Brooklyn, Pre-Hipster Era

Challenge #6: Read a high school classic over which your K-12 education somehow skipped.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Page Count: 401/493

I’d first like to echo Katherine’s apologies about letting this blog lie fallow for such a long time (see the usual host of excuses, foremost among them being “life”).  Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep it up this time around!

I feel like this is a very appropriate challenge for this time of year.  I don’t know how your schools worked, but, starting in the summer before sixth grade in my district, all students were given a reading list, expected to select one of the titles within, and come into English class on the first day of the new academic year.  I came across some good books this way – Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day comes to mind.

As Katherine mentioned in her post introducing this month’s challenge, there are indeed a lot of stereotypical high school books that neither of us has read.  Originally, I was going to seek out The Catcher in the Rye, but Idle Time Books didn’t have a copy and I had, in any case, head many a complaint about the protagonist’s penchant for whinging.  Instead, Katherine recommended to me A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which is one of those books I always see on Barnes & Noble’s “notable paperbacks” table but have never picked up.

This novel concerns the coming of age of one Francie Nolan in the early twentieth century, when Brooklyn was not yet populated by fixed-gear bikes and organic food co-ops and still home to impoverished immigrant neighbourhoods.  Though nominally fiction, it’s heavily rooted in the author’s own experiences.  I’ve got just under a hundred pages left to read, so I’ll leave all further comments on the book after I am finished with it!

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

And we apologize profusely for the delay. I'm not going to lie, Malin and I got a little lazy with this, but now we're back (hopefully for good) with our June challenge.

Read a high school classic over which your K-12 education somehow skipped.


We decided we definitely needed to bring the blog back for this challenge several weeks ago during a trip to Idle Times Books (a fantastic used bookstore in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC - check it out!), where Malin picked up a copy of A Tree Goes in Brooklyn. I struggled to find something there that I had any interest in reading, and so went home empty-handed to look up suggestions online. I discovered that there were a lot of books that Malin and I were supposed to have read in high school but didn't. I settled on Fahrenheit 451, which turned out to be a very appropriate choice (sad, but appropriate) as Ray Bradbury passed away just a week or so later. 


Fahrenheit 451 is one of those novels that has always been on my internal list of books to read and it actually surprises me that I've never gotten around to it. I'm definitely looking forward to it, as it will also be my introduction to Ray Bradbury (The Illustrated Man has been on my list for a while as well). My plan is to finish it before I leave for a week-long vacation on Wednesday so we'll have to see how that goes!