Archive for the 'Books' Category
June 26, 2008 @ 7:17 am | Filed under: Books
I’m glad I checked my comments spam filter today, because look what I almost missed! Sorry, Sherry; I don’t know why the filter zapped you. We’re big Semicolon fans here, even if my filter isn’t.
I wanted to tell you that I’m starting something new at Semicolon, and you’re certainly invited to join in along with any of your readers. It’s called Semicolon Author Celebration, and to start with I’m looking for posts about Charlotte Zolotow on this Thursday, her birthday.
For more information, click here.
Of course, today is Thursday, which means the Charlotte Zolotow post is already up!
Charlotte Zolotow, children's books, Semicolon
June 3, 2008 @ 9:01 pm | Filed under: Books, Family Adventures, Uncategorized
It is always interesting to see what odds and ends have accumulated on my bed by the end of the day. My bedroom is a favorite spot for reading, playing Polly Pockets, destroying bedsprings acrobatics, and sundry other activities. Often, at the tired end of a day, I’ll find a pair of dice, a toy frog, a candy wrapper, a sprinkling of buttons: flotsam and jetsam suggesting that perhaps Beaver Cleaver has wandered in and emptied his overalls pockets on my comforter sometime between his after-school milk and cookies and his slingshot attack on Eddie Haskell.
Tonight I find: two hair barrettes (it’s not the Beaver, then); two small sun visors, one pink, one white; a Sandra Boynton book; the decapitated head of a coreopsis; a crumpled tissue, presumably used (ew); and a book I distinctly remember leaving on the nightstand: Noel Perrin’s A Reader’s Delight, a surprise birthday gift from a darling friend, which I have been treating myself to, one delicious essay at a time, over the past six months. What’s especially intriguing is that this morning, the book’s cover was papered with small pink Post-Its: the evidence of a previous day’s fun-in-Mom’s-room hijinks. I had been keeping a small chunk of Post-Its on the aforementioned bedside table for the handy flagging of quotes to savor later. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the small chunk of notes had been systematically dismantled, one satisfying shhhnk after another, no doubt, and reassembled mosaic fashion upon Mr. Perrin’s fine tome.
Now, today, all the little pink stickies are gone. Vanished. I’ve looked under my pillows. I wonder where I’ll find them?
***
Beanie and I bawled in each other’s arms today. It was awfully sweet. She had picked up an Illustrated Classics version of Jack London’s White Fang at the library earlier in the day. An adaptation, yes, but the kid is seven. Adaptation or no, this was still a hefty volume. She also checked out Dracula, but I told her I should preview that one for her, might be a little scary. She doesn’t like scary. When we got home from the library, all three girls scattered with their armloads of treasure. Beanie reappeared about 45 minutes later, her finger holding her place in White Fang.
“I think you’re right, Mom,” she said. “Dracula might be a bit much for me right now. White Fang is about a REAL wolf and it is so scary! But I love it. You’ve GOT to read it.”
She remained glued to the book all afternoon. When she finished, with a happy sigh, she turned to me and told me all about it. White Fang’s numerous escapes from peril, his brave acts, his poor mother whom he never saw again.
I tried to think of other wolf/dog books she might like, and Stone Fox came to mind. But oh, that heartbreaker of an ending. I told her I knew a wonderful book about a dog similar to White Fang—a Husky, not a wolf—but that it had a sad ending. She likes forewarning of these things.
“Does the dog die?”
(Spoiler alert.)
“Yes. It makes a brave sacrifice for a little boy. Do you think you’d like to read it?”
“Mmm, no, not yet. Will you tell me the story?”
And so I did, the two of us perched on bar stools at the living-room side of the kitchen counter. How the little boy’s grandpa can’t pay his back taxes, loses heart, gets sick. How the little boy hears about the sled-dog race, the prize money in just the right amount. How he practices with his faithful old dog, Searchlight. How everyone knows the race will be run by the big silent Indian, Stone Fox, with his team of five champion dogs. How the boy is determined to try anyway because it’s his last hope. How Searchlight holds her own against the dog-pack surprisingly well, running neck and neck with Stone Fox’s lead dog. How, yards from the finish line, her old heart bursts, and she falls down dead. How the little boy stares down at her in stunned disbelief and grief. How Stone Fox halts his dogs, leaves his sled, picks up the fallen Searchlight and carries her, pulling the boy on his ramshackle sled, across the finish line.
