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Showing posts from July 3, 2011

On Judging a Book by Its Cover (also new work)

So, I have to admit that I have a weakness for pretty books. Right after the school year ended I made a goal to finish off a stack of beautiful books that I had started reading and yet not finished at one point or another. I finished two so far: A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey and The Time it Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy. Alexia picked the first one for me. She said that not only did she think that I would love the gorgeous hummingbirds on the cover, but the words “love,” “art,” and “scandal” would also intrigue me, and did they ever. I really enjoyed all the characters and even Benfey’s, at times desperate attempts of bring them all together through the symbolic hummingbird. Although to me they are equally beautiful books, I only enjoyed Benfey’s gathering of historical specifics to create a book that reads almost like a novel. Even though I already knew what happened to the characters individually, it was great to read about the symbiotic connections between