This arrangement would drive me crazy on a practical level, but it sure is pretty.

We have a loose system for shelving our books…probably wouldn’t make much sense to anyone else, but works for me. I am usually able to lay hands on the book I want—not always, because if one of the kids was reading it recently, it’s probably under a bed.

Laurie loaned me her CueCat and Jane & I have been slooowly working our way through the bookcases. (Where "slowly" means "did it obsessively for the first week and then forgot about it for the next two months, but remembered again and keep meaning to finish before Laurie needs it back.") We’ve entered around 300 books at LibraryThing so far. And then I started getting invites to GoodReads, so I imported the library to there. Anyone have thoughts about the one vs. the other?

There are two bookcases in our living room and two in our dining area, which is the short leg of the L-shape that makes our main living area. The shelves in the living room hold—just as they did when I wrote about "The Living-Room Shelf" so long ago for Cay Gibson’s book, Literature Alive!—some of our most beloved books, the ones we turn to over and over again. Fred Chappell is there, and E. Nesbit, and Hilda Van Stockum, and George MacDonald, and lots of Penguin Classics. Most of our poetry books. The big Macauley books—The Way Things Work, Ship, Cathedral, City.

(Speaking of Macauley! I’m going to be hosting his Robert’s Snow snowflake here during the Blogging for a Cure event. Go read all about it at the amazing Seven Impossible Things. I’m also hosting illustrator Timothy Bush, whose hilarious and perfect James in the House of Aunt Prudence is one of our family’s favorite picture books, and thus rates a spot on the living-room shelf.)

Scott has a zillion composer biographies, and most of those are in the living room, too. Also my stack of Waldorf books, along with Charlotte Mason. The rest of my education books are on the bookcase behind the kitchen table. Above that shelf is non-U.S. historical fiction for children, and below it are all the nature study books, field guides, Linnea, One Small Square, and so on. Then come a couple of shelves of miscellaneous educationally-useful things. The other dining-area bookcase holds all my religion books. (C.S. Lewis and Chesterton take up a whole shelf of their own.) There are puzzles and games on the top shelves, and I keep my pretty Small Meadow Press binders there too, because I like to look at them.

I keep thinking it would make an interesting (to me, at least) series of posts to talk about what’s on each shelf in the house, one at a time, and who has read it, and what we think about it, and why it made the cut when we were purging for the move. There’s no dead weight in our book collection now, that’s for sure.

If I scanned barcodes as I blogged, I could maybe get that CueCat back to Laurie sometime before our kids grow up.

(Seriously, Laurie. If you need it back anytime soon, just holler.)

I first heard about this delightful-indeed book from the Deputy Headmistress at The Common Room. A Child’s Delight, by Noel Perrin, is a collection of essays about children’s books that ought not to be missed. The DHM’s review suggested that Perrin’s book ought not to be missed, either, so naturally I took her advice. She is, as always, as good as her word.

I loved this little book. Perrin wrote a column on books—"neglected minor masterpieces" is how he described them—for The Washington Post. Not children’s books; that came later. His column, "Rediscoveries," recommended books Perrin thought everyone should read but which had seemed, for various reasons, to slip under the radar.

Eventually, Perrin shifted his attentions to children’s literature. The Deputy Headmistress elaborates:

Years later he was invited to
revisit the topic, only this time, to look at neglected children’s
books that deserved greater attention.

He and his editor had
some trouble coming up with a list they both agreed on. Perrin came up
with a list of 17 books, but the editor rejected eight of them as too
well known. The editor, a well read man, didn’t want books that were
too famous. The point was to recommend pieces that everybody didn’t
already know.

The story of just how Perrin came up with the final list of books, recounted in the introduction to A Child’s Delight and summarized in the DHM’s post, is fascinating reading in itself.

I had read about two thirds of the books Perrin discusses. Our taste seems to run on similar tracks, for many of his most enthusiastic reviews were of books I get pretty excited about myself. I’ve been tracking down and reading the other books on his list, and I owe him (and the DHM) a debt of thanks: these are indeed books not to be missed.

The DHM talks in detail about a little picture book called Johnny Crow’s Garden, by Leslie Brooke, reviewed with joyful rhapsody by Perrin. Their descriptions jogged my memory; I remember reading—and adoring—Johnny Crow when I was a tiny girl. I scored a used copy on Amazon marketplace (it is no longer in print, unbelievably, but you can view the whole book at Project Gutenberg) and had goosebumps when I turned its pages and saw those familiar old animals, the storks, the lion, the dapper Johnny Crow. Beanie quickly claimed the book for herself, and we have shared many a chuckle over it already in these few weeks.

Another Perrin pick is Millions of Cats by Wanda Gag, well known in homeschooling circles because of its inclusion in—hmm. I was going to say its inclusion in Before Five in a Row, but I just checked the booklist, and the other FIAR booklists, and it isn’t there. Another Wanda Gag book, The ABC Bunny, is in BFIAR, so that must be what I was thinking of. But you remember Millions of Cats, the Caldecott Honor Book about the little old man and the little old woman who are all alone, and they want a cat, and the husband goes off to find one and encounters

who all follow him home, which is when things get grisly. But charmingly so.

Perrin gives a very interesting biographical sketch of Wanda Gag, whose personal story was new to me. I’m even more intrigued by her work now.

Those two are picture books, but most of Perrin’s essays are about middle-grade novels. His taste runs toward fantasy, which suits me fine. Some of his choices surprised me because I wouldn’t have thought they were in fact under the radar. Watership Down is one such novel. You know I agree with Perrin that  everyone should read that book, but before that Google search hit popped up on my sitemeter, I might have thought such advice was redundant. Perrin wants to make sure no one misses it, so it lands a place in his book.