Both of us were bawling by this point. How could we not? My voice was cracking as I tried to finish; tears were streaming from Beanie’s big eyes. She lunged forward, tipping her stool, throwing her arms around me.
“Oh, Mommy. That’s so sad.”
“I know, sweetie, it really is.”
“But it’s…” She paused, seeking the right word. “It’s noble, too. Isn’t it?” Another pause. “White Fang did some noble things too. But it’s a very happy ending. It’s the best book I ever read, Mom.”
***
I’m in my bedroom, writing this post, when I hear the following sequence of events: Scott walking down the hall. Scott suddenly bursting out in an incoherent shout: “GAAH!” Scott bellowing for Rose, speaking to her softly. Rose murmuring a reply. Scott calling the other girls. Pattering feet. Shrieks, squeals, commotion. Paper rattling. A door slamming.
A little while later, Scott IMs me from the other computer. Wants to know if I’m still awake: a joke, because even if I weren’t working, who could sleep through all that shouting? What on earth, I ask him. He explains, but you’ll need a bit of backstory. See, Rose has this toy snake that looks completely realistic. And sometimes she plays a joke on me: coils it in a box of diapers or a laundry basket, somewhere I’ll come upon it unsuspectingly and scream my head off because THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE BOX OF DIAPERS. Then everybody comes running and laughs and laughs. Oh, isn’t it hilarious, Mom just lost another ten years off her life. Ha ha.
I live with a pack of smart alecks; have I mentioned that?
So what happened was, Scott was walking down the hall to the laundry room and at the bottom of the two-step staircase, he almost stepped on a big old lizard. (That was the GAAH.) Looking twice at the hideous, motionless thing, he realized it wasn’t real. Must be one of Rose’s little jokes on Mom, which hmm, seems my hubby finds those a lot funnier when I’m the hapless victim. Thus the bellow for Rose, presumably to tell her to save her jokes for when Mom is sure to be the patsy.
“That’s real, Daddy,” says Rose. And then it moved.
It was this thing. Eek. No wonder he shouted.
Is a transcript too dorky?
Scott: It was about eight or nine inches long
I love it
Bit the hell out of me, though.
Understandablyme: It bit you????
Scott: Yeah.
Doesn’t have much in the way of teeth, fortunatelyme: no way!!!! baby!!!!
how?
where?Scott: Um. Put its mouth on my finger and closed?
me: You offered it your finger?
Scott: Yes.
Yes.
I thought it might be hungry.
Apparently so.me: Seriously. Did it really bite you?
me: And more importantly, where is it now?
Scott: It started running, but had trouble getting traction on the floor. So it started to go into a paper bag, which was good.
me: Hooray for lousy housekeeping!
Scott: But the bag was ripped, so it ran out the hole. Which was bad.
me: Boo for lousy housekeeping.
Scott: So I picked it up.
And it bit me.
So I dropped it.
Then I picked it up again.me: Buddy.
Scott: And it bit me again.
me: Honey!!!
Scott: So I dropped it.
Then I picked it up again and tried to throw it outside.
But it was biting me again so I dropped it again.
Finally, I threw it.
And the last I saw it was running under our bedroom door.
(At this point I emit a piercing shriek of my own. I am a long way from Scott’s computer, but evidently the sound carries.)
Scott: Thank you.
That was very gratifyingme: I HATE YOU.
Scott: It landed between the garbage can and the recycling can.
me: I am never taking out the trash again.
Scott: I love it and wicked regret tossing it out of the house.
me: It will never be your friend now.
Scott: Sometimes I act without thinking
me: You?
Really?Scott: I know!
I think this might really hurt our long term relationship, Liz and me.me: That’s the same kind of lizard who freaked me out that time in the watering can.
hanging out in there, looking like a rattler.Scott: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1285/534174395_b6bfe60133_o.jpg
me: Gah.
