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The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories        |        Nella Larsen

I came upon this book as a gift from a fellow teacher at my school.  Before the school year started, I asked her what our students were reading this year and she told me about the book Passing by Nella Larsen.  As she described it to me, I was intrigued and asked if she had an extra copy once the kids arrive, could I borrow it.  She immediately said she had a copy of all Larsen’s fiction that she found in her room when she arrived this year and that I could keep it!  What a gift!

I wanted to read Passing partly because I found it interesting and partly because I strive always to better understand my students.  Reading the same literature as them and being able to discuss it with them and hear their perspective is one way I can try to gain a deeper understanding of who my students are.  I surely accomplished this, but also found so much more in Larsen’s texts than I could have imagined.

One thing I love about older novels and also short stories in general is how they do not feel the need to wrap everything up in a pretty little bow for you at the end.  I found this true when I read The Red Pony and I found it true of Larsen’s literature as well.  Quicksand doesn’t have a conclusion.  You are kept wondering.  There is no resolution.  There is no reassurance to the reader either way-that Helga is successful or isn’t...although I could take a guess.  The same rang true at the end of Passing.   Nella Larsen’s stories are a like peering into a window and watching someone’s life happen for a short moment of time.  Sanctuary is positively chilling in its slow reveal, then sudden end.  And like the others, a story is told, but it is just one piece of a whole life.  We can only speculate about what came before and what comes after.

 I’ll end with a quote from the front of the book.  This quote completely echoed how I felt as I read each story...

Me Before You       |       by JoJo Moyes

I didn’t know if I would like this book.  The word “affair” in one reviewer’s brief commentary on it, made me feel like I would not find it the most engaging story.  “Affairs”, per se, are not usually my go-to reading material; not stories I find particularly enjoyable or interesting.  However, it was recommended by a friend, whom I respect a great deal, so I thought I’d give it a try.  I am glad I did.

I had to pause when I reached the end.  Partially because I was crying and partially because I wanted it to keep going.  There was an expert from another of Moyes’ books at the end, which I knew about, but all the same I wanted the story to keep going!

Me Before You challenges the way we see life.  It challenges the idea of who gets to decide when a person lives or dies.  I don’t know how much I can say without giving too much away to those who might like to pick this book up for themselves.

Etta and Otto and Russel and James      |      by Emma Hooper

Words cannot describe how beautiful I found this book to be.  Even my tears as I read the last pages cannot tell you how touching I found this story.  I finished this book a couple months ago and I still think about it often.  It sticks with you. 

This is Emma Hooper’s debut novel and it is brilliant.  Some people praise her prose and her lack of quotation marks.  I love her prose, because it is simple and straightforward, yet has so much hidden beneath, much like her characters.  The lack of quotation marks...I am still deciding how I feel about that.  On one hand, it makes the pages looks less cluttered.  It makes you feel like you are peering in through a window and watching someone’s life happen, rather than reading about it.  On the other hand, quotation marks exist for a reason.

But THAT is not the main thing I want to discuss here about Etta and Otto and Russel and James.  I want to discuss every minutia of these characters lives.  I want to discuss their feelings and how that guided their life choices and did they ever talk to each other about this event or did it just sit there, brewing between them?  I want to talk about the details I missed and know every little thing that brought them from point A to point Z in their life.

I love Hooper’s juxtaposition of the past with the present.  I love the perspective it gives you.  I love the way you can juuuust a little bit see how one moment is shaping the characters’ choices fifty or sixty years later.  Or not.

Hooper simply lays the story out there with no manipulation telling you that you are supposed to feel one way or another.  You are an onlooker.  Free to form your own opinions or to simply observe.  She doesn’t take sides or ask the reader to do so either, she weaves a story full of depth and a long-lived life.

