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 I like to have three books going at once: one challenging, one light, and one book of poems.

I've started on the novels of Jean Rhys, and that's my challenging one-- not in the sense that she's hard to understand, but that her topics are serious. I'm just beginning, but my first impression is that her style is similar to J.D. Salinger's. I love her use of repetition.

My light one is Dewey by Vicki Myron, the story of a library cat and the woman who cares for him. It's not overly sentimental, but there are a lot of Awww… moments.

And my book of poetry is a rereading of The Essential Rumi translated by Coleman Barks. Rumi is remarkably accessible, considering he lived in Persia 800 years ago.

It's a good idea to read poems at different times in your life. The poem you loved as a teenager and the poem that strikes you as an adult are seldom the same.

Bessie

Excerpted from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, ©1961:

It was a very touch-and-go business, in 1955, to get a wholly plausible reading from Mrs. Glass's face, and especially from her enormous blue eyes.  Where once, a few years earlier, her eyes alone could break the news (either to people or to bathmats) that two of her sons were dead, one by suicide (her favorite, her most intricately calibrated, her kindest son), and one killed in World War II (her only truly lighthearted son)-- where once Bessie Glass's eyes alone could report these facts, with an eloquence and a seeming passion for detail that neither her husband nor any of her adult surviving children could bear to look at, let alone take in, now, in 1955, she was apt to use this same terrible Celtic equipment to break the news, usually at the front door, that the new delivery boy hadn't brought the leg of lamb in time for dinner or that some remote Hollywood starlet's marriage was on the rocks.

There's a certain kind of world-weary sadness where everything hits you hard.