I do not want to know how that thing got into my house. Nor do I desire to know, any longer, what happened to my little pink Post-Its. It ate them, I just know it.
May 28, 2008 @ 7:38 pm | Filed under: Books, Uncategorized
The good:
Betsy-Tacy has been reissued in a spiffy new edition. Nice big trim size, appealing to young readers. The beloved Lois Lenski art inside. Quite a beautiful painting on the cover—you may recognize it from the previous edition, which featured the same art peeking through a cutout on the front cover. And a nice bonus: in back is a big chunk of interesting biographical material about Maud Hart Lovelace. My young B-T fans (and their mother) were delighted.
The bad:
This doesn’t necessarily mean the entire series is being reissued. As you may recall from posts last year, many people have lamented the gradual going-out-of-print of this series, which is one of the best children’s serieseses of all time (she says authoritatively). If you’re a fan, now’s the time to show you want books like this in print…I for one will be stockpiling enough copies for my brood.
(P.S. Pardon the lack of wrapped text around the picture above. WordPress is being persnickety with me. Can’t remember the HTML do wrap it manually. Tried float=”left”. Didn’t work, obviously. Too lazy to google it. Too lazy even to capitalize google. Almost too lazy to close my parenthesis here, but…will…muster…the…strength.)
April 1, 2008 @ 6:48 am | Filed under: Books, Connections
Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, wrote a second book called Hey! Listen to This. It’s a collection of stories for reading aloud to young children. I read it many years ago and don’t remember anything about what stories are in the book; what I do remember, have never forgotten, is his story about the book’s title. He said his kids teased him about saying those words more than any other: “Hey, listen to this!”—and then he’d read aloud something that had fired his enthusiasm in a book, newspaper, magazine he was reading.
I laughed out loud the first time I read that anecdote, because that’s exactly what Scott and I did to each other all the time. We were practically newlyweds then, but it’s a habit that hasn’t changed over the years. At any given moment, someone, somewhere in my house, is likely to call out, “Hey, check this out” or “Whoa! You’ve gotta hear this!” and read a passage aloud for anyone in the vicinity.
Our bedsides are piled with books and articles one of us read and thought someone else would enjoy too. I suppose the flurry of links we email back and forth is an extension of that pile. Once upon a time, I was the one strewing reading material in Jane’s path. These days she strews just as much, or more, back into mine. Muse magazine has been the jumping-off point for a thousand heady discussions. I’m still working my way through the Redwall books she loves so dearly, not to mention the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series. She has more time to read than I do, so I get the fun of restocking her pile on practically a daily basis.
I’ve been reading Edward Eager’s Knight’s Castle to Beanie. It’s the sequel to Half Magic, and if you don’t know these books, you are so lucky because all the fun is still in front of you. Eager was (like me) a huge fan of Edith Nesbit’s children’s books. He set out to write books in the same rich and rollicking spirit, and he succeeded beautifully. Half Magic is the story of four siblings who find a magic charm that grants wishes. Sort of. It’s an old charm and only grants wishes at half strength, resulting in much mishap, hilarity, and confusion. For example, the youngest girl wishes her cat could talk, and the poor beast winds up able to speak a garbled, nonsensical half-version of English. The cat’s outraged utterances have become regular contributions to discussion around here. “Idgwits! Foos!”
The young heroes of Knight’s Castle, much to my children’s delight, are the children of the Half Magic kids. Jane tells me that the next book in the series, and I can’t remember if it’s Magic by the Lake or The Time Garden, but I’m thinking the former, is another story about the four Half Magic children, and then the fourth book is about their kids again. I’m told that the most delicious part is that the second generation of children actually get to meet their parents as children, though I don’t think they let their young future parents in on the secret.
One of my favorite things about Eager’s writing is his fondness for referencing other authors, other books. Nesbit in particular (the Half Magic and Knight’s Castle kids alike are great fans), but also Sir Walter Scott, Jane Porter, and many others. It’s as if Eager is always crying out, “Hey, listen to this!” and gushing about the books that set his imagination on fire.
