Good Books, Good Times

by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Good books, good times/Good stories Good rhymes
Good beginnings, Good ends/Good people, Good friends
Good fiction, Good facts/ Good adventures, Good acts
Good stories, Good rhymes —
GOOD books. GOOD times.

In the category of “what hath God wrought!?” I must introduce you to GoodReads, the latest delightful book-logging, time-wasting, book web-addiction. No, I do not need to have yet another place to discuss books — I have two Yahoo groups, two websites, 73 titles on hold at the library, and a pile of books next to my bed. Neither, I suspect, do the people who invited me to play at GoodReads need any more places to discuss books — some of them are librarians and booksellers. Trouble is, we’re just… addicted… I thoroughly blame it on being a book-deprived child. (O, Mother, O, Father! If only you knew the damage you have done by making me do homework and chores and clean up after the pets instead of letting me skip school, ignore the whole world and disappear under a convenient table with a pile of books, a stack of pillows, a bowl of blackberries, and a stack of library books! Woe!)

Okay, so no one is buying the deprived-child story, but I was, and I am still years behind making up for it by reading everything. Not every book I read is… um, spell-binding, some are annoyingly obvious, didactic or preachy (Frying Pan Books, as Leila at Bookshelves amusingly calls them), but the gems I unearth more — much much more than more than make up for the duds.

All of which leads me gently onward to today’s National Poetry Month selection,
Surprise by Beverly McLoughland

The biggest
Surprise
On the library shelf
is when you suddenly
Find yourself
Inside a book-
(the HIDDEN you)
You wonder how
The author knew.