I'm in the middle of a buddy read. Well, to be more precise, I'm a third of the way into a buddy read. My daughters and I are reading this trilogy (a reread for three of us, a new read for Ramona):
Ramona has never read this series. What??
But she decided this was the summer to dive in. So Anne-with-an-e, Betsy, and I decided to jump in and reread them, too. Not that we need an incentive to stay in close to touch with the now-married-and-living-elsewhere Betsy, but we all decided that buddy reads would be a fun aspect of our in-touch-staying. And we're just about ready for our discussion of the first book. I can't wait!
The Hunger Games series has a long history in our house. Some of my thoughts on the entire series are here.
And then there was the time that Betsy finished Mockingjay and woke me up at 2:30 a.m. to discuss it. Which I happily did.
And in this discussion of Mockingjay, then-8-yr.-old Ramona left this comment on the blog:
Ramona here, dictating to Betsy:I personally have never read The Hunger Games, but, I don't want to have anything to do with it. At all. Whatsoever. Because I do not want to have anything to do with it, I very much loathe Karen Edmisten. So I say farewell to all of you, and I love you very much.Dramatization. I really actually love Karen Edmisten.
Obviously, she was not allowed to read them at that age, so she greatly disliked how much everyone else was talking about them. I can't blame her for feeling like she wasn't part of the club. But now, she's in the club. She's almost finished with the first book and can't wait to get to Catching Fire. And I can't wait to have all sorts of rich discussion again.
As Stephen King said, "Books are a uniquely portable magic."
Billy Collins captures the magic, too, in his practically-perfect-in-every-way poem, "Books."
Books
by Billy Collins
From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
an immense choir of authors muttering inside their books
....
(Read the whole thing here, at the Poetry Foundation.)
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Be sure to visit Kat Apel for the Poetry Friday round-up.
