Gleanings from My Readings

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice
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BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Just this week, I began reading Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrow’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I’m only about a third of the way through, but I can’t wait to recommend it. It’s an epistolary novel set in Britain and the Guernsey Island in the aftermath of World War II. It’s beautifully written, full of literary allusion, wonderful characterization, and best of all, it makes me laugh out loud. If you’re looking for your next read, I don’t think you could do better. Here are a couple of quotes from the novel:

“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive—all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.” (11-12).

“I gave a talk on the Brontë girls once when it was my turn to speak. I’m sorry I can’t send you my notes on Charlotte and Emily—I used them to kindle a fire in my cookstove, there being no other paper in the house. I’d already burnt up my tide tables, the Book of Revelation, and the story about Job.” (52)

I have a feeling I’ll be quoting some more from this one.

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“What some students experience when they are made to confront a poem might be summed up in a frustrating syllogism:
I understand English.
This poem is in English.
I have no idea what this poem is saying.”


“Too often the hunt for meaning becomes the only approach; literary devices form a field of barbed wire that students must crawl under to get to ‘what the poem is trying to say,’ a regrettable phrase which implies that every poem is a failed act of communication.”
---Billy Collins, from his Introduction to Poetry 180

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From Billy Collins’ poem “Introduction to Poetry”:

“But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.” (12-16)

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From Patricia Waters’ poem “Old Country”:

“Afternoons I lie in bed to stay warm,
reading Thomas Hardy, then Henry James,
novel follows novel,
like courses in an ever richer meal.” (8-11)

From her poem “Out of These Things”:

“In her inmost interior of beige
the housewife fingers the page:
from whom must she steal this moment?” (8-10)

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And for all you teachers out there,
From Tom Wayman’s poem “Did I Miss Anything?”

“Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours” (1-3)

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Happy Reading!