My Other Blog, "Moments in Literature", Recognized

My ambitious, but not very active blog, Moments in Literature, is one of the 45 blogs that have just won the 2010 Top Literary Studies Blog Award. I am excited. Although I would have wanted this one here to win something, I am excited about Moments in Literature. When I started the blog at the end of 2007, I wanted to highlight intriguing moments in the fiction I was reading. Let's say I was reading David Mungoshi's The Fading Sun, I would take a moment to discuss chapter 7, highlight why I thought it was intriguing, and that would then lead to a brief discussion of Mungoshi's place in literature, etc. Right now I am re-reading Charles Mungoshi's The Setting Sun and The Rolling World, his US-published collection of selected stories. Each story has moments worth sharing, the boy in "Shadows on the Wall" reflecting on how one day he discovered a dove's nest, examined the nestlings, went away thinking about mothers and their importance to children, only to come back later and find out that the nestlings had died because mother never made it back home, having perhaps crossed the path of a hunter. Oh, and how that gets the boy thinking about his own mother who left because the father made her leave, thereby robbing the boy of the motherly care he so needed....it's an interesting moment in the story, shaping the boy's present and future, shaping his relationship, or lack thereof, with his father, who, we learn later, has denied the boy "the gift of language."

Moments like that. Then I would go to another book, discover another moment, and share it with my readership, which I doubted I had when the blog began. So now they tell me I have won an award? That will just get me working again. And working means more reading. More sharing. More growth...as a writer.