Did we define classic for the 52 books bingo? I can't remember. I'm wondering if I can count High Adventure. It was published in 1955.

Tensing and Hillary have reached the top! They deserve every bit of credit for their accomplishment. Hillary told the story of the climb very well.

If a book is well written, I see and hear it happening, feel the emotions, taste the tastes, as in real life, like I am the main character. This affects what kind of novels I choose to read. If I read a book and it's like watching a movie, that's a different feel, more detached but still visual. I think to myself that the author herself must have seen it unfolding like a movie in her head when she wrote it. Somehow that style feels a little more immature to me, but sometimes more fun.

This was the biggest problem I had coming back from Puerto Rico. The military in the 70's was very integrated. We knew many people of other nationalities. The DOD schools in PR were not just for the military but also Puerto Ricans who worked for the government. They were very racially diverse, so were my friends. I actually was not aware of race issues until I attended a non DOD public school in Jacksonville Florida our first years back. The U.S. felt like an uncomfortable place to live. People seemed a lot more grumpy to me. You couldn't just pick free mangos, guavas, and bananas either. Not to mention, the flat topography of Florida made me cry. I told my father it was ugly, lol. (Sorry Kathy)

If you are not going to hem them, you might want to secure the edges of the side seams with a couple of stitches so the seam doesn't unravel and separate.

This is what I do all the time. I'm short and often have to shorten pants by cutting length off.

My culture: Navy brat, navy wife, three countries, one territory, six states, Virginian for 27 years now. I don't have an accent that people recognize easily. I'm comfortable with the ways of the south, but have too much of my New England born parents in me to be seen as a true southerner. I'm definitely an east coast person. I've lived near the Mississippi, but never west of it. I now live in a small rural town. The first year I kept wondering why people were waving at me when I didn't know them. My biggest culture shock was coming back to the U.S. as a 12yo after 4 years in Puerto Rico. I look back on those years as idyllic, realizing they probably weren't as fascinating to my parents at the time.

Hi. I'm still climbing Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary. I expect to reach the top this week. I'm also reading what I assume will count for my flufferton bingo square, Pomfret Towers by Angela Thirkell, thanks to Aggieamy. I'm finding it quite amusing so far. As the main character falls in love at first sight: "In that flash of ecstasy she suddenly knew what all poetry, all music, all sculpture, except things like winged Assyrian Bulls, or the very broken pieces in the British museum, meant."

I just finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro for my IRL book club. I didn't have any idea what it would be like going in. I certainly didn't expect what I got. That was wierd and uncomfortable. The story was told in first person and you have to pay attention, read between the lines, and piece things together, just like other books of his that I've read. I don't want to imagine a world like that depicted in the story as being possible. What makes his stories so unnerving to me is the feeling of emotional detachment that the narrators portray with their words, yet belie with the account of their actions.

Me too.

I read Texas over thirty years ago, after I married dh, who grew up in San Antonio. He insisted we go there on our honeymoon. Texas still feels like a foreign country to me. Dh has lived away from it twice as many years as he lived there, but he is still from Texas. Unfortunately I can't remember much about the book at all. I also read Michener's Hawaii. Before I had kids, big books didn't scare me. 😉

I liked the subtle nods to Singing in the Rain, American in Paris, Casa Balanca, and others, in the sets, dance numbers, and plot. What blew me away was Ryan Gosling was actually doing all that piano playing and it was obvious. I went home and googled. He was already a musician, but not a piano player. He took three months to concentrate on learning piano before the movie. Incredible.

You should read Reaper by the same author. Death has an existential crisis. 😄

I will share my chocolate with you, compliments of shukriyya.

Ds3 and Ds4 say at least once in each book. Sorry.

I appreciated RandG and Hamlet more after I watched them enacted. I got even more out of RandG after I read Waiting for Godot, which I thought was pretty awful. What I took away from RandG that made me appreciate it: 1. All the world's a stage, all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and their entrances. 2. The Play's the thing. We are each in our own cosmic play (life). As they come and go, we interact with other players, but we don't know what is happening to them when they are off stage. They are living out their own dramas.

I'm in a similar boat, taking a statistics class this semester. I was prepared on the first day, with my outrageously expensive book that came with an online math lab code, listed as required for the class. I get to class and the teacher announces she's decided not to use any of that. We are using a free online textbook. I look around and 90 percent of the students didn't have a book, like they expected something like this to happen. It was the old people who had books, lol. Then I had to get my son to show me how to return my 160 dollar Amazon purchase (cheaper than the school price) to get a refund. I thank my lucky stars that I hadn't scratched off the covering on the code yet. I learned some valuable life lessons. Hope your semester goes well!

Did you see that Head in Flames could be a play on words representing the sunflower or a redheaded person? (There is even room for a rooster in there.) I wonder if the author and the cover artist collaborated. It is awfully clever.

The cover is fascinating too. I was staring at it thinking, "Is that a sunflower or an eye," before I even read that the book was about Van Gogh. Also, I learned a new word: narraticule.

Double post

I did a book poem from my shelves for this thread last year, or was it the year before? Here is one from my current bedside stacks: Summer of the Dragon Travels With My Aunt The Wizard's Daughter High Adventure The Country of the Pointed Firs Elsewhere The Fun of It 😄

This year I would like to keep one fiction and one non-fiction going at all times. so, when I finished The Nordic Theory of Everything, I started on High Adventure: Our Ascent of Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary. I'm still working on Houses of Stone. The Nordic Theory of Everything had lots of information about their education and medical systems and why they are so successful, causing the Nordic countries to be ranked among the highest in many desirable traits. It was eye opening. So far, High Adventure is told in an engaging style. They endured so many hardships, but their enthusiasm was relentless. Just the leeches would have made me turn back. Who thinks about leeches and Everest? But they didn't just climb mountains, they traveled many many miles on foot in rugged terrain, across torrential rivers, in monsoons sometimes, before they even got to the mountains they wanted to climb.

So, I convinced Dh to take me to see La La Land tonight because of this thread. I did not expect to do some serious crying. It was very well done but now I need chocolate.

We called it the Hogwart's Reading Academy. 😄 Mind skipped Frog and Toad too. I was sad about some of the books he never read that the others did.

I had repressed this memory. Copy work and dictation, shudder.