Twitterlog 2009-03-08
March 8, 2009 @ 12:25 pm | Filed under: Twitter
Favorite twittered moment this week: “I have just been informed that Rilla is ‘Daddy’s dust mote and Beanie’s polka dot.’ ” (more…)
Comments are off
Archive for March, 2009
Time to Read
March 7, 2009 @ 9:32 pm | Filed under: Books
I enjoyed this post (three years old now) by Andrew Wheeler of the Hornswaggler blog: How to Read a Book a Day. I don’t read anywhere near as many books as Andrew does—but then again I don’t have a subway ride to and from work. I consider it a major accomplishment if I manage to read a book a week. (Not counting picture books and read-alouds.) Sure, I’ve been on a bit of a reading jag lately, but I’ve had dry spells in the past few years during which it seemed like I could barely get through a book a month. Sometimes it seems I simply lose the habit of reading.
Or (this was certainly the case last fall in the months leading up to the election) there are periods when all my reading time goes to information-gathering, reading blogs, magazines, journals, articles. Other times, I’ve gone on topical nonfiction binges: education theory, or cooking (oh yes, just because I don’t like to cook doesn’t mean I don’t relish a delectable cookbook now and then), or sewing and the needle arts. Last September and October I felt like I was doing little besides reading, but none of it was the sort of thing you keep track of in a nice, neat booklist, that satisfying record of what you fed your brain this month.
(My stars, how I do love a booklist.)
Anyhoo. Andrew Wheeler mentions several habits he has cultivated to assist his rather stunning goal of reading (or at least finishing) a book a day:
—has more than one book going at once, some heavier, some lighter (yup, I do that too)
—keeps a book by the computer to pick up while waiting for pages to load, etc. (but then when would I Twitter?) 😉
—reads while waiting in line (wouldn’t work for me as I’m never waiting in line alone: but I do tote books to read to kids if we get stuck waiting somewhere)
—keeps lots of enticing books around so there’s never a shortage of choices (I’ve got that one down pat)
—doesn’t watch a lot of TV
—makes a point to have dedicated reading time in his daily routine. Susan Wise Bauer urges the same habit in The Well Educated Mind. Makes sense.
I’ll say, though, that at this season of my life, with a houseful of kids both big and little, I just can’t count on having a set time of day devoted to reading for myself. (As opposed to reading to kids, or prereading books for the kids, or reading books to discuss with the kids.) What I have to do is jump on the opportunities when they arise. And that means strewing for myself, making sure I can always reach out and grab something to read when I sit down to nurse the baby, for example. If I take a book down to our patio room, where all the little ones’ puzzles and trains are, I can usually squeeze in a chapter while they play.
I don’t read much at night because unlike Andrew, Scott and I do watch a fair amount of TV—one to two hours a night, I’d say. We watch LOST, Battlestar Galactica (not for much longer, sob!), House, Heroes (though what a disappointment it is this season), The Office, and 30 Rock. And often we’ll watch a Daily Show episode we DVRd the night before. Other nights we put in a movie, but it usually takes us two nights to finish a film because I crash halfway through. Scott reads in bed at night but I only pretend to. He takes the book off my face when I start snoring.
I can often sneak in a chapter or two early in the morning, though, before anyone else is awake—especially if I download a book on the iPod, as I mentioned the other day. I recently read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother that way. I’m still plugging away at my DailyLit installments of Ulysses, too; I find I really enjoy waking up my brain with that tiny chunk of lush and inscrutable prose. I’m not saying I’m understanding all of it, but it’s good exercise.
My favorite part of Andrew’s post is this bit:
And what makes the whole thing go, of course, is guilt. You have to look at those towering stacks of books and desperately want to get through all of them, right now.
Ain’t that the truth. Sometimes as I walk through this house—all the walls are lined with bookshelves, even in the hallway—I feel almost tormented by the desire to read all those lovely, beckoning books. All the ones we own that I haven’t read yet. All the ones we own that I’ve read repeatedly because they’re so darn good. All the ones.
Sometimes I’ll think: that’s it. No new books are coming through this door until I’ve read everything we own. And then I’ll die laughing because that is crazy talk. For starters, there’s that book I’ve had on hold at the library for weeks that is finally ready for pickup. And that review copy that just arrived in the mail. And the book I put on preorder and forgot all about. And the present from a friend. And the book Jane borrowed from her friend—gosh, that one looks terrific. And that other one I’ve read three blog reviews of in the past month, and look! An Amazon gift certificate! Really, I have no choice!
Heh.
Oh, books, books, books, my darlings, my hamburgers. (A little literary humor for the Paul Zindel fans out there.)
A few of the titles filling me with that sweet guilt and longing this week:
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
The Zookeeper’s Wife
The Mysterious Benedict Society
Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict
The Thirteenth Tale
River of Gods
A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano
And on and on and on…had I but brain enough and time.