Yesterday when I was reading to Beanie, Rose got sucked in. She’s read Half Magic herself but not the rest of the series, and she had thought she’d prefer to read them on her own but the snippet she overheard yesterday proved too bewitching, and she decided she wanted to hear the book out loud after all. She asked if I would catch her up, so we started over at the beginning and read all afternoon, and that’s why dinner was late.
In chapter two the children (two sets of cousins) are taken to see Ivanhoe, much to the delight of young Robert, who, we’re told, is in a yeomanry phase. Back at home, a massive Ivanhoe reenactment is set up by all four of the kids. The descriptions of Scott’s colorful characters had Rose and Bean clamoring to watch the same movie. (”In Technicolor, just like in the book!” says Bean.) Jane thinks it’s cool that Ivanhoe, the novel, makes an appearance in so many of her favorite books. It’s a plot point in one of the Betsy-Tacy high-school books, I forget which; I always loved the bit about how Betsy narrates the plot to two friends who forgot to read the assigned book over the summer, and they get perfect marks on the summaries they’re made to write on the first day of school, but Betsy herself, a devoted fan of the book, waxes on in such detail that she runs out of time while still describing the opening episode—and is severely rebuked by her teacher, who takes her paper as evidence that she never read more than the first chapter. Ouch, dear Betsy, I feel your pain.
When I was researching the fourth Charlotte book (I think it was the fourth), I found a Boston newspaper article from the year in which that book takes place excitedly announcing the arrival on U.S. shores of Sir Walter Scott’s latest novel, Ivanhoe. Naturally, I couldn’t resist including that event in the book, so Charlotte’s family enjoys it as their own read-aloud.
We were just talking yesterday about yet another children’s book that references Ivanhoe, but I forget what it was and Jane isn’t up yet. Probably there are many, but she was talking about one in particular.
I think Edward Eager would have gotten a kick out of knowing that Jeanne Birdsall set out to write her delightful novel The Penderwicks “in the spirit of Edward Eager and E. Nesbit.” The Penderwick children are also great devourers and quoters of books.
As I’m writing this, iChat is pinging me to let me know that Scott, making his early-morning internet rounds on the other computer, is saying “check this out” about something interesting he’s come across. Whatever it is, it’ll probably show up later in one of my del.icio.us link autoposts, the 21st-century version of “Hey! Listen to this!”
March 7, 2008 @ 1:09 pm | Filed under: Books, Connections, Unschooling, Why I Homeschool
The other day I posted a link to this article about Harvard professor John R. Stilgoe. The article made me want to read his book, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places
Some quotes:
[Regarding his courses at Harvard]
“…I refuse to provide a schedule of topics. Undergraduate and graduate students alike love schedules, love knowing the order of subjects and the satisfaction of ticking off one line after another, class after class, week after week. Confronted by a professor who explains that schedules produce a desire, sometimes an obsession, to “get through the material,” they grow uneasy. They like to get through the material.”
I’ve seen this in myself, and in my kids, during our forays into structured learning. Not right away, but after a few weeks on a scheduled plan. And because avoiding the going-through- the-motions kind of false “learning” (it isn’t really learning at all) is a major part of my educational philosophy (life philosophy really), I have always been quick to shelve the plan when I see this happening. We spend a whole lot more time in low tide here than in high tide.
“I explain that the lack of a topic schedule encourages all of us to explore a bit, to answer questions that arise in class or office hours, to follow leads we discover while studying something else. Each of the courses, I explain patiently, really concerns exploration, and exploration happens best by accident, by letting way lead on to way, not by following a schedule down a track.
“My students resist the lack of topic structure because they are the children of structured learning and structured entertainment. Over and over I explain that if they are afraid of a course on exploring, they may never have the confidence to go exploring on their own.”
(snip)
“Learning to look around sparks curiosity, encourages serendipity. Amazing connections get made that way; questions are raised—and sometimes answered—that never would be otherwise. Any explorer sees things that reward not just a bit of scrutiny but a bit of thought, sometimes a lot of thought over years. Put the things in spatial context or arrange them in time, and they acquire value immediately.”
