RAE’S READS

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This year (2025) finds me with 53 years of teaching “under my belt.” I have taught all levels from pre-K “(library lady” or “book lady”–volunteer) to juniors, seniors, and graduate students enrolled in my Advanced Writing class at the university where I have just completed 34 years. My first paying teaching job was junior high, and I spent 13 years with ages 12-13, the “difficult years.” I had some of the “funnest” experiences with this age group. When I was no longer the “young, fun teacher,” I taught in an elementary school setting before sixth graders went on to junior high, teaching language arts blocs, an assignment that was a “dream-fit” for me. After completing graduate school in my 40s, I went on to community college, then university teaching. This past fall I accepted a part-time teaching job at Apogee Gulf Coast Schools in its first year at the Alvin campus. After my Better Half died n 2022, I achieved a lifelong dream: opening a bookstore of my own, Rae’s Reads. A year later, I sold the house we had lived in for 47 years and moved into the bookstore. My goal is to circulate and repurpose books. Just as teaching is “in my blood,” so is a passion for reading, writing, libraries, and everything bookish. This blog will be open to anyone who loves books, promotes literacy and wants to “come out and play.”

  • SATURDAY MORNINGS FOR KIDS

    It is not unusual for neighbors to place books they’ve read in my Little Free Library. Interestingly, some books are lovingly worn from re-reading, some are books assigned for the current semester at the local schools, and some are obviously the products of someone’s attempts to clean out clutter or downsize. The other day, some wonderful, anonymous neighbor (I have my suspicions as to who you are.) donated three brand-spanking-new copies of Gordon Kramer’s ReStart. I vaguely remember a car stopping to chat mentioning Kramer, a YA author, whom I registered a “mental memo” about to “get with it” and look for at Half Price Books, but the person in the car evidently bought three copies of this wonderful book first before I could act on it. (Obviously, I am guessing as to who did this good deed.)

    The book was the best YA novel I have read this year. It was so good that I put a crease in the paperback cover because I kept holding it up while reclining on my back, not wanting to turn out the light and sleep! The subtitle is, “Lose your memory…find your life.” Fourteen-year-old Chase “comes to” in a hospital to discover that he doesn’t know anything–anything! The doctors tell him he fell off a roof, and he meets people he doesn’t remember, his mother, father, brother, and two big football players who inform him they are his best friends. When Chase returns to eighth grade, “Some kids treat him as a hero; some kids are clearly afraid of him.” Who is Chase? His attempts to find out and what he does find out about the kind of person he was is a zany, funny, read with plenty of “mysteries,” complications, puzzles, and many revelations.

    ReStart talks to teens directly, yet never lectures or preaches. I am sure kids will enjoy the book as much as I did.

  • FACES OF OPPRESSION AND THE PRICE OF JUSTICE, A Woman’s Journey from Eritrea to Saudi Arabia and Then The United States: A Review

    Published in 2017 by Dewit O. Woldu and Irvin Bromall, this “composite story” reflects refugees’ experiences in seeking asylum in the USA.  Woldu relays the story of “Natsnet” who journeyed from Eritrea to Saudi Arabia, then finally to Florida. The book is a personal ethnography dealing with abuse of human rights and the “burdens that refugees on our shores carry with them.” Natsnet fled from the “traumas of war and political repression in Eritrea to the gendered and sexual violence accompanying her work as a live-in maid,” in Saudia Arabia. When I thought, “Thank goodness, she is in the U.S!” the author details the “obstacles and cultural biases of the bureaucracy ” of the confusing, molasses-slow processes of immigration control and the slow-grind of the U.S. judicial system. As a reader, this was all new information to me. My heart began to align with immigrants from all countries seeking asylum as Natsnet experienced depression, irritation, suspicion, and hopelessness as she tried to start her new life.

    Much academically-acceptable research went into Woldu’s statistics presented in the book, but the personification of the plight of refugees/asylum seekers are his own. He carries this off well, engaging those of us who were unaware/uneducated, which surely was his intent.

    This book made a huge difference in my thinking and in my life. Not only was Dewit Woldu a colleague at the university where I taught, but his passion comes across in his teaching and in conversations.  I remember asking, “What can I do? Can I write a check to help?”   His reply was a kind admonition to make a difference in small ways within my own town.   My first step was to read articles in The Houston Chronicle on human trafficking and become aware of issues where my provinciality handicapped me. Last Christmas (2018) I began reading The Newcomers, as a first step to educate myself on how I, as a retired teacher/professor could help. (I will review the book on this site soon.) Today, I am assisting a friend who teaches Basic ESL at the Alvin Family Community Center. Some of our students are seeking asylum; some are applying for a GED or U.S. Citizenship, and all are very grateful for any instruction/encouragement.

    I highly recommend Faces to anyone who wants to be reminded of what people will do to achieve a better life for themselves and their children; maybe it will make a difference in your life too.

  • WORDS OF WISDOM WEDNESDAY: WORDS ON WRITING

    These quotes about writing have come my way over time, and I wish to share them with my blogging friends.

