By Choice or by Chance

Greetings, fellow readers! I'm taking advantage of the long weekend to post an update on the shelf life here at school. Since the semester started, my answer to "What have you been reading lately?" has been "My Chemistry textbook!" more often than not, but it's not exactly the most scintillating of reads. My answer did, however, make me think about the books I've been reading lately: which ones have been required reading, and which have been for fun. I decided to divide them into two categories, Books by Choice and Books by Chance, so here they are:

Books by Choice:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This one made the rounds of my group of friends last weekend; we passed it back and forth during a car trip to St. Augustine. This chilling femenist short story is remeniscent of Edgar Allan Poe in its horrifying style yet closer to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale it its treatment of women's imprisonment. Great for provoking discussion!

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I've been meaning to read this one for a while, and one of my friends here finally convinced me to start. That being said, I haven't gotten very far into it, but I like it so far.

Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman. This was one of my favorite books in middle school, all about a girl growing up in the middle ages and trying to resist her family's attempts to marry her off. I picked it up again this morning and found myself smiling as I remembered what it was like to read it for the first time.

The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds by Alexander McCall Smith. The latest installment in the Isabel Dalhousie series proved just as delightful and comforting as its predecessors. I finished this one during the first week of school, and Mc Call Smith's gentle and thought-provoking writing provided me with a welcome antidote to long hours of studying in the library.

Books by Chance:

Chemistry and Physics textbooks are both self-explanatory and not very exciting to talk about, so I'll gloss over those and to straight into

Selected Poems and Four Plays by William Butler Yeats, ed. M. L. Rosenthal. The first of nine poets we're studying in my 20th Century British Poetry class, Yeats also happens to be one of my favorites. His lyricism and sense of rhythm are like music to my ears, and we even listened to some musical adaptations of Yeats in class: proof that art begets art.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I've been reading these for a class on Science and Literature. The structure of this class is unique in that we're reading scientific texts in conjunction with (instead of opposed to or isolated from) great literary works of the 20th century. This approach has yielded many fruitful readings for me, especially of my favorite peom, T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which we discussed in class last week. More on our discussions in a later post.

And now for the Les Mis update: I ordered my copy through Amazon, but unfortunately, the seller had not refreshed their stock listings, and so the order didn't actually go through. I'm going to try again this weekend, as we are now halfway through January, and I still haven't started on my New Year's resolution book.

One final note before I go: one of the used bookstores on campus went out of business this week, and they had a sale of all their stock. Everything was marked down to as little as ten cents a book, and I got ten books and a record for $2.76. Among the titles were The Unnatural History of the Nanny, The Mennonites Among Us, and an advance reading copy of Bliss, which is about a family who lives in a magical bakery. I'm very much looking forward to starting them and sharing my thoughts with you.

Until next time,

Anna

Once upon a time . . .

Once upon a time, there was a girl who never made New Year's resolutions . . . until now. Welcome! I'm Anna, and this year, I've resolved to start writing a blog. Finally! It's something I've wanted to do for years. I'm calling it Shelf Life because I spend most of my time prowling bookshelves, hunting for good, satisfying stories. This blog, like my own bookshelves, will address diverse, eclectic topics and hopefully lead you to discover some new favorite books of your own.

Now it's time for the all-important question: what have I been reading lately? As a busy college student, I haven't had a lot of time for "fun" reading (as opposed to required reading, which can be fun in its own way, but that's a post for another time.) However, I have had a lot of time to read over the Christmas break.

I began with revisiting some of my high school favorites (Piper Bank's Geek series; Ann Brashares's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), progressed to Kathryn Lasky's Wolves of the Beyond series, and finished vacation off with Charles Finch's A Death in the Small Hours, the latest installment in his Charles Lenox mystery series set in Victorian England. It's one of my favorites, and you'll hear all about it in time.

Thanks to my generous friends and family, I was able to conduct a successful post-Christmas raid on our local Barnes and Noble and came away loaded with enough steampunk fiction and science books to last me through March. Between those and the books I received as gifts and loans, I'm booked until Easter at least!

As far as I'm concerned, though, The Book of 2013 is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. You see, it's a most unusual year in that I made not one, but two New Year's resolutions: one is to write this blog, the other to read Les Miserables. As a singer, I'm in love with the musical--I've seen it live and went to the recent movie adaptation with my family on Christmas Day--but I've never read the book, so I decided that this is The Year to read The Book. I'll keep you updated on my progress, once I get ahold of a copy of The Book, that is!

Until next time,
Anna