My Bookshelf

Ever since I was young I have loved to read. My mother insists that my eye sight was poor (prior to a wonderful invention called Lasik Eye Surgery- 20/20 is amazing!) due to the fact that long after the lights had been turned out and I was to be sleeping, I had my head under the covers, flashlight switched on, fully engrossed in a Nancy Drew novel. There is something special about a library or a bookstore. There are so many reasons to love books. They inform, entertain, distract, question, and initiate discussion and thought. I also enjoy how the different aspects of a book can reel you in. One book may enthrall you with its’ setting, another with its’ plot, another through its’ characters. I have finished many books that have left me wondering what happens next to the characters. Authors allow readers to become absorbed in their descriptions which evoke memories, feelings, nostalgia.

For these few reasons, I can’t get enough of books. Not only is there never enough time, but my reading appetite is insatiable. My reading career has been filled with a variety of genres. When I was in elementary school, I devoured Th Babysitter’s Club, Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley Twins/High, Judy Bloome novels and a plethora of other novels that dealt with girl/teen issues. As I got older I moved into R.L Stine Fear Street Novels, Christopher Pike novels and later Dean Koontz novels. It is a good thing I read those novels back then, I hate scary things now! During my university career, I didn’t have a lot of time to read for pleasure. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the immeasurable texts, articles, case studies and legal documents that were required reading. However, reading something that I choose always garners more satisfaction than reading something I was instructed to read. Since university, I have found my self gathering biographies, autobiographies, journalist novels, books of photography,books set outside the Western world, pedagogical articles and historical fictions. 

I will read almost anything (save for Stephen King or Harlequin romances) and I love taking reading recommendations so please pass along titles that you have enjoyed or reply with a book review! Below are some of my favourites along with some of the books I have read most recently.

1. WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS  Wilson Rawls

If I was asked to name my favourite book, I would say that hands down it is Where the Red Fern Grows.I don’t remember exactly when I first read this book. I was probably 10 years old. What I do know is that I fell in love with the story and have read it every year since. When I was student teaching in a grade 7/8 class I used this novel as an example in a Visual Arts lesson. I was surprised (and somewhat appalled, although I have to bear in mind this was written in 1961) that not one student had read this novel. Even after reading this book approximately 18 times, this novel still moves me. I love some of the underlying messages in this novel and still cry every time I read it.

Over the years my reasons for loving this story have changed. I think when I read it for the first time I had a severe case of puppy love and was enthralled by Old Dan and Little Ann. The descriptions of the little pups were what initially delighted me. This story also taught about persistence, hard work and reaching for your dreams. Subsequent reading brought about an appreciation of the relationships that Billy had with his mother, father, sisters, grandfather and of course his beloved dogs. When I read this novel now, the first chapter is what captures my attention. The first chapter is about nostalgia, a feeling which I relish. I love retrieving memories and remembering the people and events that have coloured my life’s path. My favourite quote from this novel is in the final chapter. Billy’s family is moving out of the Ozarks and he goes to visit the graves of his dogs one last time. As he approaches the site he sees a red fern has grown over the grave.

“I had heard the old Indian legend about the red fern. How a little Indian boy and girl were lost in a blizzard and had frozen to death. In the spring, when they were found, a beautiful red fern had grown up between their two bodies. The story went on to say that only an angel could plant the seeds of a red fern, and that they never died; where one grew, that spot was sacred” (Rawls, 1961, p. 248).

2. Night Elie Wiesel

In the summer of 2006, during my travels through Poland, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. This day is one of the most memorable of all my travels. After this visit, I emailed my family and friends…

“My glorious summer adventures took a serious turn when I went to visit Auschwitz, the German concentration camp located just outside of Krakow. The visit is at the same time devastating and mesmerizing. When I arrived I was flooded with thoughts and images of everything that I have been taught, read and have seen in the movies. However as you see where the prisoners slept, see the belongings that they were striped of, hear about the life they lived, and read their final words scratched in the walls, a much more individual image of the victims is aroused.  I realized how fortunate I am to have been and continue to be able to write my own personal history as millions of people worldwide have had theirs forced upon them. So many people whether it was for 2.6 seconds or 26 years have added color to my life. So thank you, thank you, thank you for bringing your vividness to my life. I hope that this finds everyone healthy, planting their own hopes, growing there own dreams and happily writing their own history.”

"Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes you free)

Sleeping Quarters

Chimneys

  

In Memory- One brick for each life lost, estimated at over 1.5 million

A story such as this is not open for review. The unanswerable questions this story provokes are How? Why? This is such a devastating, personal, emotional story of a young boy, a family, a town, a country, and an entire group of people devastated and ravaged. The effects have been felt world-wide. It is unthinkable, yet it happened. Well worth the read.

Check out Elie Wiesel’s Foundation for Humanity

3. The English Patient Michael Ondaatje

I enjoyed this novel for two reasons. The first draw was the setting. Italy, Northern Africa after World War 2. Michael Ondaatje winds his story through a historical context. History is complex, difficult and amazing. I never grow tired of the myriad of interpretations and perceptions of history. While this is a work of fiction, the events and settings, the emotions and the consequences of war, come alive in this story. The second reason I loved this story is that Michael Ondaatje has the incredible ability to weave a spell over me with his descriptions, explanations and dialogue. One of my favourite passages (which strangely I didn’t underline) has Hana reminiscing about the sounds of Toronto streets. This passage evoked such emotion in me. Ondaatje captured how I feel when I am in my childhood room, with an open window, listening to the sounds of the summer traffic. Michael Ondaatje made the characters’ stories true and strong through his descriptions and although I wasn’t completely captivated by them, they did evoke sympathy and compassion.

Some of my favourite passages/descriptions include:

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. When she was now what she herself decided to become” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 222).

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 259).

” She wished for that. Her inwardness was a sadness of nature. He himself would allow her to enter any of his thirteen gates of character, but she knew that if he were in danger he would never turn to face her” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 272).

“When someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colours, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the ight of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of faces. He’s never sure what an eye reveals. But he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 219).

“As they grow intimate the space between them during the day grows larger. She likes the distance he leaves her, the space he assumes is right” (Ondaatje, 1992, 9. 127).

“Her hand touched me at the wrist” (Ondaatje, 1992, 0. 145).

“When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our ledgend, what our lives will mean to the future” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 141).

“He has been disassembled by her.

And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought to her?” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 155).

“All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whos openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with east in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world” (Ondaatje, 1992, p. 157).

“From this point on in our livesm she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls” (Ondaatje,1992, 9. 158).

I could go on. You should just read it.