Currently reading:
- The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler: this is a story about a young girl who discovers that she’s a mermaid. The book had good reviews, so I borrowed it from the library for Livia. She liked it enough to ask for the sequels. I decided to read it, too. It’s cute, but I do not love it. I’m glad that it’s short and that I’m nearly done with it.
- The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes edited by Arnold Rampersad: this year I’m actively celebrating Black History Month by reading some works written by authors of color. In high school, I was assigned Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son,” which I liked then and still remember all these years later. I haven’t read anything by him since, though, and it’s high time that I did. On a side note, I hope my high-school English teacher, Mrs. H., received some sort of karmic reward for being such a good teacher. The books and poems I read in her class had a profound effect on me, though it’s only now as an adult that I’ve come to understand that, and I am grateful.
- Chairlie and the Chocolate Works (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, translated into Scots): My progress on this book has been slow, but not because I’m not enjoying it. It’s actually a great deal of fun. It’s taking longer because I need to be near my computer when I’m reading, so that I can look up unfamiliar words. Scots is readable to me because it is, if not a dialect of English, certainly very closely related to English, but I don’t know all the vocabulary (BTW, some people argue that Scots is a dialect, and others argue that it’s a language in its own right, and I am not qualified to judge, so I’m not going to jump into the fray). I can guess at the meaning of most words, but for truly unusual words (e.g., “kenspeckle,” “glaikit,” etc.), I usually stop and look them up. It’s an interesting challenge to read the story this way, and I don’t mind the slow progress.