read it again ten years later. Life experience flavors your reading. Like when I read The Awakening by Kate Chopin for the third time (as a grad student); I understood Edna Pontellier much better than I had when I was in my early twenties. It's easier to understand her boredom with her life. It's too easy to get bogged down in the labels we put on ourselves. I recently had a chance to comment on Facebook about how what you want to be when you grow up is different from what you want to do. We should want to be good humans: thoughtful, kind, caring. What we do can change. That's reassuring somehow.