Calling Marge
March 7, 2009 @ 6:08 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
You know who you are. 😉
I misplaced your new-address card and your old email is bouncing, so that’s why you haven’t heard from me since you moved! The baby clothes were absolutely swoony. Thank you so much. I’m dying to hear all about the new digs. How are the boys liking Ohio? I miss knowing you’re right up the road in the O.C. even if I never actually managed to make it up there.
:::mwah::::
(We now return this blog to its regularly scheduled blathering.)
Comments are off
Spring in San Diego
March 5, 2009 @ 7:43 am | Filed under: Gardening, Nature Study
The signs are subtler here than on the East Coast; we’re still, after two and a half years here, learning to see. I never loved the snow except as a pretty picture outside my window, and the slush and bone-chill of a long Virginia February used to make me crazy. But oh how I loved that first glimpse of spring: the soft tips of crocuses pushing through soggy mulch, the yellow haze over a bare forsythia bush the day before it bursts into golden bloom. The return of robins. A feeling in the air, it was, that always quickened my pulse, gave me a soaring feeling. And then suddenly the grape hyacinths and daffodils would be blooming intermingled along my friend Sarah’s front steps, and my perennial bed would wake up, and the bluebirds would get busy cleaning house in the nesting box below our deck, right outside my office window where I’d be writing Martha and wishing I could push the deadline back and take a month off for spring.
It’s so different here. I don’t miss the frigid weather—haven’t worn my big red coat since we moved—but I do miss March, April, May, the gorgeous reawakening. San Diego is sharpening our senses, though. We do have seasons here, a blue one, a gray one, a gold one, a brown one, all of them bright with gorgeous bloom.
Last week we noticed the hillside along our route to piano lessons was covered, once more, with riotous orange and yellow wildflowers. I don’t know their names and last year I didn’t take note of how long they lasted. (We’re going to drive back with a camera, maybe this morning even, and pull into the Park-and-Ride parking lot to snap a few pictures so you, the Internet, can help us identify them.) Yesterday, just one week later, we saw that the grape soda lupine has joined them in bloom. That one I remember from last year. I told the girls, this year I’m going to pull over and sniff some to see if it really does smell like grape soda, and they said, Mom, you did that last year, don’t you remember?
The orange and lemon trees in our neighbors’ yards have been fruit-heavy for weeks. Yesterday I passed a table loaded with lemons in someone’s driveway, with a hopeful sign offering them five for a dollar. The orange poppies in our back yard are big clumps of feathery leaves, no buds yet. Nearby, I have an amaryllis whose shiny leaves had grown tall, promising a fat flower stalk not far behind, but Rilla and Wonderboy picked them all and turned them into leaf soup, spiced with sidewalk chalk.
There is a yard in town that looks weedchoked nine months of the year, and then for three months it’s a stunning tapestry of wildflowers. I saw the orange-and-yellow blooms there, too, yesterday. The sunflowers are tall in the schoolyard behind us. We’ve got a smaller crop coming up beneath our birdfeeder. Nobody but sparrows and house finches visit the feeder, and mourning doves picking fallen seeds out of the mulch below. Crows drop in to steal the peanuts we put out for the scrub jays. A phoebe perches on the back fence, bright-eyed, observant. I haven’t heard the noisy parrots in a while nor seen their green flutter above the neighbors’ treetops.
Our pole beans and peas are beginning to grope for their stakes; the grape tomatoes are green and Rilla is under strict orders to let them turn red this time before she picks them as presents for me. The lettuce is tender and ragged because the girls pinch bits of it all day long to nibble on. My Uncle Ray sent butterbean and White Acre pea seeds from Georgia and we are very excited about this.
I still need to find a milkweed source so we can lure some monarchs to the neighborhood. And it’s been too long since we visited the nature center; I wonder what spring is doing over there.
CPSIA and the Illegal Books Meme
March 4, 2009 @ 8:51 pm | Filed under: Books, Current Affairs
Like many people, I’m still reeling from the bizarre, ill-considered piece of legislation that recently went into effect which (among other things) makes it illegal for Americans to buy, sell, or barter children’s books published before 1985.
I graduated from high school in 1986. That means all the books I read growing up, all the precious copies my sisters and I absconded with when we left home and all the ones waiting for our kids in our old bedroom closets, could now be considered, according to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), a form of hazardous waste. It is against the law to sell them and possibly even to give them away.
Quite often on this blog I find myself encouraging readers to look for certain out-of-print gems, children’s books I think no child should miss. Some of these books were published in the dark ages—that is, prior to 1985. There’s no point in my recommending them anymore; no one can sell them to you.
Which is a very great pity.
Alicia at Love2Learn began a meme for sharing treasured titles CPSIA now makes illegal to sell or swap. Here are some of our favorites. I’m sorry you can’t buy them anymore, even from used vendors at Amazon Marketplace.
