Invalid Books
or, "What I Read When I Was Home With The Flu". I redirected from my usual fantasy for a change.
Not as good as the earlier volumes. Breathed's correspondence with Harper Lee made me realize I had never read...
I only read an excerpt of this in school, and hadn't seen the movie, so I spent most of the reading time absorbing the plot. I wonder how the author, with a pretty similar childhood to Scout's, would judge the world of today's children: better or worse? I was especially drawn to the lives of the "white trash" families which led me to...
A sad, sad story of a girl growing up in a hopeless situation. It gives the reader a good sense of the lives of people like the Boatwrights and the vicious circles that come from poverty that are still around, mostly unchanged. Splitting the difference between the 1930's and the 1950's and looking for hope for persecuted people, I picked up...
The affirmation that it's possible to save one life, and so save the world entire, despite overwhelming pressure to do otherwise. More was made in the book than in the movie (if I recall correctly) of Schindler's philandering and Emilie's role in the final chapters, which was interesting. There are no spotless heroes in this story, but monsters aplenty.
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and
A natural companion to the above. The debunking of the "nobility of the victim" idea and the author's guilt in so doing are consistent themes. The big question: how much did the Holocaust actually change Vladek's outlook on life? Would he have been a miserly conniving bastard anyway, or is that only the product of his experience?
by Betty Smith, an ancient copy once owned by Mom and Dad. I enjoyed 
some years ago, and was happy to find they were by the same author. I'm now on the lookout for 
.
(unavailable from Amazon US) would be a good companion for Betty Smith's books. I believe my copy went in the Purge, but I daresay the library has one.
And... an armload of 
books. I didn't have these as a kid, and so missed the repeated fun of discovering new allusions and puns as one learns more and more classical (and modern!) history and literature. (The Wikipedia article is enlightening reading in this regard.) I suppose you have to be nine or ten to read them at all, by which point you've probably picked up a few things to twig to. They're great silliness at any level.