I added a new plugin today!

Now on the right side of my page you can see the books I am currently reading (you can add books you have already read, but that would take an absurd amount of time, so I think I’m just going to do the ones I am reading now).

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is required reading for my African American class. This is my second time reading it (this is one of 3 books written by a minority that was approved for Bedford Country) and I already love it more. The novel being written with a thick Southern dialect can be difficult to get through, though. To be perfectly honest, my first time reading through it was damn near impossible. I think I read the first 5 chapters and used cliffnotes for the rest. Now I have given myself the time to get used to the style and read it out loud and it is great.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is written by one of my absolute favorite contemporary authors, Jonathan Safran Foer. The novel is about a boy living in the Upper East Side whose father died on 9/11. He finds a key in an envelope with the word “Black” written on it, so he assumes it is the last name of someone important to his father. Naturally Oskar, the boy, sets out on a journey through the five boroughs, meeting everyone with the last name Black while acting in his elementary school’s production of Hamlet and trying to keep from his “heavy boots” feeling. Meanwhile, the love story of his grandparents and their life before and after coming to America is woven in, creating a story that is unbound in time and emotions. Foer writes beautifully with a style that is paralleled in beauty by a small few.

So there you go, my two books for the week. Along with an image of an old man sweater:

I dub him, “Wilderness Grandfather.”