I’m always reading a couple of books at a time, usually a fun book and a learning-teaching book. I like to read before I fall asleep. I read a lot of murder mysteries. I have read all of Louise Penney’s Inspector Gamache books. The last year or so, I have been reading library or bookshop-themed mysteries. I teach first-year writing at EMU and WCC, so when I started reading Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, I realized i was following the literary narrative arc and I was hooked r the first hundred pages.As you can see in the image below the beginning that leads into the rising action is what this book did so well. I was sucked into the book one night and read until 2 AM. I haven’t done that in a while. It could have been because it was a different genre than I had read in a while, or it was just because it was well written. Of course, I now wanted to go see the movie!
My sister and I saw the movie a week ago Thursday and WOW. Weir’s descriptions are wonderful and easy to visualize; however, the movie visuals are spectacular. The movie makes everything bigger, even the spaceship, which i some scenes w reminiscent of the Starship Enterprise.
This past Tuesday, I sat and read the graphic memoir Dreamer by Akim Aliu straight through. I’ve had it on my to-read pile for a while. A very powerful story about the systemic racism that Aliu experienced in hockey. I use graphic memoirs in my first-year writing class. I have found getting students to pick a topic to research is difficult, so I have them choose a graphic memoir from my list at the beginning of the semester. They read it for the first project that ends with a proposal to research an issue from the memoir.
Another book I’m reading is Introducing Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide by Cath Ennis. My grandson is graduating from California Polytechnic State University this June, with a degree in micbiology, so I wanted to understand what it was all about. This graphic guide explains just how complex our genetics, our DNA, which makes us who we are, really is, with wonderful comic illustrations with speech balloons.
I also finished reading a fun book The Irish Bookshop Murder by Lucy Connelly. This is a series, very fun, quick read. However, reading it after the Weir book I found myself questiong a few sentences and wanting to revise them. Yes, I had to remind myself I was reading this book just for fun, stop editing! LOL!
I challenged myself to write in my blog at least once a week and I’m finding it difficult, to say the least. This one has taken me a week and a half. Most of it is the frustration of not knowing how to insert and resize an image and getting it next to the text! I’ve been screaming at my laptop and clicking on every button, every icon, etc. Somehow I actually got all of the book covers next to the text that talks about them. Yay! So, I hope I have encouraged you to maybe read Project Hail Mary or anything else that strikes your fancy.
Until next blog!
Cunniforms to Blinking Cursors 