{Lindsay} 20-30

My latest reading spree was quite a success, and I have plenty more lined up that I wanna get through before school starts again. I'm hoping to get a little bit ahead in the next month, because I'm sure I'm going to be plenty busy between class and two jobs and won't have much free time for reading. Boooo!

Anyway, I started the latest batch with Jon Stewart's Naked Pictures of Famous People. I was expecting to really enjoy it, because I've always been amused by The Daily Show when I've watched it, and thought his stand-up was really great when I saw him a few years ago at the Bushnell. However, this book is kind of a snoozefest, and I was glad it was short and didn't take me long to get through. I honestly don't think I laughed once reading it.

Next was The End of Overeating by David Kessler. I borrowed it from my dad and thought it was pretty interesting. It goes into how food in the U.S. is developed and marketed to condition us crave more of it by using a lot of fat, sugar, and salt. He takes a psychological approach to the country's obesity problems, and focuses on the food industry as driving our psychological needs for unhealthy foods.

After that I ventured again toward some childhood favorites. First was Roald Dahl, with The Witches and Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory. I didn't actually read Charlie when I was younger, but Witches was always a favorite, and they both made for nice quick reads.

Next was a book called Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. I first read this book in college as part of a campus book-club type thing, but hadn't read it again until now. If you like language, this is a really fun book to check out. The premise of the book is as follows (courtesy of Amazon.com):

"Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet"

Next was The House With a Clock In Its Walls by John Bellairs, who was one of my favorite authors when I was younger. I also read The Figure In the Shadows and The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring, which are both sequels to House and follow the same characters. They're sort of gothic novels for kids, and involve magic and evil things that need conquering, but the characters and settings are set in reality. Hopefully I'll get to re-read the other Bellairs books I have soon.

I decided to venture back into the world of Shakespeare and see if I like it any better, so I decided to re-read "Romeo and Juliet," which I haven't looked at since 9th grade. It turns out old William's not so bad after all. I guess my brain just needed a reeeeeeally long time to get comfortable with the language, though I think "R&J" is one of his easier plays (thus it being taught in high school, even though in high school I really didn't get it). Still, I haven't really appreciated him until now, despite taking a whole class on him in college. I will definitely be reading more of his plays soon. Good thing I have a giant anthology of everything he ever wrote.

My decision to read more Shakespeare stemmed from my reading The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle, which I picked up on a whim while I was at Borders one day. I got the "Borders Classics" edition, so it's a nice hardcover with faux-gilted page edges and one of those attached fabric bookmark things (unfortunately I couldn't find an image of it). It was originally published in 1883, but Pyle, and American author who also illustrated the book, used late medieval/really early modern English to write the book. It's not quite as tricky as the language Shakespeare used, but it definitely requires some slow reading.

Finally, just today I finished reading Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I wanted to read it because I had heard it mentioned in a couple of my more linguistic-y classes in my grad program and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I had a hard time getting through it, but I can't figure out why. It's definitely more of an academic-oriented book, but the language of the book itself isn't that difficult to weed through, nor are the concepts. I think it just has so much packed in that I had a hard time figuring out what the point of it was or really remembering anything from it for a significant amount of time. I'm sure if I read it one or two more times, I would be able to appreciate it more, or read it for a class and have discussions about it. It really just talks about ALL language as being very metaphorical, as opposed to just literary or poetic language, and it gives a ton of examples and breaks things down into categories of different types of metaphors. I guess I got the book in hopes that I could incorporate it into my teaching someday/how, but after reading it once, I'm not so sure. Oh well.

I'm not too sure what I'll be reading next, but I still have quite a stack of things to keep me goin for the rest of the year!