Exactly 300 pages yet to go in Alexander Hamilton. I could have it finished by the end of the month if I commit to reading a chapter each night. I may regret having purchased Adams vs. Jefferson since at this point it looks as if AH is going to cover a lot of the same territory in its second half.

Started March last night; two chapters in I already like it lots more than Year of Wonders.

Since it's National Poetry Month and we're celebrating, er, studying poetry every single day, I'm already very tired of hearing S. tell me that he just doesn't like poetry. It's good for your brain, I keep telling him (link via Book Glutton). Yesterday I added Maxine Kumin's Jack to our selection of Wordsworth poems and it was the hit of the day. Of course, it helped that he'd learn to ride on a horse named Jack and that he knows a couple of roans, but hey, we had a wonderful discussion even once we quit with the horse talk.

A huge number of book lists can be found at Lists of Bests.

Saul Bellow died yesterday at the age of 89. Philip Roth credited him--along with William Faulkner-- with providing "the backbone of 20th century American literature." (SF Chron)

Michiko Kakutani writes, "For all the awards Mr. Bellow received in the course of his career, he saw himself as going against the mainstream of contemporary literature, skeptical of the willful aestheticism and postmodern pyrotechnics that had become increasingly fashionable, and equally dismissive of the trendy nihilism evinced by writers he called 'the wastelanders,' those who believe, in his words, that it is 'enlightened to expose, to disenchant, to hate and to experience disgust.' He believed that literature should hew to one of its original purposes - the raising of moral questions - and his own writing remained firmly indebted to the works he had studied as a boy: the Old Testament, Shakespeare's plays and the great 19th-century Russian novels."

Some quick links

Patry Francis writes about having dinner with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson.

A list of Pulitzer winners with reviews/interviews.

Gail Haley, winner of both Caldecott and Kate Greenaway medals for children's books, has donated her medals and an "SUV full" of papers, drawings, and manuscripts to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

In deference to R., who says she hates sites like mine which lure students to them in the hopes of some actual content which they might conceivably put to use in the papers which they have been assigned to write but in actuality offer only LISTS of books read which do such desperately-seeking-substance students NO EARTHLY GOOD: Your Homework Done For Free (via Making Light).

And Michael Berube has some fun at the expense of the Tar Heels.

TAR HEELS RULE

North Carolina 75

Illinois 70

I pretty much read all weekend. The weather wasn't worth going out in and that was all the excuse I needed.

There's actually a poetry competition in The Ionian Mission and later neither Stephen nor Graham are particularly enthused over the prospects of critiquing the poetical compositions of Naval gentlemen intended for actual publication. Good reading for a Friday night.

Caught up on my Don Quixote reading on Saturday and I'm continuing to find it quite enjoyable, to the point that I could easily read on and not limit myself to three chapters a week. I'm toying with reading on to the end of Book One next weekend and then taking a break for a couple months before continuing on with the others. The crew at 400 Windmills have begun their discussion of DQ and it's been both insightful and informative.

Decided I ought to spend some more time with Alexander Hamilton before beginning another novel; I'm now past the midway mark thanks to the time I spent on the bio on Sunday.

Also read the Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and Nell Freudenberger stories from the BASS 2004 collection; I loved how both stories relied heavily on other texts--Tobias Wolff and Ray Bradbury--for much of their resonance.

Don't know if I'll make the time to do more than skip through Diane Ravitch's The Language Police, but I did spend some time with her classical literature sampler for high schoolers at the back of the book.

Also read some stuff online about the Fisher King and found a few books of commentary at the library on "The Waste Land." I need to look for a copy of Tennyson's "The Holy Grail," and according to Harold Bloom, I ought to read Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" as well.

Won two rounds of Mystery Quotes at Readerville--guessed Ian McEwan the first time, recognized a Guy Vanderhaeghe section from The Last Crossing the second.

Another mystery quote

On Sunday morning I examined my safeguards, the box of silver dollars I had buried by the creek, and the doll buried in the long field, and the book nailed to the tree in the pine woods: so long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us. I had always buried things, even when I was small; I remember that once I quartered the long field and buried something in each quarter to make the grass grow higher as I grew taller, so I would always be able to hide there. I once buried six blue marbles in the creek bed to make the river beyond run dry. "Here is treasure for you to bury," C. used to say to me when I was small, giving me a penny, or a bright ribbon: I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

It rhymes, don't it?

"Rowan was a round-faced, bright-eyed young fellow with a rather decided air: Jack had seen enough of him to know that although he was a man of little formal education--a West-Country shipwright's son--he was a competent officer and a great improvement on Somers; but apart from that he had gathered little and now, during a momentary pause in the talk on either side of him, he was surprised to hear Rowan say 'I may not know what a dactyl is, but I do know that Will you take A piece of cake is poetry, whatever you may say. It rhymes, don't it? And if what rhymes ain't poetry, what is?'

"Jack quite agreed; and he was morally certain that Mowett did not know what a dactyl was either, though he loved him dearly."

--Patrick O'Brian, The Ionian Mission

It's National Poetry Month! I've signed up to receive a poem a day in my email.

The Literary Saloon has taken the time pull the rug out from under Katie Roiphe's claim that few 'cept her had seen fit to mention the connections between Ian McEwan's Saturday and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. This New York Times piece about McEwan doesn't mention either Woolf or Tom Wolfe, but links to the Katutani review that does.

At least in the United States loonies who want particular books removed from the shelves usually know that the books in question are actually on the shelves: Orhan Pamuk's detractors in Turkey need to work on that part.

Kazuo Ishiguro's latest, Never Let Me Go, has been getting lots of press. Margaret Atwood's review has made me decide I want to read it sooner rather than later.

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot?

Remember to check out The Ark on Fridays and the Carnival of the Cats on Sundays for a round up of the best and latest pet blogging photos.