Category Archives: Favorite authors

Tuck Everlasting

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In mindfulness practice, we are guided to return to our “center” when our mind wanders. That center can be the breath, or a sound to focus on, but something that will draw the mind back to the practice, to the focus of the moment. Reading children’s books does something similar for me. It centers me, and reminds me of my deep love of reading…and reminds me of who I am deep inside.

Revisiting the beautiful story, Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt, was a gift I gave myself at the beginning of this August. This last year has been such a profound one for me, full of losses, and, in all honesty, at times I have felt that I’ve lost myself. Reading brings me back to my center. And this story especially, about life and death and the idea of living forever, was a reminder of just how precious life is…and that “Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short,” she said calmly. “You got to take what comes. We just go along, like everybody else, one day at a time.” 

From the Publisher:

Doomed to – or blessed with – eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, the Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year-old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks take her home and explain why living forever at one age is less a blessing that it might seem. Complications arise when Winnie is followed by a stranger who wants to market the spring water for a fortune.

Favorite Quotes:

“Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.”

“Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.”

“I don’t want to die.”
“No,” said Tuck calmly. “Not now. Your time’s not now. But dying’s part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can’t pick the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing. But it’s passing us by us Tucks. Living’s heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it’s ‘useless, too. It doesn’t make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I’d do it in a minute. You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.”

I loved rereading this book at this stage of my life. Through the lens of age and grief, I deeply appreciated the honesty given the ideas, and the beauty of the language expressing them. It truly is a timeless classic, and a timeless gift from the author, Natalie Babbitt,

The First Week of August

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One of my all-time favorite books is Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting. And the first paragraph in that book absolutely captures, perfectly describes, the first week of August!

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.

Don’t you agree?

Happy Father’s Day, Atticus Finch

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Byron
My Dad
Atticus Finch

This will be the first Father’s Day without Byron, who was a wonderful loving father and grandpa. He is deeply missed. But, his humor and his sense of fun remain with us, so there will be laughter and many smiles as the family remembers and celebrates him.

It will also be the 29th Father’s Day without my own Dad. It’s hard to believe that he’s been gone that long. He’s still so present in my everyday life! His humor, too, remains with us, and his timeless wisdom still guides us each day.

In anticipation of this Father’s Day, I asked myself who is my favorite literary father. Atticus Finch, from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, immediately popped into my mind. I wrote about him in a post from June 2007, when I finished listening to the audiobook version of the book, narrated by Sissy Spacek (now my all-time favorite audiobook!).

” I was captured by his intelligence and integrity, his compassion and humanity, and his complete and unconditional love for his children. He reminded me of my own father in many ways, and he must have helped set a standard for the husband I would meet and marry years later…”

I wonder…who is your favorite literary father?

A Chapter a Day

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Reading a chapter a day is an interesting experience. I usually don’t restrict my reading in any way. Most of the time, I just enjoy getting caught up in my book and keep on reading. This George Eliot Readalong this year is a different kind of challenge for me. I am, so far, only reading one chapter a day of our current book: Adam Bede. What I find so interesting is that I read the chapter first thing in the morning, and then I find myself thinking about it during different times of the day. I’m thinking about what happened in that chapter, about what the author wanted to do with it, about the characters introduced or some new action initiated. I ruminate a lot about one chapter. I like that!

2023 With George Eliot

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It’s been many years since I read any of George Eliot’s books, but I remember how much I liked  them. Especially The Mill on the Floss, which I particularly loved when I read it in high school! So when I learned that Nick Senger was going to do his “2023 Chapter-a-Day Read-Along” with a year of reading six of George Eliot’s novels, I couldn’t resist. I can read a chapter a day for a year! So that’s my plan! Click here to read about how this fun challenge works. Maybe you would like to join us?