This book is simultaneously healing and heartbreaking.  It chills you to the bone with the reality of war at the same time it warms you with stories of love, understanding, and sacrifice.  It makes you question how we respond to those who hurt us while at the same time deepens your understanding of what it means to love someone beyond the romantic notion of the word.  It quiets you with the truths of Alzheimer's and old age, while it makes you shout for joy at the fullness of a life well lived to the very last breath.

Nineteen Minutes     |      by Jodi Picoult

This book is my first BINGO!  The school year has begun, so I know it will go much slower from this point on, but I hope to continue my BINGO game throughout the school year.

Nineteen Minutes takes you through the unique perspective of so many different characters that it could easily get confusing, but Jodi Picoult does it seamlessly.  Each perspective tells you more about each character’s feelings and motivations in unique and different ways.  Picoult has a way of spinning her web of stories in a way that has no bias.  For each character, from the killer to the hero, you can find something you love, something with which you sympathize, and something you hate.  I love a quote from People on the back of the book, that the author “dares to remind us that someone loved the killer, too”.

The Knife of Never Letting Go     |     by Patrick Ness

I really liked the concept behind this book and the way that it was executed.  Todd lives in a world where you can hear everyone’s thoughts...but in a more realistic way than you might imagine.  People can kind of control what you hear, and thus the thoughts you see and hear from others may not be the truth, but rather what they want to the be the truth, what they want you to believe is the truth, or even what they have convinced themselves over the years is the truth.

This is a young adult book, which like many young adult books, deals with many very adult themes.  It is a very real reminder that history is written by the victor.  That if we always believe what we hear, we may not ever know the truth.  That when we are constantly hearing everyone thoughts on everything (read: social media) it may be hard to decipher the truth.  And also...there are many version of the truth, are there not?  The image below comes to mind...

This book makes you question just a little bit who is right and who is wrong.  It is a reminder that we each live a different reality.  Sometimes what we are used to seems “right”, but there are many other ways to go about it.

Besides all that, this book is just plain well written and enjoyable to read.  I place it under the “mystery” category because although it is not the typical mystery genre, it certainly felt like Todd was uncovering the mystery of his world’s heritage as he went, picking up little clues here and there along the way and I was right there beside him trying to figure it out and put the pieces together.  I don’t know if it was favorite book that I have read this summer, but I will tell you three things: (1) Especially towards the end, I couldn’t put it down.  I couldn’t find a good stopping place.  (2) I will most certainly be reading the sequel.  (3) I cried.

So, I definitely recommend this book.  And I’ll leave you with one more image, because, much like another book from my summer reading list two summers ago, there is a lot of great fan art for The Knife of Never Letting Go.  And because Manchee is my favorite.

Every Day     |     by David Levithan

The concept behind this book is what intrigued me and it far exceeded my expectations.  Every day the character, A, wakes up in a new body.  I loved this book.  It teaches about life, about perspective, about the battles that we each fight..each different but not lesser than the next.  It teaches about love and the cost of truly loving someone and the price you will pay to love them.  

Every Day is so beautifully written and says so much about life in general that I found myself writing down quotes that I liked as I read.  I could go on, but instead, I’ll let the quotes I jotted down speak for themselves (along with some of my own photography that I think might accompany them nicely):

“If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: We all want everything to be okay. We don't even wish so much for a fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.”

“Simple and complicated, as most true things are.”

“Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”

“People take love's continuity for granted. . . “

“ . . .religions have much, much more in common than they like to admit. The beliefs are almost always the same; it's just that the histories are different. Everybody wants to believe in a higher power. Everybody wants to belong to something bigger than themselves, and everybody wants company in doing that. They want there to be a force of good on earth, and they want an incentive to be a part of that force. They want to be able to prove their belief and their belonging, through rituals and devotion. They want to touch the enormity.   It's only in the finer points that it gets complicated and contentious, The inability to realize that no matter what our religion or gender or race or geographic background, we all have about 98% in common with each other. Yes, the differences between male and female are biological, but if you look at the biology as a matter of percentage, there aren't a whole lot of things that are different. Races differ purely as a social construction, not as an inherent difference. And religion--whether you believe in God or Yahweh or Allah or something else, odds are that at heart you want the same things. For whatever reason, we like to focus on the 2% that's different, and most of the conflict in the world comes from that.”

