recent reading.

Yesterday I finished a book called Denison, Iowa that, a quick search through my archives tells me, I started reading in September...of 2005. I don't think that speaks well of me or the book. It really doesn't feel like that long ago, either, since I've picked at it occasionally over the past couple of years and always remembered what was happening. There's something weird about starting a book when it's new (I started reading it shortly after it was published) and finishing it after enough time has passed that it needs an epilogue to update it. It was a good book though, I guess. Not good enough that I felt compelled to read it in a timely fashion, but there are lots of better books that I've left unfinished for even longer.

I also finished reading Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, which I only just started shortly before we moved. (The move upset all the books I was reading, actually, and this was the first I've recovered.) It's sort of about diagramming sentences. More than that though, it's an essay on growing up in a particular time and place and the way education can shape personality. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here's one of the many things I learned from Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog... On the day Ernest Hemingway was born, his mother wrote this: "The sun shone brightly and the robins sang their sweetest songs to welcome the little stranger into this beautiful world."