May is my Reading Month

After a long school year, I usually spend May reading. It helps to move out of all of the details and dialogue (some of it in my head!) of teaching. I often have to read to choose books for the fall semester, but I also try to "get away" through fiction.

This May I have read two novels. An adolescent novel, A Northern Light, was recommended to me by my son's friend, Sarah. http://www.jenniferdonnelly.com/jd_books.htm I enjoyed hearing the perspective of a farm girl from the 1908. Another story about a farm girl is the horizontal world: growing up in the middle of nowhere by Debra Marquart. I love how she weaves together her own autobiography about growing up in North Dakota, her experiences in multiple rock and punk bands across the West, and her explanations about local geology and geography. Here is a snippet I love:

"How strange it seems to me now, an adult woman so far from that life on the farm, that the struggle I face each day when I approach my writing desk--to bring to language the stories pushing up beneath my feet--feels so much like the hard labor of unearthing those half-exposed rocks in my father's fields. And no matter how fiercely I struggled to evade my fate as a farmer's wife, becoming a writer instead, how strange it is to realize that writing, the act of arranging language in neat horizontal furrows, is a great deal like farming."

I hope you have a chance to find rich stories to read this summer and have the time to relish them.