This is what the unschoolers are talking about. It’s exactly what I’ve enthused about when I write about the connections my kids have made—I get so excited about it; it amazes me to see what they put together in their minds, and where the subsequent discussion takes us. It’s how I learn best, and live best, too.
In a post a while back I quoted Sandra Dodd on connections:
“Learning comes from connecting something new to what you’ve already thought or known.”
She has a connections page on her website (well worth your time to explore, as is her entire site). At the top is a quote from Heraclitus, circa 500 B.C.:
A wonderful harmony arises from joining together the seemingly unconnected.
Yesterday, perched in that tree outside the library, Beanie looked at a sign on a church across the street and said, “Mom! The Black Douglas!”
The sign said “E. Douglas.” It reminded her of the story of The Black Douglas (a Scottish hero) that we read in James Baldwin’s book Fifty Famous Stories Retold. She giggled and said the sign should say “B. Douglas.”
The Baldwin book is a great one for connections. When we see rocks poking up from beneath the waves out at sea, Bean calls out, “The Inchcape Rock!” We have a whole long-running family joke spinning off King Alfred and the cakes he burned while daydreaming military strategy. The joke kind of blurs into my kids’ very, very favorite Gunther children quote, uttered by a young Margaret at dinner one night: “Mommy, my burnt corn is cold!”
(One of the many reasons I adore Alice. She’s my kind of cook.)
Last weekend the girls were watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Tom was conducting an orchestra in the Hollywood Bowl (and beating down an eager Jerry who wanted to help). Jane wanted to know what the music was. I thought it sounded like Strauss, but I wasn’t sure, so I (what else) Googled it. Sure enough: it’s the overture from Die Fledermaus. We looked it up on Wikipedia and read about the opera, and we watched the overture on YouTube. Which led to viewing other songs, mostly sung by the famous coloratura Edita Gruberova, who is famous for her Adele in Fledermaus and who also played the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute, which (if you want another Alice connection) is the song my cell phone plays when she calls me because it always reminds me of her daughter Theresa singing the aria around the house. And from there way led on to many other ways, and these connections will keep popping up in years to come, linking to something else.
Oh, I just remembered writing about this years ago, how I love that we call it “linking” when a topic on one web page connects to a page somewhere else.
“Way leads on to way,” of course, is a quote from “The Road Less Traveled.” But unlike Frost’s traveller, who, “knowing how way leads on to way,” doubts life will ever bring him back to this crossroads in the wood where he has chosen to take the less traveled path, the paths unfolding before our connections can and will be revisited and explored endlessly, in different ways, all through our lives. And like the paths in the wood, where wind and light and leaves and wildlife are always altering the landscape so that the path changes from hour to hour, our mental landmarks are changed and built upon and nuanced every time we revisit them.
Another funny connection: I had read much of the first chapter of Outside Lies Magic to Jane yesterday—it’s one of those books you just can’t keep to yourself—including the parts quoted above about Stilgoe’s students being uncomfortable working without a clearly defined linear schedule. This morning I asked Beanie to do a job for me, and I was explaining it step by step— overexplaining, evidently, because Jane laughed and said, “Gosh, Mom, it’s like you think she’s a Harvard student.” Heh.
“Exploration,” says John Stilgoe,
“is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.”
Yes: it is so, so much fun, and that is why I write these posts all chattery with excitement over this or that connection the kids made today. (Or that I made myself!) I know I get carried away, but that’s the point, isn’t it, that way leading on to way has carried me away? And yet—and yet—I think we are at once ‘carried away’ and made more fully present in the now, more rooted, by these relationships between ideas about things past and future. The joy of connection makes me want to celebrate this moment, this brief encounter with wild-haired child and broad-trunked tree, bus going by, sign on church wall, Scottish warlord creeping over the tower wall and startling the English soldier’s wife who has just put her babe in arms to sleep by crooning that the Black Douglas won’t get him. Child, laughing, shouting “Dinna ye be sae sure aboot that!” across the courtyard outside the library. How can I not celebrate this freedom?
natural learning, poetry friday, Unschooling
March 6, 2008 @ 9:23 pm | Filed under: Books, Connections, Family Adventures
This morning Jane was showing me her coin collection, which contains a number of interesting specimens thanks to our world-traveling pal Keri. She has coins from Vietnam, India, Singapore, China, Korea, Japan, and a bunch of other places. We couldn’t figure out where a few of them came from, so we started Googling and figured out which ones came from Korea and which came from China.
