Jo March wins

In a survey updated from 2008, Louisa May Alcott's LITTLE WOMEN has jumped into America's top 10 books list. Other major winners were MOBY DICK, THE GRAPES OF WRATH and THE GREAT GATSBY, bumping out ATLAS SHRUGGED, two Dan Brown books (ha ha) and Stephen King's THE STAND. THE BIBLE is still #1 across all demographics, but millennials' #2 favorite is HARRY POTTER, the East Coast loves THE LORD OF THE RINGS and white people like GONE WITH THE WIND. (Via Jezebel)

"Pilgrimage," by Natasha Trethewey

Here, the Mississippi carved
            its mud-dark path, a graveyard

for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
            Here, the river changed its course,

turning away from the city
            as one turns, forgetting, from the past—

the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up
            above the river's bend—where now

the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.
            Here, the dead stand up in stone, white

marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand
            on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;

they must have seemed like catacombs,
            in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor,

candlelit, underground. I can see her
            listening to shells explode, writing herself

into history, asking what is to become
            of all the living things in this place?

This whole city is a grave. Every spring—
            Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle

with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders
            in the long hallways, listen all night

to their silence and indifference, relive
            their dying on the green battlefield.

At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—
            preserved under glass—so much smaller

than our own, as if those who wore them
            were only children. We sleep in their beds,

the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped
            in flowers—funereal—a blur

of petals against the river's gray.
            The brochure in my room calls this

living history. The brass plate on the door reads
            Prissy's Room. A window frames

the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,
            the ghost of history lies down beside me,

rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

--Trethewey was named U.S. Poet Laureate last month. Happy Fourth of July!