Let Mr. Cheng POINT you toward Barbara Kingsolver's official website!

http://www.kingsolver.com/home/index.asp

On Animal Dreams...

Hi folks. This is the third time I've tried to make this post, so just know that you're not the only people trying to figure this blog thing out. Harumph. This is my first time reading and teaching the book, and I just finished reading it. I have found it to be absolutely lovely. Now, I'm an old softie at heart, with a particular weakness for love stories with happy endings - I'm partial to romances and so-called "chick flicks," so you'll have to pardon my sentimentality, but I could practically hear orchestra music swelling when (spoiler alert!) Codi and Loyd reunited on that train platform. It's like a scene out of a movie. In fact, the whole book reads like a movie to me. It gets me thinking who I would cast as Codi, which is not unlike the scrapbook assignment that we did a couple weeks ago. The actress would have to be tall and slender and beautiful, so the obvious choices would be Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow (whom I once heard Robert Downey, Jr., describe as "naturally about 8 feet tall) or Keira Knightly, but I picture her more dark complected. The person I pictured when reading was more like Irene Bedard, who was the voice of Pocohantas in the Disney animated movie (first photo, upper left corner). Or a friend of mine from my Los Angeles days, Nina Revoyr, who is now a novelist. She's a former basketball player (self-described 5 foot 13 inches) and really looks exactly how I pictured Codi except for the Billy Idol haircut that she keep describing that she has (upper right corner). Do you kids even know who that is? I'll have to find a picture of him, as well (lower left corner). And then there's Barbara Kingsolver herself (lower right corner), who sounds like a hybrid of Codi and Hallie, a biologist by education who lives a very environmentally conscious life. Her latest novel has metaphors for ecological systems and whatnot. I'll post a link to her website elsewhere on this blog. (Photo credits: Irene Bedard, sunzoftheeaerth.com; Nina Revoyr, blognetwork.poynter.org; Billy Idol, photobucket.com; Barbara Kingsolver, depauw.edu)