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October 2019:

The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine

Description (from Amazon):

An enchanting, comic love letter to sibling rivalry and the English language.

From the author compared to Nora Ephron and Nancy Mitford, not to mention Jane Austen, comes a new novel celebrating the beauty, mischief, and occasional treachery of language. 

The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret “twin” tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition

Cathleen Schine has written a playful and joyful celebration of the interplay of language and life. A dazzling comedy of sisterly and linguistic manners, a revelation of the delights and stresses of intimacy, The Grammarians is the work of one of our great comic novelists at her very best.

(P.S. You honestly didn’t think I could pass up a book called “The Grammarians” did you? I read grammar books for FUN, people. This was a no-brainer.)

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Alternative Books for October:

  • Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic: c’mon…it’s October! If you’re like me and must read something witchy this Halloween month, give Alice Hoffman’s classic a read (and in case you didn’t know, she wrote a prequel a couple of years ago, The Rules of Magic) (oh- one more thing…I l-o-v-e love the movie version of this book…an oldie but a goodie…).

  • Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places: you can pretty much count on me including something either travel or nature inspired every month because, well, there’s a ton of it in my “to be read” stack and I’m dragging you guys along with me through it, so…let’s do this one together because it’s both! I’ve had this next to my bed for approximately 8 months and the time is now!

 

 
 
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July 2019:

Upstream by Mary Oliver

Description (from Amazon):

“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”

So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”

Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.

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Alternative books for July:

  • Sarah Maas’s Throne of Glass series : if you are looking for brain candy reading featuring really strong female characters and a little fairy assassin action…

  • Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams : if you love powerful nonfiction writing that discusses the environment in a way that is personal and provocative (it was a National Book Award winner, so you know it’s good!)