What I'm reading this week (2/29/16)

Last week I finished:

Last week, I read Spark Joy, the follow-up to the popular The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. If you read the first book, you can skip this one. It offers nothing new on the subject of tidying.

I also finished The Selected Poems of Donald Hall. I don't know if all Selected volumes are selected by their author, but this one happened to be, and he did a good job collecting poems from the span of his work. My favorite are from his late-middle years. I think they're the strongest, most focused, and most interesting. That's the part of the book where I really sunk in and got engaged with the writing. In the essay at the end, Hall says that's his favorite era, too.

And I finished The House at Pooh Corner. I had a hard time wanting to pick this one up, I think because the characters, while unconsciously witty, aren't very kind to each other. There seemed to be a lot of tension for what we've come to think of as cuddly characters.

This week, I continue with:

 

I don't remember John Grogan's The Longest Trip Home being so full of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Having a grandson who's soon to come of age when drugs and peer pressure will be coming down on him hard, I no longer shake my head and say, "boys will be boys." I don't find the book endearing at all--if that's what I found it the first time I read it.

Last week, I began:

The House at Pooh Corner was the last of my February reading list, so I got to dig into my March list early. I'm beginning, as usual, with the longest book on this list (I was always the kid who did her homework right after school on Friday afternoon, so I could relax the rest of the weekend), Philomena. I really enjoyed the movie starring Dame Judi Dench, and I've wanted to read the book for months now. If you don't know the plot, it's a true story of a woman who is searching for her son who was born to her in a convent for unwed mothers and basically sold into adoption by the nuns there. This happened to countless Irish children and was quite the scandal in the middle part of the last century.

I also began one of my "out of my comfort zone" reads last week, Ms. Marvel: No Normal. This is my first comic, thought I've read a graphic novel or two. I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit. The main character is a Pakistani-American teen which makes it quite unique.