Have Blog, Will Travel

After trying to maintain two blogs, I have decided to discontinue Words on a Page in its current form. I will, however, continue to write about books and language at my other blog, Footnotes.


The original idea in creating Footnotes was to show and compare elements of the past with the present. Now the blog will also include other subjects that I find interesting and hope you will, too. So please join me at Footnotes.

Barbara

Link: www.footnotesbybarbara.com

Favorite Books of 2009

Following the grand reunion of the Class of 1951 in 2001, Maureen and I and a bunch of "girls" from St. Vincent Ferrer School in Brooklyn have been meeting once a year in Brooklyn (naturally). And with email and Facebook, the connections have stayed tight.

Maureen, who now lives in Delaware, just sent me a list of some of her favorite books: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Good Earth, Gone with the Wind, Three Cups of Tea, The Shack, The Reader, The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

I've never made a list of my all-time favorites, though I do compile an annual list. My favorites in 2009 were The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, Whatever It Takes - Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough, and Stoner by John Williams.

The worst book I read in 2009 was Ethan Canin's America America. When critics herald a book and it makes the list of best books for the year, the reader expects quality - good writing, well-developed characters, and a plot that at least makes sense. A friend of mine gave up on it after a couple of chapters, but I was on a trip out west and couldn't get to a book store to replace it, so I finished it on the plane coming home.

Well, it's another year and there's stack of books by my bedside waiting for me.

The Old Composition Book

Upon graduating from college - when the days of required reading were behind me - I started a list of all the books I read strictly for pleasure: fiction, biographies, and non-fiction. The first entry was The Web and the Rock by Thomas Wolfe, dated June 1959. I kept that list in one of those black-and-white composition books, (remember the ones with the multiplication tables on the back cover?). The list stops after a few hundred books in December 1983, Growing Up by Russell Baker.

I found that little notebook recently when I was trying to remember when I had read Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. I knew I had loved it and was thinking about reading it again. There it was, April 1960, sandwiched between Irwin Shaw’s Two Weeks in Another Town and A. J. Cronin’s The Northern Light.

Today I finished The Old Wives’ Tale again and know why it was such a sensation when it was published in 1908. And I understand why I first loved it. Of course, now that I am fifty years older, I am, I think, better able to understand the lives of the two sisters, Constance and Sophia.

Have you ever wondered why you’re drawn to certain books? I wonder if my desire to read the story of two sisters at this particular time stems from my loss of my sister Nan in June. Throughout the book I found myself comparing Constance and Sophia’s personalities, thoughts and actions to my sister and me.