The Six Books We Will Be Reading:

  1. Adam Bede: January 1 to February 24 – Kindle – Gutenberg – Librivox
  2. The Mill on the Floss: February 25 to April 23 – Kindle – Gutenberg – Librivox
  3. Silas Marner: April 24 to May 14 – Kindle – Gutenberg – Librivox
  4. Romola: May 15 to July 26 – Kindle – Gutenberg – Librivox
  5. Middlemarch: July 27 to October 22 – Kindle – Gutenberg – Librivox
  6. Daniel Deronda: October 23 to December 31 – Kindle – Gutenberg – Librivox

2023 Reading Journeys

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Journey…

My Decembers are always filled with enjoyable planning for my next year’s reading journeys. This December is no exception. I’m always so tempted by the many creative reading challenges that are presented to us in November and December, and I get excited and motivated to do much more reading than is humanly possible in one year. But that’s okay. I enjoy the planning and the dreaming and the camraderie of all those readers involved in these challenges. So I plan away.

In 2023, I’m planning on participating in most of my favorites: Adam’s TBR Pile Challenge; Meredith’s Japanese Literature challenge; my yearly Goodreads goal; the Classics Club; and my many personal reading projects. I’m also going to join a challenge that is set up to be a year of reading six of George Eliot’s novels, one chapter at a time! In the next few days, I’ll post about each one of these challenges.

Getting back to my reading is a real comfort right now, and I return to it with new perspective and appreciation.

I hope you are enjoying making plans for your reading for next year. And I hope you enjoy the journey…of both the planning and the actual reading!

Jane Austin’s Birthday

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Happy birthday to Jane Austen, who was born 247 years ago on December 16, 1775. Her stories and wonderful writing are still as fresh and refreshing as they were so long ago. She, along with her wonderful books, is timeless.

My favorite of her novels is Persuasion, but I love them all, and I have loved rereading her books at different stages of my life because I understand them at a deeper level each time. She always touches my heart .

So, Happy Birthday to someone who is always present in my life!

August Reflections and September Plans

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Hello, my friends. It’s time for some reflecting on life and reading in the month of August. It was another rather intense month, but flew by amazingly quickly. I’m proud to say that I actually finished reading two books during that month! Focusing on my reading has been a challenge with everything going on in our lives right now, but I decided to return to a much loved book, Persuasion, by Jane Austen, and just enjoy whatever reading time I could find. It was such a pleasure! The book and the simple act of reading! And then I ended up the month reading a book by another favorite author, Edith Nesbitt. The Story of the Treasure Seekers was a reminder of how childhood used to be a time of intense innocence and imagination.

The end of August also brings my favorite Fall reading challenge. Although I can hardly take on a bigger challenge than life itself right now, I’m going to join the Readers Imbibing Peril XVII challenge and read as much as time allows. I have a dear friend (a high school friend!) that loves the Fall and this kind of Fall reading, but he’s still a university professor and therefore doesn’t have the time to participate. But we both love Ray Bradbury, and he is inspiring me to read more of Bradbury’s stories and novels, so I’ve decided to make that my focus of my RIP reading this year!

My Readers Imbibing Peril XVII reading list!

On the home front, August brought another major change in our journey through cancer. Byron’s chemotherapy stopped working, just that quickly after 6 successful infusions. It was not unexpected but it was disappointing nonetheless. So he is now on hospice, and August was spent getting settled into that new reality, and focusing on finding the right combination of medications that would manage his pain more efficiently so that he can have some comfortable quality of life during this stage. We are so appreciative of our new hospice team! They work incredibly hard to manage his comfort care, and we feel very supported and cared for.

On our “Walk ‘n Roll.”

When I use the word “hospice,” I find that people assume that death is imminent. That’s what I always thought, too. But now we know that although hospice is “end of life care,” there’s a period of time before the final decline that can be much longer than anticipated. That’s where we are right now, this week — in the calm of pain management and improved quality of life. Byron is still able to care for himself and work on his home projects and his reading. Because he is quite disabled due to the cancer in his hip and pelvis, he  requested a wheel chair from our hospice team, and so we are able to get out for early morning walks as often as we can now. Being outside and surrounded by beauty feeds our souls! Our daughter calls these cherished walks, our “Walk ‘n Roll” time.

I hope that you had a good August, my friends, and will have a book-filled and enjoyable September.

Changes at Fairacre

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Times are changing in the charming village of Fairacre…

In this time of changes in my life, I find great comfort in reading the books in the Fairacre series, by Miss Read (the pseudonym of British author, Dora Saint). Changes at Fairacre is the 18th book in the series, so I am getting close to the end of my time in Fairacre. I’ve been reading them slowly, savoring them, not wanting them to end. Since I only have two books left in the Fairacre series, I am grateful that Dora Saint wrote another series to follow — that takes place in a neighboring village called Thrush Green. So it will be awhile before I have to say goodbye to these gentle, delightful stories.