The third coin described in this post is one of the Korean coins she was trying to figure out, with a spear of rice on one face. Another coin had writing on it that looked like Greek to Jane, so she took it to Rose for help translating the letters. Rho, iota, eta, they thought—and then a character neither of them recognized, and they brought it to me, and I looked at the other side of the coin and saw EIRE, so I knew it was from Ireland. Not Greek letters after all.
It took a bit of hunting, but we tracked that one down online too and read some interesting things about Irish coins. The one Jane has is a penny, but it seems so big compared to our U.S. pennies, almost the size of a quarter. It has a hen with chicks on it, and there’s a bit of history about some of these hen-and-chick pennies missing one of the chicks. Jane’s has all the chicks.
We saw that there are books with pictures of all the world coins in them, and Jane checked the library to see if there were any copies in our system. There are, and one was in a branch nearby. So after Wonderboy’s speech therapy session, we swung by the library and Jane got her book. Rose got the new Gail Carson Levine, and Beanie emerged from the stacks clutching an Edward Eager novel. I just finished reading Half Magic to her yesterday, or was it the day before? Oh, we had such a good time with that book. Jane was the one who hunted up Knight’s Castle for her, and Beanie nearly crushed her ribs with gratitude.
On the way out of the library, I picked up a cheap Miss Marple collection from the sale rack. In the courtyard outside, there is a mighty old tree, fat-trunked, low-branched, limbs spread wide to beckon small girls with new books. All three girls clambered up and commenced a-reading, while Rilla and Wonderboy (oh gosh, I really do need to come up with a new blog name for him: he’s getting too big for this) hunted bugs at the base of the tree. I sat on the grass, enjoying the peaceful moment. An elderly woman pushed her walker toward us and paused for a chat. “I’ve been watching you since you came out of the library,” she said. She approved of the tree-climbing and the book-reading. “I’m happy to see a mother bring her children to the library. If you read,” she told Jane, “you can do anything you want in life.” She inspected our haul and listened to the whole coin-identification story. She noticed the boy’s hearing aids and we compared notes; she just started wearing them herself. Then her cell phone rang, and she said her daughter had arrived to pick her up, and she bid each child a cordial farewell and departed. “I hope,” she called back to me, “that you have a very nice life.”
Oh, I do, I do.
February 25, 2008 @ 8:18 pm | Filed under: Books
Alice Gunther’s book about socialization is on its way.
To quote the publisher:
Most of us at one time or another have had to wrestle with the issue of socialization, either in dealing with friends and family members who question our decision to home educate, or from our own hearts as we worry about our children’s hopes for friendship. In this book Alice shows that “Socialization is not the weakness of home education—it is its strength and joy.”
Coming this spring from Hillside Education…I for one am counting the days!
February 24, 2008 @ 6:45 am | Filed under: Books
I was excited about this book long before I knew one of my own novels had been included in its pages. It combines two of my most favorite things (not just my favorite things, my most favorite things!): books and yarn.
Great Yarns for the Close-Knit Family by Mary Gildersleeve is about to hit the shelves, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy. What a gem of an idea: Mary has taken twelve children’s novels, read-alouds her family loved, and created knitting projects to go with each one.
Imagine how tickled I was when I saw my own name on that booklist!
