Reading

Libraries are, in my opinion, one of the greatest assets our country has going for it.  Our family takes full advantage,  as we're four avid readers.  Truly, one of the things I'm most thankful for is that my two kids enjoy reading.    Sometimes my daughter brings a book along on the ride to the grocery store.  This is usually a five minute ride, but hey, why not make the most of the time?  Here are a few excerpts from books I've recently checked out:

 

I was no prisoner, and yet, when faced with an occasion for determination, I was not to follow the lead of my will, but to endure in tedious familiarity.  What is freedom when you're too beholden to act spontaneously?  What is desire that is absolute but untimely?  Or obligation when you have ignored your soul's conviction?   

Is sacrifice really a virtue when in your heart you feel not a shred of devotion? 

{page 195 - Anthropology of an American Girl}

Looking out the window, I felt mostly lonely.  It was the kind of loneliness that cannot see past itself, a skulking suspicion that the world was not mine to inherit.  I listened as they spoke, laughed when they laughed, raised my glass as such moments presented themselves, all the while marking time.  I was sorry for the way everyone imagined my life to be my own, for the way they really did seem to like me, asking did my fish still have bones, and how pretty I looked.  I wished I could give something back.  But yet, I knew that all that they wanted from me was all that they needed from me, and that is a treacherous path to consent to travel, in the sense of suppressing things sought for the self.  That is to say,  

you being solely what others want you to be.

{page 261- Anthropology of an American Girl}

One danger of online blogs and social networking sites is that your daughter may not be expressing what she really feels.  She may instead by writing what she thinks will entertain or impress her peers who read it.  She might not even be aware of the difference.  She may not realize that what she says she is feeling isn't what she actually is feeling.   She subtly adjusts what she is writing to suit what she thinks her friends want to read.  

After a while, she may gradually become the girl she is pretending to be.

{page 38 - Girls on the Edge}


Here's a vegetarian recipe from 
Mediterranean Harvest, 
a cookbook authored by Martha Rose Shulman:
Summer Salad 


Book recommendations:  
Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Passion of Mary-Margaret by Lisa Samson
The Blackstone Key by Rose Melikan

Please send me your recommendations, too.   As long as they're not silly romance novels, or meat cookbooks, or uninspired writing popular amongst non-thinkers.