I think Changes at Fairacre is one of my favorites in the series so far. It was a tenderhearted story, with all the changes that were happening in the village and in the life of the main character. Time moves on in these books, and this main character, the village school teacher, faces new challenges and some losses that touched my heart. The seasons and each school year come and go. The children grow and change. Life goes on as the village faces all the problems of modernization. Changes.

From the Publisher:

Times are changing in the charming downland village of Fairacre, and Miss Read isn’t certain that it’s all for the best. The new commuter lifestyle has caused a drop in attendance at the local school, and officials are threatening closure. Miss Read worries about the failing health of Dolly Clare. Vegetable gardens have given way to trips to the Caxley markets, and the traditional village fete now includes a prize for best quiche. With her trademark patience and good humor, Miss Read hopes for the best and plans for the worst as the village grows increasingly modern. Despite all the innovations, Fairacre still retains its essential elements: gentle wit, good manners, and the comfort of caring neighbors.

A few of my favorite passages from the book:

“Everything was quiet. I leant out of the bedroom window and smelt the cool fragrance of a summer’s night. Far away, across Hundred Acre field, an owl hooted. Below me, in the flowerbed, a small nocturnal animal rustled leaves in its search for food. A great feeling of peace crept over me. The tranquillity of Dolly’s old abode and my new one enveloped me. I knew then that I had come home at last.”

“My bedtime reading at the moment was Virginia Woolf’s essay about my favourite clergyman, eighteenth century Parson Woodforde. I had come across her remarks on the entry: ‘Found the old gentleman at his last gasp. Totally senseless with rattlings in the Throat. Dinner today boiled beef and Rabbit rosted.’ ‘All is as it should be; life is like that,’ she comments.”

“There may be many changes in Fairacre, I thought, but the seasons come round in their appointed time, steadfast and heartening to us all.”

Painting by Robert John Hammond…

April Activities

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Is it only April 7th today? It seems like April has already been a month long! How much Life can be packed into seven days, anyway? Well, I have to answer my own question with: A LOT!

April Activities thus far:

I have finished two books already in April. I read Round the Bend, by Nevil Shute, for my Classics Club Spin book. I will be reviewing it soon. Then, I listened to the audiobook version of When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi. It’s a beautifully written memoir of a young neurosurgeon’s battle with lung cancer. It made the waiting room time go much faster.

 

Our daughter came to spend time with us, which is always a delightful time for us. Once again, she helped out with our yard work and gardening, something she loves to do and which we appreciate so deeply.

Our daughter starting the spring clean-up the butterfly garden…

Byron underwent his second chemotherapy infusion, and in these first few days of April, has completely lost his hair. He is tolerating these chemo treatments every three weeks pretty well, with fatigue (and hair loss!) being the main side effects so far. During the times that he is feeling deep fatigue, we have been watching (and really enjoying) a YouTube channel called 4kSeoul. A very talented young man films his walks through the beautiful city of Seoul, South Korea. There is no narration, just sounds of the city surrounding you (especially if you put on your headphones to listen). Byron loves to see the architecture of the city as we walk through different neighborhoods. I am fascinated by the people we see, the energy of that city, and the historical structures we come across on these walks. It’s a fun way to experience a different place and a different culture.

On a walk in Namsan Park, in Seoul, South Korea…

So, hello to April! Life is full and busy for us right now, albeit in some ways we didn’t anticipate, and we are enjoying and appreciating the beauty of early Spring.  I hope you are enjoying your April, too!

Classics Club Spin # 29

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It’s time again for a Classics Club Spin! (Click here to see how a “SPIN” works.)  I missed the announcement of this new Spin, so I didn’t make a list of 20 books from my current Classics Club list. However, I want to participate, and so when I realized that a number (#11) had already been chosen (too late to put together a list), I looked at my list for my TBR Pile Challenge, and found that #11 on that list is also on my Classics Club list. Perfect!  So for Classics Club Spin #29, I will be reading Round the Bend, by Nevil Shute! And I’m looking forward to it!