The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. Find a quote from page 56.
Check out the links for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Participants don't select their favorite, coolest, or most intellectual books, they just use the one they are currently reading. This is the book I'm reading right now---
Title: The Art of X-Ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing by Roy Peter ClarkBook Beginnings: Introduction: Where do writers learn their best moves? They learn them from a technique I call X-ray reading. They read for information or vicarious experience or pleasure, as we all do. But in their reading, they see something more. It's as if they had a third eye or a pair of X-ray glasses like the ones advertised years ago in comic books.
Friday 56: X-raying James Joyce: Let's look closely at that first sentence, in which Buck Mullignan carries the holy objects of shaving: a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. If Buck is the priest, that bowl of lather substitutes for the chalice that will hold the blood of Christ. How appropriate that the mirror and the razor lay "crossed," as every Mass takes place before a crucifix and is considered a reenactment---not a symbolic imitation---of the saving suffering of Christ.
Comment: I bumped into this book at the public library and I picked it up in hopes of gleaning a few tips I could share with my teachers. But secretly I just want to learn all the tips I never learned myself due to the lack of lit classes in college. I am having such fun with it even if I haven't read all 25 of the books highlighted within its pages.
