bookshelves: currently-reading
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I particularly loved the last section of the book, "From the God of Windowscreens and Honeysuckle." A series of poems which begins with Summer and works its way through an entire year of weekly poems, all based on careful observation of the natural world. And I don't know if I'm slow to pick up on things, or if it's the way I read (from the middle out rather than linearly), or if the poems are just strong and subtle enough that their structure is not immediately obvious (a good sign), but I finally figured out that there are 52 poems--one for each week of the year. And each poem is a sonnet. Not strictly formal--no end rhymes or iambic pentameter here--but 14 lines each. And I loved the repetitions and variations that run through the poems: "this world is cursed with repetition, blessed with waste," boys and fathers. a strand of spiderweb. "The gods no longer speak to us, but they still sing." ]]>
bookshelves: to-read
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bookshelves: to-read
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bookshelves: to-read
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This was a tough one for me. I wanted to like this book, because Annie Dillard's An American Childhood is one of my favorite books. But I haven't read any of her fiction and, while I admire her vocabulary and use of language in The Maytrees, reading it was a chore. I found myself stopping every paragraph to either 1. look up a word in the dictionary (mesoglea, culch, thigmotropic, spicule, littoral, epistomeliac); or 2. Try to figure out what the heck was going on. The narrative is so fractured. Just when I was starting to like a character or get into a scene, the book jumps ahead 39 years.
Maybe I just need to go back and re-read it now that I have a general sense of the shape of the book. Because there are some great lines: "marriage 'a sort of friendship recognized by the police'" (quoting Robert Louis Stevenson); "he wanted to spend himself broke in the brain, to master something and start again"; "she lacked a woman's sense of doom. She did what she wanted"; and "He proposed Keat's question..."Who shall say between Man and Woman which is the more delighted? The woman...she added just as he was rolling asleep, If the man is John Keats." ]]>
bookshelves: to-read
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Angie Vorhies
took the never-ending book quiz.
| questions answered: | 13 |
| correct: | 11 (84.6%) |
| skipped: | 1 |
| best streak: | 6 |
| questions added: | 0 |