Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Back to Windows

Now that the party is done with and cleaned up from, I'm back to tearing windows apart. It will be the kitchen first and then the bathroom. The problem with both is that, since I won't be varnishing the woodwork, I have to figure out what colors to paint both rooms. At least with painting rather than varnishing, I take a week off of each piece of woodwork. Not that reglazing the windows doesn't take two weeks alone for the glazing compound to properly set anyway.

Am 40 pages into Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and, though it fits my page length parameters, it won't be on my teaching list for Fall semester. I'm still up for suggestions from all of my fives of readers!

6 comments:

Kristen said...

Party?

Anonymous said...

Anything by Wilkie Collins? Victorian, and I haven't read much, but liked what I read. Just a thought. Just finished Crime and Punishment--not a novella! Great book, though.

Jon Sealy said...

Don't teach them Crime and Punishment. I did that last spring, and it flopped (though I had a blast). Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware and Melville's Billy Budd are two neat old books. If you're looking for something contemporary, this would be a cool syllabus:
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
Delillo's Falling Man
McCarthy's The Road

Anonymous said...

Joseph Conrad's SECRET AGENT isn't exactly short, but it reads quickly and raises a lot of interesting questions about terror(ism) and mental illness.

Anonymous said...

Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" is wonderful (and it's not a plot line I thought I would like), as is anything by Margaret Atwood.

JeffTD said...

Mr. Collins is nice, though a bit long for what you are working with. I read what I could find while doing my Wordsworth Classics reading list while in Romania, and he definitely was enjoyable. Of course, "The Man Who Was Thursday" is also interesting, Chesterton is that author I believe, but it should prove fun. Go for it.