Lori Bourne

I Just Can't Stop Reading

I'm a reader. There's no way around it. I love (and live) to read. But lately I've been completely out of control with reading. It started at Christmas, when I got a couple of new books as presents. I enjoyed the books I got, so naturally I bought some other books by the same authors. Then we went to visit my in-laws, and my mother-in-law had some new books I hadn't read yet (we have similar taste in books).

Within a two week period, I read 15+ new books for a total of a many thousand pages. They included all of the Clare Fergusson/Russ van Alstyne mysteries by Julia Spencer-Fleming, which I loved and highly recommend. My mother-in-law had the first one, In the Bleak Midwinter, and I was delighted to find that there were four more in the series. They were all great! The next one is due out in June and I cannot wait!

I even reached the point where I started checking books out of the library to feed my book hunger. I know! I usually buy books, to the point of ordering from Barnes & Noble several times during the week and then going to the store on the weekend. It just got too expensive! Our local library is old and gloomy (they're planning to build a new one this next year), and yet they do have all the books I've been looking for.

I don't want to get too introspective about my love of reading, but I will say that I think I use it as an escape, and not always in a good way. I sometimes choose books over spending time with friends and family, or doing chores or projects that I know I need to do. At certain points, when it's really gone too far, I stop buying or checking out books so that I don't have anything new to read, which forces me to turn back to my other responsibilities.

You might wonder how I find time to read, what with homeschooling, running a business, blogging, and all the other stuff that goes along with life. It helps that I'm a super-fast reader, but also I do purposely make time for it - and I watch a lot less TV than the average person, which helps a lot. I really, really hope to pass on my love of reading to my kids. So far, things are looking good - they love to read and to have us read to them.

Yes, I Love Harry Potter

I've been reading this series since it started - my most vivid memory is reading one of the HP books while pregnant with my son, who's now almost 7. So that must have been one of the early ones. I remember reading it, lying in bed, watching his arms (legs?) zoom across my pregnant belly while I read.

Naturally, I had to have this new one right away, although I wasn't going to be out at midnight to get it (I know I would have stayed up all night reading it). I got it this morning and spent the whole day reading. It should have been subtitled, "Daddy, why is mommy locked in the bedroom for so long?" I came out to feed the kids and put them to bed, so it's not like they never saw me =)

I loved it - it wasn't perfect; I would have like more character development for some of the tertiary characters, but this was Harry's story, and 90% of it is focused on him or through his eyes. It wraps up the series nicely, and I'm not ashamed to say that I read the last three chapters with tears streaming down my cheeks.

Part of me is sad that the series is over, but I'm also glad to know how it ends - if JK had stretched it out even further, it would have become frustrating. It'll be interesting to see if she writes more books in the years to come - one of my high school English teachers used to say that some authors have only one story to tell, and once they've told it, they don't write anymore (Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird would be a great example of this).

I don't think my son is ready for the series yet (the first book was perfect for his age, but once you've read one, you'll want to read them all and they definitely get darker).  So we'll wait on that, but I am excited for him (and my daughter) to read them when they're older.

Blink, Or You'll Miss It

So, I've been bad. I set out to read Dickens' Bleak House, and being an extremely fast reader, thought it would only take me a week or so. But we've decided to move, so the past few weekends have seen me organizing, cleaning, and painting. No time to sit down and really get into the book.

I felt like I needed some motivation, so last night I went to Border's and bought Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It's one of those books I've been hearing about ever since it first came out, but for some reason I haven't gotten to it yet. The rule is, I can't start it until I finish Bleak House. That always works for me, so I should be finishing BH soon.

Onward to Jude the Obscure

So, I finished Great Expectations! I really did end up liking it. I do remember now that I read the first 1/4 in high school, and didn't enjoy it. Now I can see that that was for two reasons: first, because I do feel that it's a bit of a slow start; and second, because my English teacher gushed over the cleverness of the name "Miss Havisham" (have a sham) so nauseatingly that it turned me off to the story. I'm not a big fan of names that are so outrightly indicative of the character. I don't think it's necessary to the story. But on that point Dickens and I will have to agree to disagree.

