Thursday

This year there has been a theme to my reading habits I think I am going to encourage over the next eleven months, within reason. This is in no way a resolution. I've often noted definite holes in my well-readness: important books from the formative reading years that have somehow slipped between the cracks. This subject recently arose when I revealed that I've never read Catch 22. While I was chugging doggedly away at the collected works of Shakespeare my fourteenth summer, I was not reading Joseph Heller. As I forced down Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness, I was also somehow ignoring Jane Austin. Even back when I was reading about Paddington the Bear, I was not reading about Peter Pan. Last year I read Crime and Punishment and the Comedians. So far this year I've read Harper Lee and am poised to read Henry James. So I'm currently into a theme of reading missed classics, I guess. I loved To Kill a Mockingbird, by the way. There's a scene in that book that is very much like today. I was woken-up early this morning because it was snowing in Greensboro, North Carolina. The snow was supposed to fall a few hours before turning into freezing rain that would not accumulate as the day warmed. I stayed up an hour, and then went back to sleep until this afternoon. The rain must never have happened because there is still snow on the ground at four. In Harper Lee's Maycomb, Alabama, it snowed the morning of Miss Maudie's house fire. A southern flurry, it was only enough for Scout and Jem to make a snowman out of mud to then encase in packed snow culled from several local yards. Today is like that in my own southern town. [Cavin]