vacation means reading

I have been able to finish three, yes THREE books since vacation began. I finally finished the last book in the Millenium series, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets Nest. Wowzas. I really enjoyed it. One caveat- this book, as with all of the Larsson books, should be read continuously. Don't pick it up if you have anything else to do for a week. I made the mistake of starting it in early Spring before I could give it the attention it deserved. I had finals, papers, and preschool end -of- year shenanigans to deal with. So I would pick it up, read a bit, but not enough to understand what I was dealing with, and then let it go, only to pick it up a week later, search for my spot (because M. and I were reading it simultaneously and he kept losing my spot) and I felt confused longer than I should have. As with the rest of the series, there are lots of characters with those Swedish names that get muddled up a bit in my brain and lots going on. Such intriguing, edge of your seat fun.

After I finished the Larsson book, I picked up Push by Saphire. Precious was based on this book. Wow. I finished it rather quickly, its a little book, but it was super powerful. I don't want to ruin anything for anyone out there but, for me, with this book, Saphire joins the legions of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. I was crying through much of it. I read most of it at the North Village soccer field while my kids played, sitting on an abandoned royal blue cot, sipping earl grey tea in a mason jar and trying not to bawl. Crazy lady.

Then I picked up Philip Roth's The Human Stain. So beautifully written. One of my favorite bits is the part about Iris's hair on page 129

"Her head of hair was something, a labryinthine, billowing wreath of spirals and ringlets, fuzzy as twine and large enough for use as Christmas ornamentation. All the disquiet of childhood seemed to have passed into the convolutions of her sinuous thicket of hair. Her irreversible hair. You could polish pots with it and no more alter its construction than if it were harvested from the inky depths of the sea, some kind of wiry reef-building organism, a dense living onyx hybrid of coral ad shrub, perhaps possessing medicinal properties."

Sometimes I wake up in the morning after a good all night soaker kind of rain, and my hair is a bit like that. But not quite so much.

I have picked up Frances Burney's, Evalina or The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. But am not sure I am in the mood for an epistolary Victorian piece right now. We shall see...