Brown Girl Dreaming

 I'm embarrassed to admit that Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming wasn't on my radar until the National Book Awards--but having read it, I think it fully deserves the recognition and wish I'd heard about it earlier.

In lovely, accessible free verse, Woodson recounts a childhood in three places: Ohio, South Carolina, and New York. She paints a vivid, moving picture of each place and the friends and family that made up her life. The story is engaging on so many levels: Woodson's struggles with literacy (and school in general) and her passionate fascination with words. The emerging civil rights movement and how it affected her and her family. A glimpse into her life as a Jehovah's Witness, which complicates in interesting ways our cultural assumptions about what it means to grow up black in the South.

The book was a relatively quick read, but so compelling: I rooted for the young Jackie and I think her story is an important one, both for the personal relationships it explores and for what it adds to the national dialogues about Civil Rights era history.

My Life in Middlemarch

I love George Eliot's Middlemarch--always have, since I was first introduced to it as a sophomore in college. I wrote a lengthy contextual paper for that course, and wound up writing my honor's thesis on the book. Each time I read it, I'm amazed by Eliot's grasp of character and her insight into the human condition. And this was one of the first books I remember really seeing myself in the characters (both Dorothea, who one of my nieces is named after, and the sensible Mary Garth).

So when I first read about Rebecca Mead's book, I was intrigued, to say the least. The book is hard to categorize: part literary analysis, part biography of Eliot, part memoir, part book history.

While Mead can occasionally come across as a bit stuffy in the memoir part, I recognized myself in a lot of her experiences (the overly ambitious bookish teenager).  And I fully related to her account of finding herself in Middlemarch. I've done that myself, multiple times.

This isn't a book that will appeal to audiences looking for a quick, fast-paced read--but for those who are interested in the ways that books deeply affect the way we live our lives, this is a terrific read. Interesting, insightful, and smart, this book reminded me of all the reasons why I love reading. (And, not incidentally, why I loved Middlemarch so much).