Wednesday's Word

Photo by veneman

Passel: noun--a group or lot of indeterminate number

I found today's word as I was reading to the boys tonight--good to know that children's books build vocabulary, too!

Wednesday's Word

Coruscate by Dance in the Kitchen

I came across this word in C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (which I am currently reading).

Coruscate: v. poetic/literary (of light) flash or sparkle: the light was coruscating from the walls. >early 18th cent.: from Latin coruscat- 'glittered,' from verb coruscare.

An Old Favorite

I Love to Read by Carlos Porto

I've been in a bit of a reading funk lately, but finally returned to C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet last week. There's something about rain and cool weather that makes me seek out my comfort books.

C.S. Lewis is probably better known for The Chronicles of Narnia, but he has many other excellent books written for adults, too, including a sci-fi trilogy (which Out of the Silent Planet is the first). Originally published in 1943, Lewis paints an extraordinary picture of space travel, and as he is a Christian writer, he often delves deeper and takes the reader beyond reading for pleasure. Here's a passage I read the other night that's still lingering with me (Ransom is the protagonist of the novel):

They were falling out of the heaven, into a world. Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom's mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets--the 'earths' he called them in his thought--as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven--excluded and rejected waste of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void, the real death? Unless...he groped for the real idea...unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths...

Some of my other favorite works by C.S. Lewis are The Four Loves and Til We Have Faces. And, of course, I do indulge in reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from time to time.

Wednesday's Word

1907 webster dictionary by jbrownell

I don't think I'll ever be one of those bright-and-early bloggers, but better late than never, right? Here's this week's word:

alacrity: n. brisk and cheerful readiness.

I will wake up at 6 a.m. and change my toddler's diaper with alacrity!

Check This Out: Three-Minute Book Club

I subscribe to a blog called Conversion Diary about a Texas woman who was once a very anti-Christian atheist and recently converted to Catholicism. She just started a blog segment called the Three-Minute Book Club and posted about Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain, a book I've been wanting to read for a long time. She includes a excerpt in which Merton talks about his desire for publication in his early adult years--something I need to take to heart.

I was first introduced to Thomas Merton through the book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, an interwoven biography about Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy, all Catholic writers. My husband Chris gave the book to me as a gift a few years ago, and although it's quite a heavy read (all 554 pages of it), I ate it up. From there I went on to devour Flannery O'Connor's short stories, Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness, and Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation. I haven't read any of Percy's work as of yet, but I hear his National Book Award-winning novel, The Moviegoer, (set in New Orleans) is excellent. So check out the Three-Minute Book Club and some of these books!

The Plath Cabinet

Forgive me for the poor photo, but I was so excited to find this book at the library yesterday that I had to share it with you this morning. I've had the pleasure of working with the poet Catherine Bowman when I worked at Gemini Ink and have been eagerly awaiting the release of her new collection, The Plath Cabinet. Instead of trying to describe the book in my own words, I'll share Bowman's own:

These inklings, riffs, and big-picture imaginings celebrate, investigate, and improvise on the life and work of Sylvia Plath. They are based on her published and unpublished work, as well as hearsay and real-life events. Several poems in the collection came out of my meanderings through the Sylvia Plath materials housed in the Lilly Library, the rare books, manuscripts, and special collections library at Indiana University, Bloomington. I spent many a pleasurable and snowy afternoon with the Plath materials, looking at the drafts, letters, photographs, and memorabilia. It is difficult to express the tenderness evoked by spending time with this repository of feelings, this locked cabinet of things that Plath touched or created--a tenderness that softens the dominant vision of Plath as icon frozen in time, reduced to a definitive set of contours--tragic, brilliant, fully and finally processed. This book was a way for me to get to know Sylvia Plath, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity. The textures revealed by the archive, the life revealed by and embodied in these objects--the diary, her braid, her instructions to her children's nanny, her paper dolls, her passport, her marginalia, her own artwork--offer, I hope, another way to go back to Plath as well as go forward: an unofficial biography, an unofficial life.

Hunt down a copy of this book and read some poetry!

Wednesday's Word

Alphabet 03 by Leo Reynolds

Abecedarian (pronounced a-b-c-darian):

adjective
1. arranged alphabetically : in abecedarian sequence.
2 rudimentary; elementary : abecedarian technology.

noun
a person who is just learning; a novice.

Today's word was inspired by a copy of A Peacable Kingdom: The Shaker Abecedarius we came across in the van-load of free books we brought home last week. The pictures and text are sweet and who can turn down a free book?