Italy and China

I devoured the two books, "Women of the Silk" and "The Birth of Venus" in a few days. I can feel the pace of school slow as Christmas break approaches. I have more time to read.

Or did I read them so fast as a challenge to myself. To see if I can enter the world of a book so utterly that my mundane world disappears. I pester my children to read. They resist. They would rather enter the easy world of internet games, communities and youtube.

So I was wondering if I too had lost that ability to dissolve into a book. No. Or at least not yet.
Both of these books relate to other things I have read in the past.

I picked up "Women of the Silk" because my IV form students had just finished an Amy Tan story about a narrator going home to discover two half-sisters she did not know she had. The time period of the novel is the same as the mother' s past -- set in China during the Japanese occupation.

The second book "The Birth of Venus" is told as a memoir by a woman living in fourteenth-century Florence. This is the same time period as flashback story in "The Rule of Four" and the biography of Machiavelli.

Mind candy both.

I think I will read "Villette" over break. Or maybe "Main Street."