It was really hard for me to turn off my teacher brain while reading Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer. The book’s intended audience is middle-grade readers, and while I think the me of that age would have been delighted with this book (it would have appealed to my snootiest, inner-art-snob instincts), 33-year-old me had a hard time getting into it. I kept looking at it from a “Would I want to teach this?” perspective, rather than from “Am I enjoying reading this?” I don’t know that […]
Steal this book.
The Book Thief reminded me of long-lost, beloved books from my childhood. If you need any more of a recommendation than that, you are obviously not my people, but I will continue. We meet Liesel (the titular character) through the eyes of a personified Death, who follows her escapades closely through its own routine of retrieving the souls of the recently deceased (of which there are many, as Liesel is living in Germany during the Third Reich). First of all, I love it when an author […]
Here, Have a Black Spot.
When I first read Treasure Island, I was living in Georgia’s low country, an area embroiled in pirate history (in fact, the Benbow Inn is rumored to have been modeled on Savannah’s Pirate House). I like my reading to provide a little bit of local color. Anyway, perhaps it was my own location that made it easy to fall into Stevenson’s world. I can understand how Jim Hawkins might feel every time his little world is intruded upon by a pirate, those dual senses of […]
Scandalous!
I don’t remember how I discovered Anne Helen Petersen’s Scandals of Classic Hollywood series over on the Hairpin. But I do remember devouring the latest entries during downtime at my job as a secretary. Petersen let contemporary fans like myself experience the restrictive glamour of stars under the old studio system. She did it with a clever, confidential voice that benefitted from hindsight, and I found the results fascinating. Her blog was a weekly read. The book is more of the same, which feels familiar […]