My Mis-spent Youth, Or The Book Quest Continues

I swear to you that I was a good student in high school. Let me just start there. I went to class, did my homework (albeit often at the last minute), I didn't give my teachers much sass except for those times that sass was well-deserved (I'm looking at you, 10th grade English teacher from hell), and every summer I made my way through my assigned summer reading lists. 

Except for the summer of '85, apparently, when I spent a month with my good friend EB with her father's cousins in England. The summer before junior year, which in New York, is the year of English literature in English class. I mention this because one of my big gaps in the list of 100 books is good British classics. As a Jane Austen fan(atic), it surprised me that there were so many British authors I'd just glossed over. I remember having a conversation with my parents in high school in which they both assured me that I'd love Thomas Hardy. But in the summer of 1985, while walking galumphing labs on Lord Bath's private roads and visiting Liverpool and Kew Gardens, the summer reading list sort of slipped my mind.

I took it with me to England, along with a big suitcase of good intentions. But when I actually brought it out to show my lovely hostess, she patted my arm and said we could probably find most of them on books on tape so I could listen to them on trains. And so it was that I listened to about two thirds of a Tess of the D'Urbervilles so abridged that it took up only two cassettes, and called my reading list done. The shame.

But now I have a second chance to make things right. While I have not yet read Tess, the second book I read on my Kindle was another of Hardy's novels, Far from the Madding Crowd. The first was A Tale of Two Cities, which won the Christmas straw poll for everyone's favorite Dickens' novel. Both of these classics were on the unread portion of my list. And now they've been read and enjoyed and given a star on the printed list that I've been toting around since Cima House. I'll never look at people knitting in public the same way again.

But it's not just classic English novels that have been crossed off the list. The first vacation rental had an eclectic, but very interesting collection of books, and I managed to read Memoirs of a Geisha and Notes from a Small Island while we were there. Memoirs is one of those books that make you wonder how a member of one sex can get inside the head of a member of the other sex so well. (Although I think Wally Lamb does that almost better than anyone else.) I enjoyed Small Island, too, but none of Bill Bryson's books have captured me quite as much as A Walk in the Woods and its discussion of bear-human treaties, or lack thereof.

I thought there was another book that I was able to cross off at the second vacation rental, but it's not jumping out at me right now. I did, of course, read the Dickens there, but it wasn't thanks to the owners, who mostly had mystery-thrillers on their copious bookshelves.

Right now, I'm in the midst of a mad rush of reading. I'm rereading Pride and Prejudice for its 200th birthday, reread all of the Hunger Game books and The Girl Who Kicked a Hornets Nest over the last week, and I'm going through all of Laurie King's Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books two at a time from the library. I didn't love the first one when I read it, but I love all of her non-Mary Russell books so much that I thought they deserved another try. It was the right decision.

Some of the most exciting reading I'm doing these days, though, is the slowest reading. Most of my rereading happens at the rate of a book a day or a day and a half, in the case of Hornets Nest, but each evening, we are reading about half a chapter of the first Harry Potter with Darcy. We'll pause for a long while between each of the books so she will be old enough by the time we get to Book 4, but it's exciting to introduce her to that world.

And what are you reading?