Books = Happy

In honor of Cyber Monday, I decided to do my part by purchasing two very coveted books:

I spent an entire night during my Thanksgiving break reading "Where the Sidewalk Ends" from cover to cover.  I was reminded how happy those poems and drawings made me...and that I can still recite "Homework, Oh Homework" from memory.  I decided that adding 2 more of these books to my collection could only be a good thing.  So many great poems to choose from, but I think my favorite is:

Worried

I worry about myself and my ability to remember things.  I have always had a bad memory, made worse by the fact that my brain spent a few years floating around in chemo.  I love reading, obviously.  But sometimes it feels like I'm barely retaining what I read.  I don't know if this is a problem particular to me, or a problem shared by other voracious readers.  I'm especially flummoxed by the current book I'm reading, Henning Mankell's Pyramid.  I bought this from Daedalus Books at a reduced price a few weeks ago.  Small bits and pieces of it are jumping out at me as I read it - mere hints of deja vu.  However, I wouldn't be able to honestly tell you whether I'd read it or not.  I went on to Good Reads today to log it as a "current read" and was told that I had read and posted about it in March 2009.

So...here I am, wondering what to do with this information.  I'm going to go ahead and blame it upon the repetitive nature of the crime / detective genre, rather than on complete memory loss.  I think most of these detective stories (they are my guilty pleasure and favorite quick read) are so similar that they sometimes all blend into one.

Well, I guess I will still go ahead and finish reading Pyramid, especially since I don't remember how it ends.

Vanished

I read a really fascinating story today about a young woman named Barbara Follett.  She was a published and accomplished author at the age of 13 (in the mid-1920s).  She was hailed by the New York Times and H.L. Mencken for her extraordinary talent and "almost unbearably beautiful" style of writing.  She would have likely had an amazing career if it were not for the misfortunes that fell upon her as she entered her twenties.  The abandonment of her father and the immediate need to quit school in order to work to support her mother meant she had to postpone her dreams of writing.  In 1939, she walked out after a nasty quarrel with her husband and vanished.  She was never seen or heard from again and her body was never found.  She was 26.

Here is an excerpt from a letter she wrote a friend about her heartache:

“My dreams are going through their death flurries,” she wrote that June. “I thought they were all safely buried, but sometimes they stir in their grave, making my heartstrings twinge. I mean no particular dream, you understand, but the whole radiant flock of them together—with their rainbow wings, iridescent, bright, soaring, glorious, sublime. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money.”