the book bum

          Have any of you read  A Little Princess  by Frances Hodgson Burnett?  It was the book that made me love books.  (Does every book-lover have one of those?  Do you?)  I first read it when I was very little and have spent the last two days rereading it, as I tend to do every few years.             But the thing that struck me about the story this time around is that the story's preteen heroine, Sara Crewe, seems to have life completely figured out.  Even when she loses both her father and her fortune and is working as a hated scullery maid at her London boarding school to pay off her debts, she never sacrifices her virtues of benevolence, hope, and grace.  Her secret is that she considers herself a princess in spirit, even when she is no longer as wealthy and privileged as one.  Sadly, I have not yet gotten my life philosophies together and lack Sara's ability to gracefull...

          The summer has officially begun!           And not because classes are finally, finally over.  No.  The summer has begun because my co-blogger Grace and I went to our annual library sale this weekend!            This tradition, in which I force Grace to take me to her country house (which was built in the 1700s'!) so we can go to the Stone Ridge Library sale, is quite central to our friendship and, furthermore, provides me with a security net of books that I can dip into at any time for the rest of the year.  It's MUUUCH cheaper than going to Barnes and Nobles every time I finish a book, that's all I can say.           So this is a list of what I picked up this year! 1. From Rockaway by Jill Eisenstadt - Rockaway is my beach!  I spend pretty much all summer there, so I had to read this. 2. Handbook of Short Story Writing: Volume II , edited by Je...

      So, I have been a very happy camper in English class this month because we have just started the POETRY UNIT!!!! Yay!!  And what makes a sophomore English poetry unit so wonderful is that we don't even have to write poems for it.  Now, you might think that I would be upset by such a restriction, but actually I couldn't be happier with it.  After all, high school is full of kids who are full of feelings and lacking in experience. What I'm trying to say is that a poetry-WRITING unit would have resulted in a slew of terrible, TMI-inducing poems.      (I must say that none of the above sarcasm means that I am exempt from the crummy-teenage-poetry-writing crew of America.  I just, you know, keep my poems in a file where no one will ever see them :P)      But all of that aside, we were asked to pick a poem to memorize for this unit, and I chose "February" by Margaret Atwood.  And thus I became aware of the wonde...

          Hello!!!  I'm feeling very cheerful tonight, because a few hours ago I went to an event called LIT Crawl and had a wonderful time.  And since it was a literary event, I thought I'd share it with you-all.           LIT Crawl is an event that takes place once a month in Brooklyn.  It is like a pub crawl in that many businesses (including bars) take part in it, but that is where the similarity ends, because instead of offering discounted alcohol, these businesses host free (!!) literary events all night long (or at least from 5:00 to 8:00 pm).  These events occur in three shifts so that people can fit in three different events in one night.  The events change from month to month, but they vary pretty widely.  For example, tonight I went to a performance art/poetry reading in a laundromat, in which the two performers danced on top of washing machines and discussed the voyeuristic and weirdly personal ...

    My personal kind of beat-up copy      I read this book for the first time a few years ago in middle school, when I got it as a birthday present from  an adult who had heard I liked to write stories.  At that time I was in this phase where I believed that the more adjectives and the bigger words I used, the more authoritative I sounded.  So when William Zinsser popped out and started telling me to Simplify, simplify, simply,  my first impulse was to slam the book shut. But soon I saw the value of his advice, and that is how On Writing Well  changed my life and my perspective on writing.      What really convinced me to listen to him was how well he wrote.  Zinsser has this awe-inspiringly simple voice when he writes.  Reading his book was like sitting in an English class.  It was like listening to a soft-spoken but amicable relative talk.  True to his own teachings, there was not a single unnec...