Recent Reads

I just finished reading My Antonia by Willa Cather. It was on my List of Books to Read Someday, and since it's both by a NE author and about NE living, right around the time I moved here is as good a time as any to read it. Possibly the best time, actually.

I enjoyed the book because Cather has a knack for capturing emotions really well, especially giving a voice to some of those hard-to-capture ones that run deep and pure within us. The main one is the love and appreciation for a true friend and how that friendship carries with you wherever you go. It's closely followed by the way she reflects a love for home that follows a boy through his childhood and into his adult life as well even after he moves away.

This was one of those books whose pages were comfortable to be wandering through, calming to take in, and which were left in my mind even hours after I set the book down. It wasn't so gripping that I had to gulp it down; it was a good book to linger with, to set down and stare out the window contemplating before picking it up again. Sometimes that's exactly the kind of book our minds and hearts need.

What really got me was the character of Antonia herself. I love reading books with characters whom I would love to have as a real friend, and this girl's one of them. She reminds me of a lot of the women in my life, actually, and I think that's why I like her so much. When Jim, the boy telling the story, goes back to visit her many years later, here's what he said about her:

She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true...she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.