Picture: Bryant Trambaugh teeing off last night.-Tiger and Michael playing togeter, or played together, this morning. What a magical pairing.
-"no crying in baseball" - one of my favorite sayings and a swell movie to boot. Remember it?
-more on favorite books and authors:
Maybe a particular time frame would be better than an all time package. For instance, during my last two years at Notgre Dame, D.H.Lawrence caught my eye and I read all of his stuff and ended up writing my senior thesis on Sons and Lovers, Two Women, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. These past winters, I've taken a hankering to David McCullough's writing and read a lot of his stuff, from his biography of Harry Truman to his telling of the building of the Panama Canal. Thirty years ago, when we moved from suburbia to small town and country living here in southern Indiana, I not only read back-to-the-land books but also The Little House on the Prairie series. Read some cowboy books and several mystery writers at that time as well.
So, I'm going to take a pass on the favorite author and favorite book thingee. I've got a bunch of favorites and over the coming years expect to have even more. How about you?
Raining hard here now with a thunder clap every now and then. Oh well, so it goes.
2 comments:
Asking an English Literature major what their favorite book/author is can be compared to asking a chocolate lover what their favorite dessert is! A certain father-in-law of mine asked me the book/author question many years ago and got a blank stare for an answer. Then as now, my favorite is usually the one I am currently reading, as I have learned long since to simply set aside any book that fails to pass my personal tests for style and substance. So many good authors out there; so little time. In years past I was inspired by the books of Richard Bach. Recently I've especially enjoyed Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood. Long ago I was moved by Pearl Buck, G.K. Chesterton and Kahlil Gibran. I would have to say that the book that changed my outlook on life many years ago was Capon's "Between Noon and Three"; it's message to me was to stop agonizing about reward and punishment, because we are already saved. What a relief. Right now I'm reading Alan Bennett's "The Clothes They Stood Up In", a short, charming and funny little book.
Oops, I forgot one of my all-time favs, Willa Cather, whose stories are set in Indiana and thereabouts. She understands mid-westerners, and local readers will easily identify with her characters. By the way, anyone out there remember a book called "The Trees"? I couldn't find it on Amazon. It's about settling the "wilderness" of the midwest when it was still all hardwood forest, about a family that wends its way through the branches and thick undergrowth that barely lets through the light from the sky. They painstakingly clear a spot for a small cabin and try to eke a subsistence living from the land. Would love to find it and read it again, and that's a true sign of a good book. Dr. Zhivago was another; as soon as I read the last page, I turned the book over and started it again.
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