    “Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under their skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities, and have them relate to other characters living within him.”   (Mel Brooks)

    “Most people carry their demons around with them, buried down, deep inside. Writers wrestle their demons to the surface, fling them out on the page, then call them characters.”   (C.K. Webb)

    “Writing, real writing should leave a small, sweet bruise somewhere on the writer … and also on the reader.” (Clarissa Pinkola Este, b.1945, American poet who often writes poems about women)

    “Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skill.” (Rod Serling, Twilight Zone)

    And, finally, good advice for any writer, “The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”  (Henry Green, pseudonym, English author and novelist.)

  • CONTINUING TO CELEBRATE NATIONAL POETRY MONTH–APRIL 2019

    Rae Longest's avatarLiteracy and Me

    One goal I had for celebrating National Poetry Month this year was to read a whole book/collection of poetry. This is turning out to be a demanding task. The book I chose was Jennifer A. Payne’s Evidence of Flossing, a photo essay of “what we’ve left behind” and poems of various themes which she has ingeniously intertwined and connected. My problem is, it is impossible not to reread many of her poems and take time digesting them, meditating on them, and sometimes even seeking to apply them to my daily life.

    For example, the ode to daybreak titled, “So begins the day,” so mirrors the start of my mornings that I have read it almost every morning since I encountered the poem in her book.

    So Begins the Day

    the 4am

    Sanskrit chant

    has nothing

    on the bird chorus

    that begins

    two hours into my day

    (the sun is silent)

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  • TUESDAY TEASER, ​THE MASTERPIECE by Fiona Davis

    I am reading a fantastic book by Fiona Davis, a novelist from New York, who has written three novels, all set in iconic New York buildings erected during the 1920s and 1930s. The Dollhouse is structured around the Barbizon, an early hotel that offered a chaperoned environment to single young ladies seeking secretarial and modeling careers.  The Address, Davis’s second novel is set at The Dakota, the famous New York apartment building with a rich history (coincidentally where John Lennon was shot), and now my new favorite, The Masterpiece, featuring the Art School above Grand Central Station/Terminal.  All three novels stand independently and are not sequels.  I can honestly say this novel is her best yet.

    Davis offers readers mystery, love, complex relationships, plot twists and turns, and her forte–problematic communication issues between characters. So far it is a GREAT read.

    Here is a teaser, randomly taken from the middle of the book.

    Virginia, the protagonist, has just sprayed Mace on a mugger: “Her assailant screamed and covered his eyes…The mugger had wanted the painting. Not her purse… Her thoughts were racing from shock. She took a deep breath to calm herself.”  Obviously, I have skipped whole paragraphs to set the plot and shorten the post.

    Davis’s story, like all her novels, moves back and forth between the “present” (in the case of The Masterpiece, the 70s) and the correlative stories of an earlier historical period.  This is NOT hard to follow, however, because she cleverly places the date at the beginning of the chapter when the setting shifts forward or backward in time.

    BEST NEWS YET…Her fourth novel, The Chelsea Girls will be published this summer. I can hardly wait.

     

  • Book Club Reflection: The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati

    Book Club Reflection: The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati

    Sam's avatarTaking On a World of Words

    After much delay, my book club was finally able to meet and discuss The Gilded Hour by Sara Donati. I finished reading this book back in December and we were supposed to meet in January to discuss it. However, Mother Nature had other plans and we pushed the book back to March to accommodate. So here we are, finally.

    We found out the sequel to this book comes out in September. We’ll finally figure out who the murderer was! (The ambulance driver? One of the doctors in the inquest?) There was so much content in this first novel that we must imagine the second and third books will be bloated with content as well.

    We asked ourselves if a situation like the one presented in this book, of dangerous abortions, could happen in the US if Roe v Wade was repealed and abortion was criminalized again. Anthony Comstock was a…

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  • How people had fun in the pre-digital era

  • GUEST POST // For I Am A Woman by Lakmi

    Tony Single's avatarunbolt me

    Splash on me
    As waterfalls will
    Hail down on me
    Like rain storms will
    Crash into me
    Like great oceans will

    And I will be unbroken

    Sear my skin
    Like a wildfire will
    Puncture my soul
    Like arrows will
    Spear my heart
    Like a great sword will

    And I will be unshaken

    by LAKMI
    © All rights reserved 2018

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  • Happy Caturday — National Library Week edition

    Rae Longest's avatarblogging807

    via Happy Caturday — National Library Week edition

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  • SATURDAYMORNINGS FOR KIDS

    Today’s post is about a book I hope to read soon. Joan of Arc has always fascinated me, and Over the years, I’ve read several novels, non-fiction books, and student research papers on her life, her “calling,” her mental state and political ambitions. This Scholastic publication, Dove and Sword: A Novel of Joan of Arc  by Nancy Garden,  Publisher’s Weekly says the book “achieves the highest goal of historical fiction.” What this book offers, based on a reading of front and back covers and the “Afterwards” is a well-researched recounting of Joan of Arc’s life and her influence on both politics and religion by a female follower near Joan’s own age.

    The cover by Brian Leister, is what first attracted me. It reflects the innocence and purity of the young woman clothed in the armor of the fourteen hundreds.

    Oh! I will be so thrilled to accomplish one goal I have set for myself by the end of the summer—learning to show a book’s cover on my blogs. HAPPY READING, EVERYONE!