For anyone who has read Clockwork Angel, Clockwork Prince was incredible. If you haven’t read either of these (by Cassandra Clare), then you should. Clare also wrote the Mortal Instruments series, of which the first three are pretty good. 

This break will be dedicated to The Hobbit after I zip through Madeleine L’Engle’s And Both Were Young, which is shaping up nicely. Her novel A Ring of Endless Light is one of my favorites. Coincidentally, I went to camp with her grand-niece. 

1. I am still working my way through The Hobbit. Slow going because I don’t have a lot of time, but it is very good. 

2. I just read a book called The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. It was magical. I had to choose a personal reading book for english so I read this. An appetizer for a book that you have to read: 

Le Cirque de Reves is a battle ground, a playing field and the most magical place in the world. It opens at night fall and closes at dawn and you never know what adventures you might have in between. It is created for the sole purpose of providing a setting for a magical competition that can only end one way. The creators of the circus are all infinitely linked to one another and to the circus itself. It attracts hundreds of followers who continually find something new when they return over and over. The cast of characters is a motley group of talented individuals all working to fuel the competition between Marco and Celia. Desperately in love, can they find a way to end the competition together? A romance, an adventure and a fantasy, The Night Circus is full of magical imagery that I still cannot get rid of. It is full of amazing quotes, my favorite is: “The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not” (Morgenstern, 1). 

The competition almost reminds me of the Hunger Games and the need to find an alternative to the plan laid out by the people in charge. 

3. I went to a bookstore in Hunter, NY. (I have made it a goal to find a bookstore in every new place that I go to and to buy a book there.) There, I bought a collection of selected poems by T.S. Eliot and I have been reading one every night before I go to sleep. It is like swimming through mud. Beautiful mud, but it is hazardous nonetheless. I sometimes will get to the middle of the poem and realize that I have no idea what it is about because it follows such a circuitous path. I’ve been experimenting with poetry myself and I am finding that good poetry is hard. Anyone who ever said that poetry is easy was lying. I am reading these poems many times and I find that that helps a bit. I quite like the structure of his poems and I find the language graceful. 

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/65338.Selected_Poems 

So if my copy of The Hobbit is out there somewhere, please come back… I would like to read you :/ 

This is very delayed…

I finished Gatsby. I loved it. I loved the setting and the writing. I really liked the narrator and the narrative technique that Fitzgerald used. It was interesting that Carraway was both an outsider and intimate with the main characters. 

I think the irony at the end of the novel is incredible. The wife, Daisy, unintentionally killed her husband’s mistress. Consequently, the husband of the mistress killed his wife’s paramour. So, he wrongly avenged the death of his wife and at the same time helped Tom Buchanan (his wife’s paramour) in 2 ways.  He got got his wife, Mrs. Buchanan, off the hook and got rid of her paramour in one fell swoop. 

On a final note, I think Buchanan was totally unjustified in being sensitive about his wife and Gatzby. He was having an affair as well. 

I think that there is more to explore, as there is in every book, in Gatzby, but for now I will move on to the next book: The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein