A Beautiful Book

Hi, I'm Leeann, and I judge books by their covers. A lot.

It drives my friend Danielle crazy, but I decide if I want to read a book based off the front cover (and occasionally the back cover). Headless girl on the front? I'm probably not going to read it. Dripping blood? Pass.

It works the other way, too. Like when Jordan showed me her new books from Puffin in Bloom, I fell in love. Bright script, flower borders and accents, illustrated interpretations of the characters--I couldn't say no.

Anna Rifle Bond of Rifle Paper Company designed these covers for Puffin, and she did an amazing job (obviously- just look at that lettering! #stationarynerd #iusehashtagsoutofcontext). When I went to select from the four titles currently available, my eye was drawn to the bright blue cover of Anne of Green Gables. The last time I read this book I was a little girl myself, so it seemed like the perfect choice in a series about growing up. In my Amazon cart it went and two days later, it was love.

What beautiful books do you love?

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Below the Line

• Homework. It's a thing. So it goes.
• I wrote my first creative non-fiction essay this week. There are parts of it I know still need work, but there's one scene I'm really proud of. It's a Christmas scene, so I turned on my Christmas iTunes playlist and pounded the keys. It left me with an amazing feeling. It's nice to remember why you love something once in a while :)
• Also, really psyched for my history presentation Tuesday. Another project I know I'm going to enjoy working on.
• Calling all book lovers! What are your favorite books of all time and what is your favorite snack/drink to have with it? Leave a comment below, or send me a message from the "Let's Chat" tab. It's for prosperity (of this blog ;)).

My 10 Most Important Books

There's a tag roaming around my Facebook feed where a person is nominated to list 10 books that have been very important to their life. My dear "big sister" (sorority slang) Emily tagged me August 26th, so my list is well overdue!

So, without further ado, the 10 books that have been very important to my life:

1. The Great Gatsby (I did devote a whole post to it ;))
2. The American Girl series (Samantha in particular)
3. Junie B. Jones (JBJ Has a Peep in Her Pocket is a particular favorite)
4. Harry Potter (with a special shout out to number 5)
5. Nancy Drew Mysteries (and the Nancy Drew Notebooks and Nancy Drew, Girl Detective versions)
6. Pride and Prejudice (my first love in classical literature)
7. "The Kissing Hand" (a meaningful family favorite)
8. Our Town (the play that made me love reading plays)
9. The Care and Keeping of You (everything 12-year-old me needed to know)
10. Tenth of December (one day, I want to write like George Saunders)

What are your 10 most important books?

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Below the Line:

• Still lots of homework to be done. I have two papers to write for Tuesday so if I don't get a post out, that's why :)
• This list was surprisingly hard to write! I really had to dig back into my memories to find the books that really meant something to me.
• Not much else to report. Mostly just school work going on around here!

What I'm Reading Fall Semester 2014

Remember back when I said my course load included 30 books this semester? I'm going to regale you with a list of all of them.

When I thought of this post, I was super excited about telling you all about the books I get to read this semester. Now that I'm thinking about it, this could be really boring to anyone not related to me. So I'm going to excite you all with awesome pictures, witty writing, and the promise of an update of school so far in this issue of "Below the Line."

(Also, disclaimer: classes are still subject to change. One stack of these might be replaced with another.)

So now that you're hooked...

Let's begin:

Nature Writing

Only a shocking two books for this class:

• Wildbranch, edited by  Florence Caplow and  Susan A.Cohen. A collection of nature writings. Hopefully they'll inspire my own :)
• The Book of Yaak, by Rick Bass. Any idea how to pronounce Yaak? I've been going with "yak," like the big, wooly animal.

Environmental Crisis Lit

Now that I've eased you in with my Nature Writing class load...

• Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson. A classic I "read" last semester and that I'm going to try to "skim in-depth" this semester.
• Odds Against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich. The odds against this book are low- it looks interesting.
• Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver. I am SO PUMPED for this book. It had me at "Kingsolver."
• The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Wind 'er up and watch 'er go!
• Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, by Daniel Quinn. Ooooo, an adventure!
• Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, by Janisse Ray. I read her essay collection Wild Card Quilt last semester and really enjoyed it. I have high hopes for her first book.
• Body Toxic, by Susanne Antonetta. Judging from the summary on the back, it sounds like one depressing book. Then again, I am in a class about environmental crises.
• Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. I read this last semester and wasn't the biggest fan. I'm not really into apocalyptic literature, and this didn't do anything to change my mind.
• The Future of Life, by Edward Wilson. The future of life is about doom and destruction. (Or at least, that's what most books seem to say.)
• Gain, by Richard Powers. I have a feeling Gain is really about losing.

