Monthly Archives: July, 2008
Business or Pleasure?
Still in that pleasure-reading drought, because I have been trying to plow through more lesson/course planning for my English courses this year. I’ve been plugging away almost all day today, reading a variety of poems and short stories and trying to figure out which will be the best to teach, and then making sure I …
Checking It Twice
While I certainly had quite a streak going, I’ve had to slow down my reading pace in order to focus on some essential teaching prep work for this fall. So today, I chose three new books for my fall class, and did some thinking and planning work for teaching composition and grammar fundamentals to my …
Laureate
Kay Ryan was recently named the new U.S. poet laureate, and while I’m not familiar with her work, the more I read about her, the more I like her. Her essay about going to an AWP conference is hilarious, candid and sincere, and she seems like a great role model for people who see themselves …
Tidbits
Summer reading progress: finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, am working my way through The Uses of Enchantment (the novel, not the Bettelheim classic) by Heidi Julavits. Never Let Me Go was a disquieting experience in that it deals with a subject (cloning) that often gets treated with dystopian pessimism or social-problem earnestness, …
Bookwormin’ Once Again
People are often surprised when I talk about the amount of reading I do, even in times of great business like my life has been lately, as we renovate our kitchen, help my sister move, and juggle various amounts of financial paperwork. But for me, times of great stress and frenzy have always been the …
Summer Reading
So far I’m doing well with my summer reading list, aided and abetted by my recent decision to try library-going again. I finished the anthology of love stories I blogged about recently, the newest Stephen King (thanks to jury duty), and am still absorbing a great new book of poetry by Mary Jo Salter. I …
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