Read, Reading, To Read

Here we go again, another month, another post about...books. :D

Books I finished recently:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling
For the seventh time

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, Thi Bui
A memoir in graphic novel form of Thi Bui's parents' experience in Vietnam before and during the Vietnam War, the family's transition to America, and the author's wrestling with how to relate to her parents and to her own young son.
I really liked this book; it was a good introduction to the Vietnam War, a war I know very little about.  I have Ken Burns' new documentary, "The Vietnam War," on hold at the library.  I am number fifty-five, in line for eight copies...for volume one.


A poem:

I Go Back to the House for a Book

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,

another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,

a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me--
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.

But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in sync,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,

but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.
He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,

shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid--

I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

-Billy Collins
from Picnic, Lightning


Books I am reading now:
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling
For the seventh or eighth time...

Whose Body?, Dorothy Sayers
A body is discovered in a bath, and Lord Peter Wimsey sets out to find out whose it is.

The Secret Adversary, Agatha Christie
Tommy and Tuppence are "demobbed" after World War I and go into business together, being hired to find a person who is supposedly holding a potentially dangerous international secret...

Picnic, Lightning, Billy Collins
More poetry


A few books on hold at the library:
Exiled: Memoirs of a Camel, Kathleen Karr

Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites, Deb Perelman


Number of books purchased on our epic Goodwill day in Lincoln, NE:
Eighteen, plus one to give away