June Reads

Only finished two books in June. In my defense, I had to take an emergency road trip to Oklahoma for a funeral, and driving over 20 hours in a week kiiiiiinda eats into my reading time.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

I don't know if I should count Mockingbird since I've read it a least three or four times, but I always notice something new and interesting when I read it. This time around, I annotated my copy.

A favorite Mockingbird quote, from when Scout's 1st grade teacher is horrified that Scout already knows how to read, and tells her to slow down:

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned how to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church--was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from the snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills to Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow--anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Penderwicks is a fun, young adult book about four sisters about the same distance in age as my own sisters and me. I quite liked how well the author is able to get into the heads of four very different school-age girls without making them seem like grown-ups.

Moby Dick - no progress. :-(