Preach it, Mr. Conroy!

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I got to the chapter entitled "A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe," and read the following quote: "The rhythms of his prose style, oceanic and brimming with strange life, infected the way I wrote and thought with an immovable virus I have never been able to shake. It is a well-known fact that I will carefully select four silvery, difficult-to-digest adjectives when one lean, Anglo-Saxon adjective will suffice. [...] Most flaws I have as a man and a writer I can trace directly back to the early influence of Thomas Wolfe: (Conroy 241), Conroy's writing made sense to me.

I have never read any of Conroy's novels, nor have I read anything by Thomas Wolfe, so I had mixed feelings about his (Conroy's) writing style in the first half of the book. His flowery language alternates between feeling dead-on and feeling over the top. A lot of times, it is when he piles on sentence after sentence of the flowery langauge that I get bogged down. I like a few sparse sentences of filler to help my digest the flowers.

Content-wise, I found that My Reading Life has inspired me to go back and read those classics that somehow slipped through the cracks of my reading background. It wasn't until earlier this summer that I read a complete Jane Austen novel, and I'm still making my way through my first Dickens (via audio book). I have yet to tackle Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, but having finished Conroy, I have renewed motivation to try. I know, I know, I should be ashamed to call myself an English teacher.

One of my favorite chapters deals with The Catcher in the Rye, in part because I teach the novel, and in part because he makes a statement about the power of literature and the danger of censorship. Conroy writes: "a great book could do whatever it wanted [...] great books invited argument and disagreement, but ignorance did not even earn a place at the table when ideas where the subject of dispute [...] if [the school board] wanted to ban [The Catcher in the Rye], then the board of education should go ahead and banish all of [the books], because books existed to force people to examine every facet of their lives and beliefs [...] There was nothing to fear in The Catcher in the Rye except the danger of its being censored by people who hadn't read it" (53-54).

Amen, Mr. Conroy. Preach it!

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Happily Ever Hovland



Wedding Palooza 2011

 They tied the knot. It went off WITH a hitch. It's a done deal. The Hovlands are happily ever after!

And it was beautiful.

I arrived at Wedding Palooza the Wednesday before The Big Day (Wedding Palooza had already begun the previous Thursday after Bekah and Melissa both finished their respective schooling, testing, and working). It was a pleasant surprise because my Wednesday class got cancelled, so I met my mom, Melissa, and Bekah at Taste of Thai for lunch. Wednesday afternoon: Mostly errand running and house cleaning.

Thursday, the house cleaning and errand running picked up. Jess was home by then, and she came over to Bekah's with the wedding dress so it could get pressed. Which was lucky for me because I wasn't motivated to go running until she showed up in running shoes. So we ran. Until it started raining. But it gave me a chance to listen to some more Great Expectations. I downloaded a free audio recording on Librivox and I am slowly but surely making my way through the entire 500 pages, audio-style, all while I run. I calculated it the other day, and I've listened to about 7 hours (out of a total of 20). At this rate, it will only take me another 6 months to finish it.

Thursday evening is when the real celebrations began. MOH Melissa planned the most creative bachelorette party in which I have ever taken part. Over the course of 3 hours, we hit 12 different locations. Four of those locations were courses of dinner:

Aunt Sally made appetizers

Salad at Aunt Rita's

Main dish--Mom!

And back to Me's for dessert--YUM!

But that was only four. The other locations were all over Springfield.

Each person got a clue, and each clue had a letter, and the letters led us to different locations. But that' not all. They also spelled something....

Too much fun, right? And this is just the beginning of the weekend.

Friday started bright and early the next morning with a day full of decorating. The church. The reception hall. It probably would have been easy had we not had to rearrange the entire reception hall because of a misunderstanding with the caterer regarding how many people would be sitting at each table. But by the end, Bekah and I decided we could definitely make it if we ever needed to arrange tables and chairs aesthetically for a living. We had just enough time after table arranging to run back to Melissa's (let Bekah in the house since she didn't have her key) and shower for the rehearsal. We rehearsed. Without Casey, who got stranded at the church WITH a dog, but withOUT a car. We ate. Then back to the reception hall for decoration. After a 14 hour day, I collapsed into bed thinking, Wow, we haven't even had the wedding yet. And at the point that I fell asleep, Bekah and Melissa were still at the church finishing those decorations.

Eight hours of sleep did wonders for me. I woke Saturday refreshed and ready for a wedding. All the hard work paid off from Friday so pre-wedding Saturday was quite relaxing. Aside from hair appointments, we really had no schedules but for the ceremony at 2:30 pm. Somehow, though, I still managed to show up late to the church. I rushed to get into my dress, thinking we are about to start pictures, and thus added an unnecessary 2 hours to the I-can't-breathe portion of my day. See, when I got my wedding dress fitted, I thought it was going to be too tight, so I requested that it be taken out a bit, only to end up spending half of my wedding day pulling up my dress because it kept sliding down. So, learning from past mistakes, I decided I would just sacrifice breathing (who needs to do that, really?) this time so that I wouldn't have to worry about a loose-fitting dress. In fact, my dress was so well-fitted that when my mom fastened the clip at the top of the zipper before zipping my dress, I popped the fastener off with a last deep breath before the zip. Oops! Better than popping a seam, or the zipper, I guess.

The pictures before the ceremony didn't happen. At least not professional pictures. Instead, I wandered around the church, taking my own pictures (see below) and learning how to not-breathe.



Dani and Emma practicing

All that hard work made for a gorgeous church!

Finally, the time came. There was music. There were tears (Not only did I cry profusely, I also forgot a tissue and had to stand up at the front of the church with a tear-streaked face for the entire service). There were vows. There was the kiss. There was the mandatory bubble picture.

Mandatory bubble picture

Then, there was the reception. It was a blast. I had more fun at Bekah and Trenton's reception than I did at my own. No pressure of being the bride. Just lots of dancing. Somehow, I also managed to eat without ripping my dress. So the night was a success. As was the weekend. I'm a fan of having sisters get married. People kept congratulating my parents: Only two more to go, while I kept thinking, Only two more??? :(

I remember My Natalie Friend's wedding. It was the first wedding I had ever been a part of more than the showing up for the ceremony and reception. It's a totally different wedding experience. From the moving of tables to the making of slideshows (and groom's cakes), from the gluing of pew bows to the un-gluing of all those flowers from all those rocks (and an entire reception hall, when it was all over), it's one of those rites of passage as a sister. And a friend. To be a part of the beginning of a new life. It's breathtaking (in my dress, quite literally). It's magical.

Happily ever Hovland!

P.S. I couldn't find a good place to put this information into my above post, so I'll just add it here. Isn't my husband one good lookin' fella? Check out the picture of us in the collage at the beginning. HOT! :)