I find that the more I write the more I read. I am a slow reader and I read very, few novels. But I read a lot, often, like a thirst. And I often read more than one thing at a time.
Right now I am reading the following:
Yarn, Rembembering the Way Home by Kyoko Mori
A Walk in Chicago, Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz
Never in a Hurry, Essays on People and Places by Naomi Shihab Nye
Fugitive Days, Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist by Bill Ayers
There are also several books I’d like to write about later– that I read and re-read– one, a book of essays, speeches and stories by Grace Paley which is a favorite, a comfort, a thing I turn to over and over, called, Just as I Thought. There is also an exquisite and amazing memoir that I have not stopped thinking about since I read it about one and a half years ago, The Latehomecomer, a Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang. More on her book and on Grace Paley’s book later. I am just so glad to live in a world in which both of those women have written and published.
I am also re-reading a book by an educator named Vivian Paley (no relation to Grace Paley, I think.) called You Can’t Say You Can’t Play about an early childhood education teacher who instituted a rule in her classroom that the young people could not exclude one another from their play and about her conversations with them about their feelings about this rule and her thinking about issues of exclusion in early childhood classrooms.
What are you reading? Do any of you read poetry? Non-fiction? Who and what are you reading?
laura writes 