Summer Knight     |     by Jim Butcher

I’m not what makes something “at the bottom of my to read pile”, but I have had this one for a while and have not gotten the change to read it, so that’s the category I picked.  I certainly have not been avoiding it, but I have several other “Dresdon Files” books by Butcher on my bookshelf that I have read, so most likely I just kept over looking it.

Maybe it was obvious from my last sentence, but I really enjoy Butcher’s series about Harry Dresden, a modern day wizard living in Chicago.  I love all the quirky things he puts in, like how technology doesn’t work well around wizards, and how faeries like pizza (they eat pizza ALL the time in these books, I always crave pizza when I read them), although I sometime feel like Harry is borderline chauvinistic.

That aside, I think that Summer Knight is my favorite of the books I’ve read in Butcher’s series (I’ve read 4 or 5).  Maybe that’s just because it is most fresh in my mind, but I really enjoyed the uniqueness of this particular conflict and I found the lessons to be learned were quite poignant.  Along with being fun (and fairly quick) to read, Summer Knight speaks a lot about friendship and camaraderie, balance and control, forgiveness and the weight of the past.

The Cinderella Murder     |     by Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke

My sister and I listened to The Cinderella Murder on our drive to Canada a few weeks ago.  I’m not sure I can find a nice way to describe how I feel about it, but let me try.

The idea behind this book is good.  It’s not extraordinary, it’s not fantastically unique, but it is good.  It is an entertaining plot line, which is fine.  But the execution left something to be desired.  That said, we listened to the whole things, because we (or at least I, sorry Sara) wanted to know what happened!

Clark & Burke are endlessly wordy and overly dramatic in their descriptions.  They introduce too many characters with too many different stories, some of which have nothing to do with the overall plot of the book, that I had trouble seriously caring about any of them.  For example, there is an entire chapter about a reporter who hears and gunshot and is thrilled that she can report it to her boss and hopefully be given the story to write about....then she is never mentioned again, nor was she ever mentioned before that point.

I was seriously disappointed in this book, but I must say I was entertained...  Mostly I was entertained by my sister as we paused the CD to laugh about something ridiculous or question was was going on or point our another cheesy song reference or mimic the strange way “God” was pronounced.

I am the Messenger    |    by Markus Zusak

This book is, at many points, written like a poem.  I hung on every word, from the beautifully honest way that Ed [protagonist] communicates with the Doorman to the sincere connections and friendships he forms with complete strangers.

Ed’s life is quickly turned upside down and yet gains meaning all at once.  This is likely a feeling many of us can relate to in some way or another.  It is a lesson on life and purpose and how we treat those we encounter, even briefly, in the mundane of our everyday lives.  It is a demonstration of how a seemingly small action can have big consequences.  It shouts the truth that sometimes those whom we think we understand, have something deeper hidden from the world.

When Ed reached the last two suits (you must read to understand), I could hardly put this book down.  And although I was not completely satisfied with the ending, I loved I am the Messenger and I highly recommend it to anyone.

The Book of Lost Things    |    by John Connolly

The entire book is excellent!  I laughed, I cried.  I was frightened, I was touched.  It is beautifully written; Connolly is a poet.  

As you read, the complexity of the stories that seem vaguely familiar, yet pleasantly new, draws you in completely and makes this book a true joy to read from cover to cover.  But the end....oh the end!  You must read it yourself in order to understand the intricacies and depth.

When I had just a few chapters left and I was at the office with Nick, keeping him company as he did some overtime, I was gushing about how wonderful it was and I read him a paragraph that I found especially intriguing.  This led to me summarizing the story thus far, which led to me reading the ending aloud to him as he worked.  