Here’s a peek at the books and their projects, courtesy of the author’s website:
1. Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
a. Pinocchio Doll and Clothes2. Canadian Summer by Hilda vanStockum
a. Mr. Magic’s Gnome Hat
b. Arthur Purcell’s “Gay” Sweater3. The Hobbit or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkein
a. Bilbo’s Backpack
b. Bilbo’s Traveling Jacket4. Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
a. Ma’s Boot Socks
b. Pa’s Red-White Checked Mittens5. Little House in the Highlands by Melissa Wiley
a. Mittens for Laird Alroch & Auld Mary
b. Tullie Greyshanks Doll and Clothes6. The Lost Island by Eilis Dillon
a. Fisherman’s Jersey
b. Wool Socks for the Journey7. Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers
a. Mary Poppins’ Carpetbag
b. Mary Poppins’ Fur-trimmed Gloves8. Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater
a. Captain Cook (penguin doll)
b. Mr. Popper’s Cozy Scarf9. Otto of the Silver Hand by Howard Pyle
a. Otto’s Chain Mail
b. Otto’s Scabbard and Belt10. Redwall by Brian Jacques
a. Matthias’ Over-sized Habit
b. Asmodeus the Snake11. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
a. Colin’s Rug and Cushion
b. Mrs. Sowerby’s Cloak12. The Wheel on the School by Meindert deJong
a. Lina’s Stocking Cap
b. Thick Wools Socks for Linda & Jan
I can’t wait to see that Tullie Greyshanks doll, but I think I’m most excited of all about Bilbo’s Traveling Jacket. I want a Bilbo’s traveling jacket!
I can also say for a certainty that Asmodeus the Snake will be crossing my path in days to come. I’m betting that’s Jane’s first project out of the book.
If you pre-order a copy from its publisher, Hillside Education, you’ll receive a free set of wooden knitting needles. Pre-orders are available through March 8th. I think the book will hit the shelves in mid-March!
January 13, 2008 @ 5:50 pm | Filed under: Books
If you haven’t yet read Matthew Lickona’s book, Swimming with Scapulars, now’s your chance to listen to it on audio. Catholic Radio International is airing a chapter a day as their current "Cover to Cover" feature. You can listen online here.
We’ve been so fortunate as to get to know Matthew and his delightful family since our move to San Diego. Our families are quite simpatico. But I had heard of Matthew and his terrific book long before we headed west: more than one friend recommended it to me with the words, "I think Scott would really like this. He’s got the same sense of humor."
They were right!
January 2, 2008 @ 7:38 am | Filed under: Books, Carnivals
Both online and off.
I missed announcing the December Carnival of Children’s Literature, which was hosted by Kelly Herold at Big A little a. The theme was giving and favorite books, and it’s quite a collection of posts. If you haven’t visited yet, do drop by for some very good reading.
The 105th Carnival of Homeschooling is up at CoH founding blog Why Homeschool. This edition marks the second anniversary of the CoH.
I’m waaay behind in my reading of the delightful Charlotte Mason Carnival. The current issue can be found at Freedom Academy.
One of my favorite carnivals is Unschooling Voices. The new edition is here.
I was intrigued by Angela’s post at Mother Crone’s Homeschool about the 888 Reading Challenge—you come up with a list of 8 books in 8 categories you plan to read in 2008. You can overlap 8 titles in multiple categories so that your target to-be-read total is 56 books. I don’t think I’m up for this challenge myself, because I have learned that the minute I put a book title on a list of books I plan to read, I suddenly want to read everything but that book. So no lists for me, but I’m enjoying reading other people’s. It’s especially fun to see what categories people come up with. Maybe I’ll do the project in reverse and write a categorized retrospective list at the end of the year.
In the meantime, here’s a challenge I can rise to meet! Elizabeth M. at Charlottesville Words links to FOMA, who has proposed, with tongue firmly in cheek, the observance of NaJuReMoNoMo—that’s National Just Read More Novels Month. "All you have to do is read any novel from start to finish within the month of January."
I’m pretty sure I can handle that.
I did a bit of updating at GoodReads (note the new sidebar widget over on the right) and hope to stay more on top of that this year. My 2007 reading list is woefully incomplete. I did enter a few of the books I had the pleasure of enjoying during the holidays: a revisit of Edith Schaeffer’s The Hidden Art of Homemaking
A TBR title I’m not afraid to commit to: Noel Perrin’s A Reader’s Delight
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