Pardon the interruption…my wife’s book proposal was close to the deadline so that has been about our only focus for the past week. I have had to continually deal with my arch-nemisis ‘that/which’ too many times for me to care right now. Anyway, back to reading books.

My oldest son went to a LitWits Workshop on Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain last week and had a blast. Both boys enjoyed the story of Sam Gribley running away to live off the land. I had mixed thoughts on it, but since it has a good message I was happy the boys enjoyed it. There was part of one paragraph we talked about, wondering if it was as true today as it was over 50 years ago. The English professor (Bando) who stumbled across Sam’s home in a tree explains to Sam (who he calls Thoreau) why people are so interested in the boy’s story:

“Let’s face it, Thoreau; you can’t live in America today and be quietly different. If you are going to be different, you are going to stand out, and people are going to hear about you; and in your case, if they hear about you, they will remove you to the city or move to you and you won’t be different anymore.”

With so many people striving to be different, how far out there do you have to be in order to truly be different? Or maybe not standing out is the new different? In any case, we had fun reading it together.