Beloved

May I just say that I love Toni Morrison? She is absolutely brilliant. For those of you who do not know, Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. In my English class, we are reading "Beloved," and it is seriously one of the best books I've ever read. It's about a woman who escaped from slavery and the things she did to ensure her freedom. Some of those things were unforgivable.

Online classes are a bit of a challenge in that your discussions are done in an online exchange and you don't have the benefit of voice inflection, expression, and rambling to help you make a point. I've been impressed by my classmate's ability to make me see things differently. I tend to understand the books with layers of inferred or hidden meaning, but sometimes you "meet" someone who gets it at a level that makes reading a book an event. So thank you, classmates, for the enlightenment.

The other writer I discovered is Zora Neale Hurston. You may have heard of her novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," and the movie with Halle Berry was pretty good. But the book is fabulous. A bit hard to read at the outset because she uses the dialog to get the Southern black inflection, but once you pick up the cadence, the story is amazing.

How's this for a first line:

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

Wow. If you are looking for something to read this summer, give it a try. It is a story about an unforgettable, strong woman, and I kind of like those stories. You might like it too.

Peace,

Jo Taylor