..Hey Folks!!
I hope you’d enjoyed ‘Agnes Grey’ by Anne Bronte!! I had!!
Our December work was without doubt among the more straightforward (which, following ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’, we’d perhaps had coming). Except this past month, ‘Agnes Grey’ wasn’t the only hardback I’d studied.
A few days back, I’d possessed a mind to visit Cleveland Public Library main branch to peruse its second-floor displays for fresh/invigorating ideals and hoped to strike literary gold as I’d done weeks prior when I’d happened upon a tabletop crammed with companionship-oriented books on which ‘The Oxford Book of Friendship’ had lain.
By D.J. Enright and David Rawlinson, ‘The Oxford Book of Friendship’ captures diary entries, poems, autobiographical quotes, and academic journal contributions of many historic literary figures (e.g. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and C.S. Lewis) that expounds upon what friendship—whether longtime or short, human or animal, identical-race or interracial—meant to them. While I’d studied it, I was taken aback by the gravity/depth of each figure’s viewpoints; and after I’d returned it nonetheless, I’d thought of friendship less as some occurrence in life and more as an intricate (and essential) institution of our society. Hence the reading had offered somewhat of a paradigm shift (or healthy change in my assumption).
Nevertheless, I’d cruised the circular literary level for yet another read with ‘Book of Friendship’-type impact, and laying on a stand just before the librarian’s desk, I’d snagged a book of poems called ‘The Rain in Portugal’ by Billy Collins. Though I haven’t completed it, the verses I’d read contained prose that seemed to lift right up from the page and into my being as ‘The Intersection of X and Y’ by Rebecca McClanahan had earlier this year.
Hence for the first month of our new year, I’m not recommending a particular reading, only encouraging us to mine for any literary piece that hopefully revolutionizes our view of the world in some healthy way.
Now, I could go on… except I won’t, it’s New Years Eve!!
That said, please remain safe, keep reading, and enjoy a tremendous New Year!!
Many thanks, and we’ll ttys!!
Phil