Thursday, April 5, 2018

Nonnie's Reading Corner #2

So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.
-Roald Dahl

Omigoodness! What would I do without a book? I'd have never met Nancy Drew. I would never had known the wonder of a poem: "The moon was a ghostly galleon..."  I would believe that one woman could raise her children on by entering word contests,  I'd never had learned the phrase '"Twas brillig and the slithy toves. Did gyre and gimble in the wabe." I wouldn't know a blind cat named Homer who could catch flies out of the air and also survive 911. And I wouldn't have met Dick Francis.

Ten Facts About Books and Me:
  1. I take a book with me everywhere. 
  2. I read three at a time: one to listen to, one on my Kindle and one "real" book so that I can read three books at a time!  
  3. The books have to be entirely different from one another or I can't sort them out.
  4. I sometimes have to keep a list of characters so I know who they are as the book progresses.
  5. I forget the end of most books I read.
  6. I have the advantage of reading more books than anyone because I can read a book over and over and over again because I don't remember the end!
  7. The author I've read the most is Dick Francis. If you want to start on his books, read The Danger.
  8. I read young adult books because they are clean. I stop reading any book that has profanity, vulgar language or explicit sexual scenes.
  9. I love a day where I can start and finish a book in one day. Book defined by amount of pages being over 250 pages.
  10. My favorite book of all time is To Kill A Mockingbird. It touches my soul in so many ways.

In March I read four books:
  1. Black Water, D. J. Hales
  2. Reality Bug, D. J. Hales
  3. Bleak House, Charles Dickents
  4. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
The first two books are a continuation of a Young Adult series I'm reading.

I read Bleak House as an audio book. I often read older classics this way. Many older books were first serialized and the money earned was determined by how the number of words written. It tends to have a lot of drawn out situations, descriptions, and sideways wandering but I did find that I had no problem going through books if I listened to them. Bleak House is one of these. To support and explain the premise of why I listen and why I needed to have a list of characters, here is what Goodreads said: "[Bleak House] was published in 20 monthly installments...It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon."
I fell in love with Mr. Jarndyce and the Little Woman. The characters were rich and side stories and characters all came together in the end. The ethics and compassion of Mr. Jarndyce plays against the ruination of lives that live on hopes that will never come to be. I think that one of the funniest things in the books was a part of Mr. Jarndyce's personality. Though he is a benevolent man, he does not like to be thanked. When someone starts to thank him, he starts talking about the east wind and how it looks like it might switch to a north wind soon...
I believe this book will go right up with the other classics I adore:  Understood Betsy and The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

I found the book, I Capture the Castle quite by serendipity. It was written in 1948 by Dodie Smith. I'm really not good at writing descriptions of books, so I hope, dear readers, that you will bear with me. The castle in the title really is a dilapidated castle that a very poor family lives in. Most of it is in a state of "rack and ruin,"and part of it is uninhabitable. The family just manages to get by. The youngest daughter, the heroine of the story, decides to write a journal and follows the events of her family for six months of an unusual amount of events and change. It is a very dear book and so worthy of being read.

In the beginning of this post, I named four things I would never have met if I didn't read books. Leave a comment telling me the books I was describing. The one who gets the most books correct will win a prize...a quilty surprise. If there is a tie or two or...there will be a prize for each! 

I hope you will put your nose in a book today and find yourself in another place.


7 comments:

  1. Love Dick Francis! Read all of Nancy Drew as a youngster, as well as Hardy Boys and Bobsie Twins. My favorite book as a child was Randolph the Bear Who Said "No." I enjoy mysteries and any author who writes in a series. I mostly listen to audio books as I find it hard to focus on a printed page any more.

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  2. I am an avid reader, too; right now I'm into Ann Cleeves' series about "Vera" the policewoman. "The Crow Trap" is the first that I've almost finished--I love a good mystery (with a cuppa right beside me) and often can be seen reading while hubby watches tv...
    I collected ALL those Nancy Drews as a youngster and have read every Agatha Christie there is...
    Have you read "Rebecca's Tale" the follow up to the famous "Rebecca" by Daphne Demaurier {I love English authors}? It's by Sally Beauman...really super.
    I haven't read many dick Francis--but will go to the library and begin on your recommendation...hugs Julierose (with her nose in a book;))) )

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  3. I usually have two or three going all the time to

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  4. Hi, Nonnie! I came here for the Star blog hop, but have to jump in and respond to your questions, because they are a book-lovers delight! And because my favorite aunt used to read at red lights, as I now do. :)

    Let's see...You're clearly talking about the curious girl sleuth Miss Nancy Drew, and the Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio--books give us great examples, eh? Speaking of which, there is the Wonder Cat in Homer's Odyssey. You referenced two poems, "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll and "The Highwayman"--was the latter also a reference to the YA series Ant and Cleo, in which that poem is featured in one of the later books? (I haven't read that one, but one of my nieces has.) Lastly, dear Dick Francis. We share a fondness for Mr. Francis. It helps not to remember the endings, because his novels are such great reads! Don't you think it's remarkable how talented he was at creating dimensional characters, right away? A few pages in, and the main and supporting characters are real and you're already rooting for some and irritated by others. The first one I read, at about 10 years old, was In The Frame. I think the scariest one (due to the nature of the crime) is "Bolt". And one of my favorites is "The Danger".

    Oh, I could talks books with you all night long. I just wanted to chime in and thank you for singing the song of books. Can't ever be too much of that in the world. In case you're wondering, I read two at a time, usually: one fiction and one non-fiction, and I tend to abandon the non-fiction when I come across a novel I'm excited about, so I read more fiction than non-.

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  5. We must be twins separated at birth! It makes me sad that the world is reducing it's reading to Twitter and FB. My husband and I both loved Dick Francis books and that was my present to him every Christmas for many years. I never read an author who could write so many of the same kind of books (horse racing) and every one would be so different! I miss him and my husband, both. =) Nancy Drew was one you mentioned at the start, and I met Nancy in the attic of my house at the age of 10. A friend donated a box of her daughter's books, but my mother wouldn't let me read them, as they weren't WORTHY books. The door to the attic was in my bedroom and I snuck up there every night for months reading those books, sitting on the stairs with the stair light on. I still debate with myself whether she knew I did that or not. =) The "ghostly galleon" quote comes from The Highwayman. Him I didn't meet until I was in high school. My English teacher had the most marvelous recording of the poem, and I can still hear the refrain in my brain decades later! I'm fortunate to be able to read many books as part of my job, both young adult and adult. My rules for books are similar to yours, and I have a few other exclusions, books I won't read, I don't care how many awards they've won. LOL My personal preference is always science fiction, but I also love good technothrillers and Charles Todd and Anne Perry, and other authors who write novels, often mysteries, about the aftermath of different wars. I'm a binge reader, and I've been on Flavia de Luce lately - which fit right in with my job! I also love children's lit and my librarians will save books for me if they think I've missed a good one. =) What a wonderful post. It's so nice to meet another avid reader in a world where there are fewer all the time!

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  7. Sorry I don't know the four things... I too love to read, but don't do much any more. My eyes are a-changing, and if I read a couple of hours I can hardly see the rest of the day.
    I do like books with sex. (Sorry if that makes me a bad girl, but I believe it is part of life, and part of some of my favorite books. Clan of the Cave Bear series and the Outlander series.) My favorite clean books are the Harry Potter series. There is a Great American book vote going on until Autumn... you can vote for your favorites on PBS.org/books all summer.
    Hugs

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