Bookworm Award

Kylee at Kylee’s 2009 Blog has given me the Bookworm Award. Thank you, Kylee!

Here are the rules:

Open the closest book to you—not your favourite or most intellectual book, but the book closest to you at the moment—to page 56.

Write out the fifth sentence as well as the next two to five sentences.

Pass this on to five blogging friends.

The book closest to me is Weaving a Way Home: A Personal Journey Exploring Place and Story by Leslie Van Gelder, which has been on my TBR pile for a shamefully long time. The excerpt from page 56 is from chapter 4, “Always Leaving, Always Coming Home”:

For some, the displacement is an act of politics as one group in power moves another across the land. For others, countless immigrants around the world, the move is voluntary but perhaps no less wrenching, as the separation of person from place simultaneously severs and reinforces what it means to be home. To be home, to have a homeland, to be a people who are of a place.

My ancestors were river people. I, too, was born at the confluence of the Hudson and East rivers near the northern tip of an island whose name in its original tongue meant “place of intoxication”—the isle of Manhattan. My mother’s parents were born along the Neumans in Lithuania and my father’s father along the Thames in London.

So now the question is who to tag next? Apologies if you’ve been tagged before and just ignore me if you’re not into this kind of thing. I hereby tag:

Luanne at A Bookworm’s World
Kathy at Bermudaonion’s Weblog
Sandra at Fresh Ink Books
Trish at Hey Lady! Watcha Readin’
Ramya at Ramya’s Bookshelf

Edited to add:

Thank you to Alea at Pop Culture Junkie, who also gave me this award!