Reading Plan 2010
I plan to read 30 books this year. Because 20 + 10 = 30. That’s all there is to my logic. Complicated, I know.
My first book this year is our Bookclub Bitches pick - Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. It’s too soon for me to write a review, but I have some favorite passages to wet your whistle.
“The world Mr. Watts encouraged us to escape to was not Australia or Moresby. It wasn’t even another part of the island. It was the nineteenth-century England of Great Expectations. We were working our way there on assisted passage, each of us with our own fragments, with Mr. Watts as helmsman sorting and assembling them into some coherent order.” p. 152
“He was inviting me to leave behind the only world I knew. While I might have dreamed of it, I didn’t ever see myself leaving the island. I couldn’t see the world wanting to take me.” p. 176
“I could have run after him I could have asked politely for some clarification. But I didn’t. I knew what I preferred and that was - I didn’t want to know. Rater, I wanted to believe.” p. 200
“People sometimes ask me “Why Dickens?,” which I always take to be a gentle rebuke. I point to the one book that supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me that you can slip under the skin of another just as esily as your own, even when that skin is white and belongs to a boy alive in Dickens’ England. Now if that isn’t an act f magic I don’t know what is.” p. 231
“Who was it that us kids saw in the classroom? A man who genuinely thought Great Expectations to be the greatest novel by the greatest English writer in the nineteenth century? Or a man left wth only a morsel who will claim it the best meal of his life?” p. 244
