Summer Reading......

I created a list of books I'd like to read over the summer and that list keeps on growing. Since my Velveteen Rabbit post I've read more, abandoned one, and added to my list from other readings.


I read about Fragile by Lisa Unger in a cooking magazine I'd been browsing through. It seemed very interesting but I found the writing to be "eh".


When K was here we took a trip to the library and I picked up Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, which is about his time in Paris. It seemed so very interesting and Hemingway has a way of pulling me in but he, for me, is just so bulky verbally and hard to read. I always have to concentrate very hard to read Hemingway and always feel like I've been in battle afterwards. I think it took me 3 tries to read The Sun Also Rises. Which is a very good but very lonely book. With the kids here and craziness going on around me I had to move Feast to the end of the books to read list. I will not accept defeat.....but will accept a small retreat. K picked out a book by Laura Hillman called I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree. It is a memoir of Mrs. Hillman's time in several Nazi death camps and tells how she came to be on Schindler's list. K never opened it so I seized the opportunity and read it myself. It is a young adult book and is a terrifying but amazing story. I am glad I read it because in it Mrs. Hillman references an Austrian poet by the name of Rainer Maria Rilke. I was enchanted by the sections of his work she referenced so much that I looked up a book of translated poems locally.


On my most recent trip I picked up Poems from the Book of Hours by Rilke, A Doll's House, Fahrenheit 451, and Fractions = Trouble. A crazy mix, I know. Rilke was selected due to Mrs. Hillman's references. Ibsen and Bradbury just because they are classic and should be read over and over. And Fractions = Trouble is a children's book by Claudia Mills about a boy named Wilson Williams who has had some problems in the past with math and is struggling with fractions. This book is so cute! I was walking by the children's section and just couldn't resist!

Though my original list is longer now and I am getting sidetracked by other readings I am very happy with the way my summer reading has gone so far. I've discovered a Rilke poem that I absolutely adore and have posted below. (Yay for discovery!)

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No, my life is not this precipitous hour
through which you see me passing at a run.

I stand before my background like a tree.

Of all my many mouths I am but one,

and that which soonest chooses to be dumb.

I am the rest between two notes

which, struck together, sound discordantly,

because death's note would claim a higher key.

But in that dark pause, trembling, the notes meet, harmonious.

And the song continues sweet.

- Rainer Maria Rilke