Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
Whee Books Hooray!
It probably happened about a week ago now, but according to my GoodReads.com list, I’ve passed the 100 book mark for 2007. Of the 102 currently on the list, about 30% of them are comics, which isn’t a bad ratio, in my mind, since most of them were good.
I’ve noticed, though, that the quality of my reading material has improved this year, or at least it seems like it has. This might just be an effect of public logging of each book—if people are going to see what I read, then I should be reading a higher caliber of authors, because I don’t want my friends to know just how many “guilty pleasure” books I read. I’m still not really into the classics—I can’t muster any enthusiasm for Fitzgerald or Melville—but I’ve been exploring some less-popular, more respected (and respectable) authors.
The new authors I’ve been reading are mostly the women I read in high school/college and not since, but I’m trying them now and really enjoying them. Women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote way more than just The Yellow Wallpaper; Shirley Jackson, previously known only for The Lottery; even Margaret Atwood, whom I recognize as likely being the party guest who brought the cat in Moxy Früvous’s “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors.” I’ve been trepadacious about Joyce Carol Oates, because I tend to think her short stories are just the right length and her novels are about a million pages long, but I’ll probably try to get over that in the not-too-distant future.
I think Hemingway is next on my list of Revisited High School Authors, even though he’s not a woman. I’ve liked nearly everything of his I’ve read, though one American Lit professor ruined The Old Man and the Sea by making us read it aloud, each student reading one paragraph, around the whole room until we’d made it through the whole book. Hemingway for kindergarten, I guess. (She ruined The Education of Little Tree the same way, incidentally. I don’t have fond memories of that class.)
But the next books on my list, after I finish the Margaret Atwood I’m working on, is a re-read of the Harry Potter series, I think. Because in just under 2 weeks, I’m leading an all-ages discussion group on the whole series, and it would be nice if I remembered some of the details.
