Archive for November, 2011
I’m reading The Cottage at Bantry Bay to Rose, Beanie, and Rilla. Funny to think that in all these years, I’ve never read it aloud. It’s lovely this way: makes me glad I took all those theater classes in college and learned to fake my way through accents. The problem with my Irish brogue is it keeps slipping into a Scottish burr. Back when I was doing lots of readings for the Martha books, I used to listen to an actor’s dialect tape to coach me in the accent. It’s awfully rusty, but it keeps wanting to sneak in when I’m trying to read the Sullivan family.
I hadn’t planned to start this book last week, but one morning Rose said she’d like to learn more about Ireland—she has recently taken up pennywhistle, so Ireland’s in the air, so to speak. We were between read-alouds just then, and sure and wasn’t Bantry Bay looking at me from across the room? Jane read the whole series long ago, but none of the others had tried it. It’s perfect for the rather wide age range we’re spanning—13, nearly 11, and 5 1/2 (oh my)—with that blend of comical domestic adventures and interesting historical detail that I especially enjoy, and enjoy sharing with my kids.
Jane’s busy with a Python programming class she’s taking (Great Campus Academy online, if you’re interested—we give them high marks) and other Jane pursuits. Wonderboy’s new favorite hobby is writing out math problems: things like 3 + Beanie = car.
Huck and I picked peas this afternoon. Well, that’s stretching it a bit—we picked a single pea pod, and he looked at the tiny not-quite-ready peas and pronounced them “sticky,” which is his word for “icky,” I think. So I ate them all myself: sweet, sunwarm, crisp. Little crunches of summer on this blue-gold autumn day.
November 7, 2011 @ 6:21 pm | Filed under:
Family I moved all the chairs into the kitchen so I could scrub the floor under the dinner table. Naturally, this meant that Huck had to climb on those chairs and stand at the counter that is usually so tantalizingly out of his reach. And NATURALLY, this meant he was bound to knock over a cup someone had left half-full on the counter. And naturally it had to land on the sparkling clean floor.
Like putting beads on a string with no knot, isn’t that what Erma Bombeck said about housework?
A roundup of books we have enjoyed this year.
Picture Books:
• The Bat-Poet (more like a short novel, really: so lovely)
• A Dog Is a Dog
• Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site
• I Want My Hat Back (& follow-up here with book-inspired art)
• Nursery Rhyme Comics (graphic novel)
• Who’s Hiding?
• Wilfrid Gordon MacDonald Partridge
Chapter Books:
• A whole slew of titles in this collection of read-aloud suggestions for a four-year-old
That’s as far back as I’ve gotten so far…I’ll add more as time permits. Some of my older reviews are compiled on this page—I had the idea that I was going to create one page with direct links to every booknotes post I’ve ever written. In nearly seven years of blogging. Blogging mostly about books. I know, I know. Well, until time freezes, allowing me an infinity of free moments to copy-paste my way through—good heavens, I just looked—2500 posts (!), partial lists like this will have to do.
Related: Gift ideas
Photo totally unrelated to the content of this post, offered for those who may not be quite as interested in social bookmarking as I am. 🙂
I still haven’t found the one best, perfect means of sharing nifty internet finds with others. To be fair, even before Google killed off Reader Share, I was forever searching for that one best, perfect show-and-tell vehicle. Reader’s share button was so easy that I took it for granted.
Linksharing is important to me. I truly loved being able to click through to your blogs and explore your Reader Shared Items widgets. I loved that I could follow those link collections on my own Reader. I love it when someone on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter shares an intriguing bit of reading—love it so much that I’m reluctant to rely on chance to put those links before my eyes in the rapid infostream. I want an RSS feed of your nifty stuff: that’s the bottom line.
Some of you share links right on your blog, and that’s terrific. I could do that myself, have done in the past, but over time I’ve found that I prefer to keep my booknotes and family chronicle separate from my show-and-tell treasures. I’m a compartmentalizer.
This past week, I’ve experimented with Diigo as my primary linksharing vehicle. I was already using it to share booklists in my sidebar. I love how its widget folds itself neatly into my blog design. And I love that it has an RSS feed so you can subscribe if you’d like. What it’s lacking—and this is a biggie—is reciprocity. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t like that you can’t comment on links. Sharing isn’t as much fun if it’s one-way.
Diigo
For a while, I was using Tumblr as a way to archive my own online reading—not necessarily links I wanted to share, but things I’d read and wanted to be able to reference later. I fell out of the habit after a while. (Around the time of Comic-Con, I see, which explains the lapse.) As a sharing platform, it has much to offer: excellent visuals (you can share [and credit!] photos and videos as well as text links); a combox; an RSS feed. But its sidebar widget is incompatible with my blog design. That’s not a dealbreaker; I’m sure there are WordPress plugins for Tumblr feeds, and anyway I’ve got a redesign planned for early next year. (New books, new look.)