That’s Good, That’s Bad by Aliki. I posted about this beloved picture book here—beloved especially by Scott. This is his childhood copy, fragile now, kept on a high shelf and read at special times with great ceremony.
Christina Katerina and the Box by Patricia Lee Gauch. This one belonged to my sisters and me, growing up, and I’ll probably be in trouble when they read this post and discover I snagged it from our parents’ basement. One of my favorite picture books ever because it rings so true. Christina’s mother gets a refrigerator and lets her play with the box, aka the pirate ship/clubhouse/racecar/ballroom/etc etc etc. It sort of drives the mother crazy, and I can so relate to that, wanting on the one hand to allow the kids to play the superawesome game they’ve got going with the big old cardboard box that takes up half the living room, but on the other hand THERE’S A BOX TAKING UP HALF THE LIVING ROOM. When Scott really wants to get my goat he’ll tell me I’m being like Christina Katerina’s mom.
The Mission Bell by Leo Politi. A gem of a book about a California mission, a gift for Wonderboy from his godmother a few months ago. Good thing she sent it before February 9th.
Johnny Crow’s Garden by Leslie Brooke. I wrote about this absolute masterpiece of a picture book last year: read about it in Noel Perrin’s A Child’s Delight, ordered it online from a seller of used books—something it is now illegal to do—and about jumped out of my skin with excitement when it arrived and I saw the illustrations and remembered reading the book as a child. “A stork…gave a philosophic talk…in Johnny Crow’s garden.” Rilla adores it now and the older girls chuckle as I read it to her, so amusing is the text. Oh, I’m so very sad that you can’t all run straight to Amazon Marketplace and order a copy. This is so wrong.
When I first started reading homeschooling message boards, people were always talking about the Childcraft books, a set of encyclopedias organized by topic. Occasionally someone would score a set at a yard sale and there would be much envious oohing by the other moms. Imagine my delight when Scott’s mother produced a complete set from her attic, one summer day: “Would you like these for your kids?” Scott (who knew nothing of the online buzz) whooped and said “THERE THEY ARE! I loved those books!” and I whooped and said “I’ve heard so much about those books!” and of course we snatched them up. I think Jane has read the whole set cover to cover. We love them. They are in frequent use.
It’s against the law to sell them now, even at a yard sale.
The meme roundup at Love2Learn has many links to more information about CPSIA, including the advice to contact your congressman.
Seven Weeks
Books Read in February
March 1, 2009 @ 7:53 pm | Filed under: Books
Washington Square
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The short story that inspired the movie, though I hear the movie diverges from the book quite a lot. I was poking around at DailyLit and saw this talked up as their Big Read selection, and I read the first excerpt and then wound up sitting there clicking “send next installment now” over and over until I’d read the whole thing, one email at a time—which is really a very silly way to read a book. Strange, unsettling story. I liked it.
Austenland: A Novel
Pride and Prejudice
Murder on the Orient Express
The Year We Disappeared: A Father-Daughter Memoir
Books purchased in February:
Fire Baton: Poems
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996
Review copies received:
Lucky Girl
Twitter vs. Email: A Revelation
March 1, 2009 @ 3:37 pm | Filed under: Twitter
I was updating my contact page just now and found myself writing “for the fastest response, try Twitter.” I wondered why that would be the case—why am I more likely to reply immediately to a tweet or DM, but it can take me weeks, months even, to respond to my email?
(I know: weeks, months, that’s ridiculous. But if you’ve written me, you know it’s true. Oftentimes, the more important the email—the more attention I’d like to give to the reply—the longer the delay.)
Then I realized: it’s Twitter’s 140-character limit that spurs me to the immediate response. It’s short and sweet, just the facts ma’am. If someone has a question, I can answer it likethat.
A thoughtful and well written email is better than a quick tweet, of course. I’m not saying I’d want to ditch email entirely—heavens no. I relish a nice long letter from a friend or reader. I love writing nice fat letters back. I wouldn’t want to confine my side of any correspondence to a tweet-sized box. But for a quick answer to a simple question? There’s a kind of liberty within the stricture of the form.
(Is that the same reason people are so fond of haiku?)
I had already fallen in love with Twitter as a source of quick answers. Throw a question into the twitstream and the answers leap at you like flying fish. Solid answers, too; keepers. But I hadn’t thought about the converse, before: that if you have a question for me, catching me on Twitter may be your best bet for an immediate answer.
I would love to explore this thought further but I have a boatload of email to answer.
Twitterlog 2009-03-01
March 1, 2009 @ 11:25 am | Filed under: Twitter
Too funny—after this tweet log posted, I thought, Yikes, I need to change the setting so it doesn’t post the @replies. But so far all the comments on this post have been about @reply tweets!
The log is too long, though. Since my primary aim in autoposting these is to preserve tweets for my own records, I’m going to publish the posts with a “more” link. Twitterlog is after the jump. (more…)