Sunday, January 29, 2017

ready for book club


I finished The Boys in the Boat today. I copied  many parts into my journal; now the book goes back to the library. I have the audio too. Ed Hermann who played Richard Gilmore in The Gilmore Girls reads it. I am only listening to parts just to hear him read. i loved how he loved his granddaughter Rory.  I loved the beginning of this audio book and the Prologue. 
You can listen : 



Wednesday, January 18, 2017

hello



I am back to teaching and reading and excited a granddaughter will be here in a month if she arrives on time. Maybe she will want to see the world and come early?  I  thought that with my first being born on Christmas Eve. He was due in January and came early.  He didn't want to miss Christmas! Maybe she will come Valentine's Day?! We shall see. Here are a few books I am reading:


for Book Club




Going to be teaching Frankenstein in Feb. so reading  this wonderful biography by a favorite author, an author we collect:   






I recently finished Walter Wangerin's new book on writing:




Teaching Langston Hughes to middle school age kids and it is my first time reading his work. 



They are memorizing the title poem:

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamer,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world. 





Sunday, January 1, 2017




NEW YEAR'S DAY
by Billy Collins

Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—

a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
that is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,
this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
I admit to regarding my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence
probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.
And as an only child--
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a colorful room this morning--
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
And one more birthday might be a consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X in a square
on some kitchen calendar of the future,
the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,
party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.
.
.
. from the book, "Ballistics," © Random House 2008