My name is Janine Macris, and I have lived in Evanston for a very long time. I appreciate its love of trees and the arts and its community, and I have spent many hours at the Evanston Public Library, even before I could read. I teach children, including my own, through my love of the power of words, and my husband builds me furniture and I love it. We read every night and it’s a great gift.
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1) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
It took me years to finally make it beyond a few chapters in this book. I had never been able to get past my college life’s raw imagining of the Running of the Bulls, but once my professor helped frame this feminist reflection of a woman traveling along and craving companionship with a friend filled with the same strain, I re-sought existentialism as a crisis amid hope. It was through this read that I saw Hemingway’s infamous short-and-sweet style being as transient as his characters’ lives. I finally understood his talent for code-switching symbolic gestures in a rebellion to be free. From there Hemingway’s door opened for me, and I felt accomplished and proud to get to the root of time’s angular woven ways.