The Red Pony    |    by John Steinbeck

Although not sure what I was expecting, this was different from my expectations.  I struggled to find what might be considered a “forgotten” classic, but decided upon this one, because I found it laying around my parents’ house and I had never read it before.

Truly, this is John Steinbeck.  You can hear his voice clearly.  I was at first put off by how the four chapters each seemed like a completely different story, but grew to love it, as that is often how life seems, isn’t it?  Sort of with separate parts and yet they are all connected and lived by one person.  How one part of life affects the next, even if it is in a subtle and unspoken way.

Black City Makers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America   |   By Marcus Anthony Hunter

I originally picked up this book last summer after it was recommended to those of us working with Philadelphia students by Dr. Camika Royal.  It was hard to find a copy of, but I hunted one down on amazon...and then it lay mostly unread until this summer when I dove back into it.  

I bought it in order to better understand the history of the culture of which the kids I teach each day are a part.  Working in Jackson, MS and now Philadelphia, PA, my students are very different.  Racism affects my Philadelphia babies as strongly, but in such different ways.

This book was eye-opening and certainly opened a window through which I can begin to try understanding my students’ lives a little bit better.  Knowing the history from which our children come and which has shaped their own culture is important for educators.

This book is especially important to consider in today’s racial climate.  It demonstrates that Philadelphia did not just “happen” around its black citizens.  It did not exist without their significant influence and contribution.  Black citizens of Philadelphia have played, and continue to play, an important and integral role in the development of the city and its culture.

Although as I write this, I am well into, and nearly finished with, summer, I wanted to share some insight on the amazing (and less amazing) books I am reading this summer.

Just before summer, I found this Reading Bingo on Pinterest.  I decided that this would be a fun way to challenge myself to read as much as possible this summer.  Last summer, I worked at TFA’s Summer Institute in Philadelphia and the 80+ hour work weeks didn’t leave a lot of time for reading.  So this summer, I wanted to READ.

I’ve been trying to choose books I want to read and figure out which bingo space they fit into rather than choosing my books based on what the bingo board requires.  It has been fun.  It has been rewarding.  It has forced me to finally get a New Jersey driver’s licence, so I could get a library card.

"I see glass doorknobs when I look at the stars

With my Two hands I reach out to open as many as I can"

A little while ago, I wrote a post about why I am a Reconciling United Methodist.  Currently, the Reconciling Ministries Network to which I belong is hosting a blog series called "Reasons I Stay," inviting United Methodists to share why they remain in the church despite its discriminatory and hypocritical practices of refusing to ordain LGBTQ minister, refusing to allow UM ministries to conduct LGBTQ marriage ceremonies, and refusing to remove discriminatory statements from the "Book of Discipline".

I have been asked by both friends and acquaintances about why I stay, rather than joining a denomination which is actually welcoming to all, unlike the United Methodist Church, whose statement of "Open Hearts, Open Doors, Open Minds" is so often not upheld.

I stay in the United Methodist Church, because I have experienced a Reconciling Congregation and it restored my faith in the Christian church.  I witnessed what a church can be when it truly opens its hearts, doors, and minds to everyone in the community.  The fellowship and love I found at FUMCOG in Philadelphia was incredible.  It reminded me of how proud I am to be a United Methodist, because right here was a United Methodist Church living out exactly what I had believed Christianity was about all along.

Not all churches in the United Methodist denomination are like that, which is an unfortunate reality.  But, having witnessed one that is, I know I must stay in the church.  Because if all of us who believe and know to be true that God truly does love and welcome all His/Her children created in His/Her image, leave the church, there would never be the change that needs to happen.

I stay because the United Methodist Church is broken is NEEDS people to advocate for it.  

I stay so that one day, I will not have to explain to people why I remain a United Methodist, but it will be evident simply in the fact that we both proclaim AND live out a message of "Open Heart, Open Doors, Open Minds".