U.S. Women's History: 1700-1900 (the potential change)

And we move into our history half of this post:

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, by Lori D. Ginzberg. Something tells me this is a biography... (Title: D).
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs. A primary document- historians love that stuff.
• Women's Rights Emerges within Antislavery Movement, by Kathryn Kish Sklar. Really a bunch more documents, in disguise. Don't get me wrong, I love reading this stuff. There's just not much to say about them before reading :)
• Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, by Rose Cohen. Out of the shadows of this book list comes a really intriguing autobiography!
• A Midwife's Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. There are babies, and blood, and a heck of a lot of screaming.
• Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford, by (you got it) Mollie herself. She went to the West and lived to write about it.
• To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War, by Tera Hunter. I'm pretty sure this will rile up the feminist in me. Oh joy.

Civil War/Reconstruction

With such a clever class name, surely the book list will be awesome:

• For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, by James M. McPherson. Famous author, known for analysis- not for titles.
• Great Speeches, by THE Abraham Lincoln. He said a lot of good stuff, so someone wrote it down.
• The Last Best Hope of Earth, by Mark Neely, Jr. Spoiler alert: it's Lincoln.
• A Short History of Reconstruction, by Eric Foner. Another famous historian, this time we turn to the one with the Reconstruction obsession.
• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, by Drew Gilpin Faust. Oh. A cherry fellow, Faust.
• The Confederate War, by Gary W. Gallagher. The Southern perspective, something this Northerner doesn't get much of.
• The Fate of Their Country, by Michael F. Holt. The U.S. was fated...but for what? (ooo intrigue).
• Civil War Stories, by Ambrose Bierce. So what was it really like at the front, Bierce?
• The South vs. The South, by William W. Freehling. An interesting argument about how the South was its own undoing.
• Half Slave and Half Free, by Bruce Levine. But neither fully one or the other.
• Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed. by Eric Foner. A collection of documents to motivate me to see "a new perspective!"

So that's it for this semester! It's quite a load, but I only have a few more books this semester than I did last semester, so I think I can keep up (fingers crossed!)

What books are you reading for school? Do any of these books look interesting to you?

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Below the Line:

•  Classes are getting under my skin already (stress levels are high). Welcome back to college!
• On that note, I'm going to do my best to keep up the twice a week schedule. But bare with me if posts don't go up every Tuesday and Friday morning. I'll keep you updated.
• After attending each of my classes, I'm really excited for the Civil War course. The professor is really passionate about the material and has structured the class in a way that fits my learning style. The rest of them... well, I just need to get adjusted to being back at school. :)

Reading for Fun in College

Let me be blunt: you won't have time to read for fun at college if you don't make time. I have 30 books assigned for next semester. THIRTY. 

So disclaimer: I probably will not be reading for fun this semester. These tips are more for people with reasonable reading assignments or who would rather give up eating than pleasure reading. And while no, I won't selecting what I read until December, most of the books I have to read are still great reading material. I typically like most of them. No textbooks for the English/History major!

But I digress. You're here because you want know how to read for fun at college. Or maybe you've just found yourself busy with your job, your high school work, your newborn baby, your car, your yard work- you get the picture- and want to fit reading into your schedule. Look no further: here's what you should try.

The most important thing to do is choose a book that can be easily put down for several weeks. It will be extremely difficult to read your book continuously over a couple of days. Last year, I brought along Life is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman to school. Over the course of the semester, I could pick up this book with weeks in between and not feel lost because of its building plot and memorable story.

I highly recommend any "auto-biographical" or "memoir" type book for that reason. It's fairly easy to jump in after being away for a long period of time. A couple other options are Ellen DeGeneres's Seriously...I'm Kidding (just don't listen to it as an audio book- surprisingly a bad idea) and Barbara Kingsolver's High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never.

You should also set aside a certain time to read. Even the most die-hard readers struggle to pick up a book spontaneously when faced with unfinished assignments and unread emails. In the past, I've set Saturday mornings as reading time. It worked maybe once. But I have generally stuck with Saturday mornings as my "chill" time. If I have a book I want to read during chill time, I totally can, guilt free. You can choose whatever time or frequency you want; it's all about what works best for you.

Finally, use your book as a reward. Tell yourself "if I finish this chapter before dinner, I can read Life is So Good for 30 minutes." Or, when the procrastination is running strong, tell yourself that every minute spent on Twitter is a minute lost on reading time. When you get your work done, you won't feel as guilty for taking time to read as you would when a blank Word document stares you in the face.

How do you find time to read for fun? What books do you recommend? I'd love to hear your suggestions!

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Below the Line:

• Another great post on this subject is by Katie at My College Advice. She writes more about why you should keep reading in college.
• I FINALLY FOUND THE PLANNER. Whoosh, that was a frustrating, stressful process. I'll reveal my choice in another back-to-school post next week.
• The clock is ticking on summer days, and I have quite a bit left to do. Like the big stack of books next to my full bookshelf that still needs a home. And the stack of boxes in front of my closet. And all the blog posts I was going to write and plan ahead...