Back to Work! (+ Book Review)

Well, the summer vacation is over.  It was a nice week.  Tomorrow I will be back to a fuller-than-ever tutoring schedule (new students!) and cleaning the house to beat the band (important guests this week!) and prepping for a whopping summer class (let's keep up the A streak!).

I often kill time at a small park in between tutoring sessions.  Isn't this a beautiful scene?

I have become a lemming.  Two separate friends have convinced me to sign up for two separate races over the coming months.  One is a 5K this summer, which we will mostly walk, and I can totally handle.  The other?  A half-marathon. 

{Waiting for this ridiculousness to sink in.  Take your time.}

The Russkie is a bad influence on me.  The only half marathon I've ever done was about three lifetimes ago when we lived in Hawaii and it scarred me for life.  Apparently I'm a lemming with no backbone or capability for independent thought because she has coerced me into doing it again.  Thank G-O-D I have a few months to prepare.

And I bought a bike!  More on that soon.  We're getting one of G's many Tour-de-France style bikes fixed up so we can troll around Denver together.

Ok, quick book review.

For the record, this is what Lucy looks like when I read on the couch.

This is what she looks like when she's pretending to ignore me.

As part of my Willa Cather/American Modernism class, we read a book by Nella Larsen called Passing.  She wrote in the 1920's and was part of the Harlem Renaissance.  Passing was so intriguing because it was about a mulatto woman who was light enough to "pass" for white.  So of course it raised all kinds of race and cultural issues.  It wasn't her first book, though.  I read up on her a bit and discovered that she became famous for her first book about race, called Quicksand.  So I put it on my summer list.

Quicksand by Nella Larsen

Quicksand is the story of Helga, whose mother is white and whose (absent) father is black.  A fierce, not exactly likeable, character, she drifts in and out of black American culture and even Denmark (very white!) culture, trying to fit in, learn about herself, and create a desirable identity.  She is deeply insecure and confounded by racial problems, and never manages to resolve them, although her story is such a fascinating window into early twentieth century life in America.

I really wish Larsen had written more books.  That said, I highly recommend both Passing and Quicksand.  They are entertaining in their own right, and also full of literary themes and material to analyze if that's your thing.

Time to go ride my bike.