in the middle

I'm in the middle of several books right now - can't just keep it to one. I remember a professor at W&L once telling me that she would read five or six books at time, and I couldn't remotely fathom that. Well, here I am, stewing over which one to pick up this morning. To add to the pile, I really want to get Rick Bragg's new book The Prince of Frogtown, which is a memoir about this father. If you haven't read Rick Bragg yet, go now to half.com and order anything you can get your hands on. He is that good. I still think he has one of the best first lines ever in Ava's Man. He opens by describing his grandmother: "She was old all my life." Ahh. See what I mean?

So what I will probably pick up this am is Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I'm teaching this right after March in my War in American Literature course this fall. I had no idea whether or not I would be able to play these two off of each other, but already I'm seeing some good connections, which makes me so incredibly excited about this class. I find this novel devastating. All that beauty and terror in such razor-thin prose. Yesterday I read the part where Lieutenant Henry gets wounded by a mortar shell and braves the ambulance ride to the field hospital, and I had to go down for a two-hour nap afterwards. It just knocked me out. Hopefully it will not have the same effect on my students.