But in spite of the overly symbolic names, Great Expectations was indeed a scathing look at British society, and an intriguing mystery to boot. I personally like the "happy" ending as opposed to the "unhappy" one (Dickens wrote the first ending when the story was serialized, but wrote the other one later when it was published as a book), but that's just me, and I can see how someone would disagree.

Now that I've finished it, I am off to the races with Jude...by Thomas Hardy. I can't wait; I think I'll start it tonight. Today I went to Barnes & Noble with my son and bought Bleak House and Oliver Twist (both by Dickens), so I shall have a Dickens festival after I finish Jude.

A Little Dickens

So, after Far from the Madding Crowd, I read the Mayor of Castorbridge, which I adored, and now I'm reading Great Expectations. I remember reading part of it in high school and hating it. Somehow I managed to write a book report about it without finishing it, but I've always felt like my literary education wasn't complete because I hadn't really read it.

Also, there's this one episode of The West Wing where C.J. asks Sam who his favorite writer is, and he says "Dickens". I always took that to mean that Aaron Sorkin (the writer/creator of The West Wing) loves Dickens too. Since Sorkin is a great writer (up until Studio 60) I figured that I probably hadn't given Great Expectations enough of a chance. [I should say parenthetically that The West Wing - seasons 1 through 4 - is my favorite TV show of all time. I could have another blog just about The West Wing!]

Anyway, I'm about 100 pages into it, and I must say I do like it. But I don't love it - it's a little cutesy. Has anyone ever called Dickens "cutesy" before? Probably not. It's a little twee, and not my favorite style of writing. I think that Pip (the main character) is supposed to be seen as young and innocent (even ignorant) of the world around him because of the way he's been raised, but he comes off as kind of dumb. But I have promised myself that I must finish it before I dive into Jude the Obscure, the last major novel by my now-favorite author Thomas Hardy.

(In between  pages 80 and 100 of Great Expectations, I read Freakonomics. Really cool book!)

More Book Stuff

I guess I could have called this "Lori's Books", because that seems to be what I'm going to talk about most. I can't help it - I just love books so much!

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned on my other blog that in junior high school, I had given away hundreds of books from my childhood to the local library. Really dumb, eh? I don't know what I was thinking!

Anyway, as I've grown older, I've realized that I really wish I had all those books. So I've set about buying up all the ones I can remember. Over the years I've bought almost every one of those childhood "classics".

Just the other day, my church put out all the books from the church library for people to take (no one was using it, so they're not going to have a church library anymore). Lo and behold, out on these tables were tons of books from my childhood, most of the published by Moody Press (now called Moody Publishers). Books like the "Felicia Cartwright" mysteries and ones by Patricia St. Johns. It was awesome! I was like a kid at a candy store - I really had to restrain myself.

Anyhow, I think now I can say that my childhood library is once again complete.

My Literary Renaissance

Like most people, I took English classes all through high school and college. But you know how it was - the teacher would hand out a list of 18th century authors/books and tell you to pick 2 and write papers on them. Whatever happened to all the other books on the list? I rarely chose to read them on my own. I love to read, but my tastes at that time ran more towards mysteries, science fiction, and contemporary fiction.

About a year and a half ago, I realized that there were holes in my reading education - important books that I had never read but should have. I decided to go ahead and buy them and read them. Within a few months, I read All Quiet on the Western Front, The Scarlet Letter, Tess of the D'urbervilles, The Sound and the Fury, and several others. Then, as quick as it had started, it was over. I returned to my usual diet of parenting/education books and contemporary fiction.

Recently, I decided to take up the classics again. I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo (which I adored), and am almost finished with Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (who also wrote Tess of the D'urbervilles). Far from the Madding Crowd is by far the superior book in terms of writing, but The Count... was a swashbuckling page-turner that I just couldn't put down. Anyway, I'm excited to have a Literary Re-Renaissance. I'll let you know what I pick up next!