How To Disappear Completely

And you read your Emily Dickenson, and I my Robert Frost

Breaks are the times when one can read for hours shamelessly. Or maybe that was school. I guess I've found the reason why I like school so much. Anyway, I've read a few "for fun" books over break.

1. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. An engaging blend of humor and Botswanan culture. Although my favorite books about Africa are by Alan Patton, I really enjoyed Smith's portrayal of Botswana community as seen through the eyes of a middle-aged woman.
2. Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith. Second book in the series.
3. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. I am ashamed to say that this was actually my first time through. I love random silliness if it involves words.

Happy thanks to Red Rover for lending me the following three.

4. The Perilous Gard by Marie Elizabeth Pope. If you are into castles, fairies, intrique, Romance, and thoroughly capable heroines, you MUST read this book! If I were ordering these books axiologically rather than chronologically (ie the order in which I read them), then this book would be at the very top.
5. The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. This book starts out EXTREMELY slowly, mostly because the protaganist is an obnoxious brat, but if you stick with it, the plot takes a sudden turn for the better, racing to the end and headlong into the sequel. Then one regards the agonizing beginning through a Hamletian lens ("there is method in his madness").
6. The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner. The sequel. And rumor has it that a third book is forthcoming.

I also purchased Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, mostly because he also wrote a story (Lyda's Oxford) that takes place in Oxford, with pull-out maps and everything.
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Sometimes one returns to the first fruits of her attempts to master the English language and finds traces of a developing style. I look at my first stories and find them rather boring from a narrative point of view. They were predominantly about horses and inevitably followed the formula, "once upon a time, there a lived a herd of horses. Their names were...." and a page long list cataloguing each member of the equine family in its proper place ensued. The story itself would, by necessity of space, be curtailed to a cursory summary of how the bad stallion had tried to steal all the horses away but had been defeated by the ever victorious good stallion. The narrative portion thus dispatched, all the carefully named ponies returned to happy grazing and an orderly life.

Apparently I am just as fond of using lists as a form of communication as ever I was in third grade. Except now I name books and music rather than imaginary horses.