Old Soul, Young Heart

I thought it would be good to read a book that is kind of a classic. I never was assigned this one in high school or college, but I know a lot of people were required to read it, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I had no idea what to expect going into this. The title is kind of mysterious; I'm not sure if anyone knows what it means prior to reading the book. I didn't know when it was written (1951, if you're curious). I just learned that this book was banned in the 1960s because people believed it was linked to Communism? It was considered to be very controversial during that time. I guess I can see how it could be viewed as a little scandalous, but Communist? Not so sure on that one. Anyway, I really liked this book. It was very entertaining and wasn't at all what I thought a book written in 1951 would be like. It follows the story of a kid who was kicked out of a prep school in Pennsylvania and then sort of wanders around New York City, his hometown. I wa

I think I heard of this book when I was in grad school and the title caught my attention. I've had it in my queue for awhile and finally got around to reading it. We learned briefly about race identity development in grad school, but this went into more detail. I was kind of concerned with this one that it would be very academic, jargony, and hard to read. I thought I might start and not finish it because it wouldn't hold my attention. It was a surprisingly easy read that did keep me interested. There were a lot of first-hand experiences that made it feel like a personal narrative.  I'm always interested in the life experiences of others, especially those that are very different from me. Some of the stories were pretty eye-opening. To be honest, there were parts in it where I was like, "Really? C'mon." This is a true testament to how much I don't know about the experiences of black people. (And the book taught me it's okay to say "b

Now that I am nearing 32 years old and it's been over 12 years since my mom died, I find it completely lonely to be a motherless daughter. In the past, it's been hard. Now... it's really difficult. It's difficult because I suppose after 12 years I'm not supposed to get teary-eyed almost every time I think about her for more than a few seconds during the day. It is obvious that I think about her every day. Every day she crosses my mind, but not every day do I think about her for more than a few seconds. On those days when I cross the threshold of thinking about her for more than a few seconds, I am in tricky territory because I start thinking about things like, "My mom doesn't know who I am anymore, because I am a totally different person than I was when I was 19" or "I bet Mom would be proud of me" or "I wish I could talk to/ask my mom about this" or "I wonder what my mom's opinion was about that," or "I wonde