i know we chose something of a toughie for february. children of the alley isn’t exactly a saturday afternoon breeze. and, fact is, our amazing guest host who is a professor of arabic language and literature, is not only swamped with his teaching load this semester and his task of planning a study abroad program to jordan this summer, he has recently contracted the flu. i think this, combined with the fact that none of us has finished the book (no, not even me), means that we’re up for a switcheroo.
i motion, book trail, that we put children of the alley on the shelf and come back to it in late summer or fall when our fearless guest host can point out its brilliant amazingness to us as we read (he meant to do that this time around) and read something else for february.
so, what is everybody reading anyway? suggestions for a last minute book?
[i'm reading jonathon strange and mr norrell and i LOVE it. but i doubt i could finish by next week. it's the kind of book that makes henry cry inconsolably when he drops it on his toe. we're talking 800 heavy pages.]
O, good, I am not the only one. I am not yet reading ‘March’ by Geraldine Brooks, but will be sometime tomorrow after story time at the local library. I enjoyed her first novel, ‘Year of Wonders,’ but know very little about ‘March’ other then it was recommended to me by a friend.
ps- write your 100 list. I want to read it. see my blog
I’m sorry this book didn’t turn out well. I’m curious to know how much you got through. What made it so ‘difficult’ to read?
Just curious . . .
Can we do something, short, light, and just fun? A blah month like Feb. deserves something like that. (I admit, I didn’t even start the other book–this month was just too crazy for it)
spinny, i have to say that i am about 150 pages in and it’s fascinating. but thick and depressing. (whoo.) i’m glad the bible doesn’t have a lot of detail–i would probably throw myself off a balconey.
so everyone, any suggestions for something short and light and fun? we only have a week… should we can it and just head toward march?
[or we could all read "march" with sarajane...]
How about just a short story, or a children’s story if we only have a week? I actually have a story that I love that’s both–it’s short and it’s a children’s story. It’s called “Small Country” by Nick Hornby. After I heard the author read his story on NPR, I was dying of laughter. It can be found in a collection of children’s short stories called: “Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things . . .: That Aren’t as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, … Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out” I know that’s a long title, but I bought the book just for this little children’s story. So you could read it there or just listen to This American Life “295:Not What I Signed Up For” and hear the author read it himself (I love podcasts!) I think this should get you there:
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=295
Anyway, that’s just one suggestion for something that’s easy, would take less than an hour, and make you laugh. Listen to it sometime even if we don’t talk about it online!
I’m all for Nick Hornby–he’s one of my favorite authors. Another quick cool one that also has something by Nick Hornby is Click! It’s a pretty interesting book–it’s written by 10 authors, all well-known, award winning type writers, and it follows the story of a girl and her brother and the gifts that their photojournalist grandfather left them. (I also heard about it on NPR, actually. You can listen to their report about it here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14869506)