Tumblr
So for now, you may find (and subscribe to) my shared links at both Tumblr and Diigo, your choice. If I decide to let one of them lapse, I’ll let you know.
If you have come up with a replacement for your Google Reader Shared Items, please leave the link in my comments!
Occurs to me I forgot to share yesterday’s GeekMom post, a follow-up to recent posts here on Bonny Glen: Why Curated Content Matters.
My Diigo share widget is working quite well. It’s a satisfactory way for me to share links with others, although it lacks the reciprocity of Reader Share; you can’t comment back on my links. But please always feel free to come here to discuss anything I’ve shared, eh?
Now what I need to know is this: where are YOU sharing curated links now that your handy Reader Share button is no more?
A Dog Is a Dog by Stephen Shaskan, published by Chronicle Books.
The cover of this delightful picture book grabbed my kids’ attention immediately with its bright orange and turquoise palette; the big grinning doggy face made them giggle.
Those giggles never stopped: this is art that goes straight to a little kid’s funny bone.
In whimsical rhymes and big, comical images, we learn that a dog is a dog no matter what it’s doing—“Whether it suns on the beach, or glides on the ice.” “A dog is a dog, if it’s skinny or fat. A dog is a dog, unless it’s a…CAT!”
Would you believe that grinning doggy unzips his dog suit, and there’s a plump ginger cat inside? This is the point when Rilla’s giggles turned to shrieks of laughter. But the surprises don’t stop there…It seems a cat is a cat unless it’s a…
Oh, no, I’m not telling. But we all howled. I did not see that coming. Nor the next twist, nor the next! One of the things I love about this book is that it manages the near-impossible feat of employing the sort of rhythmic pattern that young children delight in, while simultaneously making unpredictable turns. And this while delivering art that bubbles over with humor and energy. I’ve become a huge Stephen Shaskan fan in one fell swoop. You remember last year when I went nuts over Jeremy Tankard and Tom Lichtenheld? Yeah, Shaskan is on that list. I’m officially (and totally on the spur of the moment) dubbing it the Mo Willems List: storyteller-illustrators whose art has won my heart with its bold black outlines and lively antics and hilarious facial expressions (often on creatures you wouldn’t think would be terribly expressive, like a dump truck or a pigeon or a woolly mammoth or…the thing inside Shaskan’s cat suit). [I’ve recently encountered another artist who belongs on this list, but I’m not allowed to tell you his name yet. And that, my friends, is what you might call a hint.]
Anyway, my dears…A Dog Is a Dog gets high marks from Wonderboy, Rilla, and Huck (not to mention their daddy and some amused big sisters). Enjoy.
Review copy received from publisher, but you know I don’t write about them unless they’re a hit with my own personal focus group.
P.S. Did you know November is Picture Book Month?
November 1, 2011 @ 5:54 pm | Filed under:
Photos 
My cat and werewolf. Are not Beanie’s wolf ears splendiferous?
Following up on last night’s post:
I’ve come up with a solution to my Reader-share problem, at least for now. I use Diigo for lots of bookmarking purposes (my [out-of-date] sidebar “Rillabooks” log, for example) and have set up a “share” tag there that will feed into my sidebar here. See “Caught My Eye” under the Recent Comments widget on the right. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of those posts, if you wish. (Click the RSS icon at the bottom of the list, which at this moment contains a single link.)
As I said in the combox the other day, most of what I shared via Reader was different in tone and content from the more newsy links I share via G+, Twitter, Facebook.
I frequently Reader-share posts I find moving, lovely, heartwarming, funny, or thought-provoking—vs. the more informational, newsy link-sharing I do via other platforms. My Reader shares are from blogs I subscribe to & read regularly (stating the obvious, I know). Somehow it feels different to carry a link to FB, Twitter, or G+ and post it: more official, formal, thrusting the post into your stream if you follow me on the platform in question. Whereas with Reader Share, you come to it or follow it only if you *want* that content. Also, those other outlets are so very *public.* If [a friend with a quiet family-focused blog] write[s] a beautiful post I’d like to share, I might be hesitant to do so on G+ where I’m followed by hundreds of people I don’t know—I’ll feel like I’m invading her privacy or something. Sharing via Reader seems more personal.
For now I’m using Feedly to read my blog subscriptions. It has easy sharing to Diigo, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve read that Google may roll out design themes for Reader the way you can get them for Gmail & iGoogle now. If that happens, I may return to Reader for feed-reading.
(Of course now I’m worried about Gmail too. They’re rolling out its redesign soon—you can see what it will look like by clicking the gear icon on your Gmail screen [upper right corner], Mail Settings, Themes. Select the “Preview” theme. More heavy black, excessive white space, ugh ugh ugh. I keep thinking about the design team who undoubtedly worked very hard on the visual elements of this grand Google overhaul—how hard they must have worked & how crushing to have the design met with such resounding disgust all over the internet. Such a bummer.)
