Thursday, May 12, 2011

The Road to March

So I am reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy now (which is PP Book #5). It's a pretty bleak read, but I'm just so damned grateful for its simplicity and the absence of Spanglish, comic books, and footnotes, that it's already got a leg up on Oscar Wao.

Looking ahead, the next winner is March by Geraldine Brooks. I picked it up at the library yesterday, as I will probably finish The Road pretty quickly. However, I just read the jacket flap and realized that the gaps I've found in my literary canon seem to extend to my reading of children's classics as well. March is based on the father character in Little Women, which -- you guessed it -- I have never read. I have also never read Tolkien (maybe it would have helped with Oscar Wao), anything set in Narnia, The Phantom Toolbooth (at least not in its entirety), or The Secret Garden. So anyway...before March, I think I need to pick up a copy of Little Women. Maybe the girls will want to read it with me.

I also think I'm going to give myself a break every 5 or 10 years worth of PP Books to read something just for pure pleasure. What I'm most looking forward to right now is Don't Breathe a Word by fellow Vermonter, Jennifer MacMahon. There's another book called In Zanesville whose cover captivated me. (I'm a sucker for a good cover -- which is another reason why e-books have been a good thing for me -- no pretty packages to woo me.)

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