As do Noel Streatfeild’s "Shoes" books: Theater Shoes, Ballet Shoes, Dancing Shoes, and the others. I have probably blogged about those books before. They are enchanting. My girls are in the thick of them now, especially Beanie. I never encountered them as a child; my introduction to Streatfeild came during my first months on the job as an editorial assistant at Random House. My boss was involved in bringing three of the Shoes books back into print. All we had was hard copy, old out-of-print editions from the company archives. Someone needed to type the manuscripts into a Word document—and that someone, as it happens, was I. This was a freelance job, not part of my salaried employment, and I remember sitting up late at night in my little Queens apartment, typing away to earn extra money for the wedding I was planning. Talk about a cushy job. The only drawback was that my fingers couldn’t keep up with my devouring eyes—the books were so good that I kept finding myself drawn in, turning pages when I should have been typing.

Perrin’s quite right; if Streatfeild has slipped under your radar, you should treat yourself to a delightful read. Ballet Shoes is my favorite, I think (though I’ve a fondness for Dancing Shoes, with that insufferable little twit Dulcie Wintle and her maddening "baby dance").  Ballet Shoes is the story of three unrelated orphan girls—Posy, Pauline, and Petrova—who are adopted, one after the other, by an eccentric English explorer who spends most of the book off exploring, leaving his charges in the care of a sweet great-niece. Exploring doesn’t bring in much income, so the niece fills the house with interesting boarders, one of whom just happens to teach ballet…

But I don’t want to reveal too much. One of the things I appreciate most about Perrin’s reviews is that he is careful not to give away plot surprises.

Even so, I didn’t read more than the first few paragraphs of the essays about books I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading. Perrin sent me running to the library website to see which titles I could track down. The girls and I are just getting into The Children of Green Knowe, which Perrin praises most enthusiastically, and others on my list include T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose (I’ve only read White’s The Once and Future King) and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. (I know, I know, I can’t believe I haven’t read it either!)

Perrin’s essays have an E. B. White quality about them: their calm, good-humored simplicity; their elegant prose. I do believe I enjoyed his essay on Diana Wynne Jones’s ripping good tale, Dogsbody, almost as much as I enjoyed the novel itself. Coincidentally, Jane was reading Dogsbody about the same time I was reading A Child’s Delight, and when she finished, she wanted to discuss it, as we are wont to do. It had been probably ten years since I read that book myself, so I had to re-read it for Jane. ("Had to" makes it sound like an obligation, but you know if it’s Wynne Jones, it’s a privilege.) When I finished I really wanted to sit down with Jane and Mr. Perrin over a cup of tea for a nice long confab about Sirius, the luminous being who was banished to earth—in a puppy’s body, no less—for a crime he didn’t commit, with only a dog’s short life span in which to clear his name.

Other gems on Perrin’s list include Margery Sharp’s The Rescuers (much better than the movie), Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, and my favorite Edith Nesbit novel, The Railway Children.

My to-be-read pile is approaching Tower of Babel heights, and yet, like those foolhardy Old Testament architects, I keep adding layer upon layer. If I should disappear from this blog you will know the tower fell over and crushed me in my sleep. Whatever happened to Melissa Wiley? She died as she lived, buried in books.

My parents are in town (yippee!!), and yesterday Scott and I left the kids in their energetic hands and went for a drive in the mountains. On the way home, we stopped at a bookstore. We had a $50 gift certificate to spend and wish lists a computer-screen long. But we left without buying a single book. Why? We weren’t sure. Both of us walked into the store eager and drooling, and we walked out subdued, pensive, puzzled. We didn’t know why we weren’t buying anything; we’d each collected a few books on our slow stroll through the aisles. But we put them back.

Option paralysis? I guess. I couldn’t remember what was on my wish list. Of course I could have recited it line by line as soon as we were back in the car. An Egg Is Quiet; Mistress Masham’s Repose; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; Never Tease a Weasel; the entire Melendy series by Elizabeth Enright; a dozen other titles.

I did almost buy a copy of Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, which I had not heard of before a very large signboard just inside the store entrance informed me that I will find it Spellbinding, Beautifully Crafted, and Mesmerizing. Judging the book by its cover, I was inclined to believe the ad copy. Besides, I’m assured the novel is also Tender and Delicious, which makes me think of asparagus. I love asparagus. I also love magical realism and Southern writers (you know how I feel about Fred Chappell, for instance), so really, I have very high hopes for Garden Spells. And I could be reading it right now, but I didn’t buy the book.

That gift card is burning a hole in my bag, so maybe I’ll go back to the bookstore.

I also almost bought (for five dollars in the bargain section, so again: why didn’t I?) A Widow’s Tale by Margaret Frazier. I have never read any of Frazier’s work but I am almost certain I’ve heard one of the other book bloggers raving about her recently. Which one of you was it?

Then! I came home to my bloated Google Reader and saw all those tantalizing Under the Radar recommendations, and oh! There are so many books I want to read. I will raid the library and add them to the tower, my darling, my nemesis.

…for "what problems did the rabbits encounter in building a new warren in the book watership down"—I implore you to read the book yourself and find out!

Did a teacher assign it for summer reading? It’s too soon, surely, for you to have been assigned a paper for this semester’s classes.

Listen, even if you blow the back-to-school quiz, don’t hold that against the book. Give it a try.

You’ve never met anyone like Hazel and Fiver. Or Bigwig and Kehaar. You want them in your your life, trust me.

I guarantee you the "problems they encountered" aren’t the sort of challenges you might anticipate. They aren’t easily boiled down to quiz answers, either. Those rabbits’ experiences will make your heart pound, and they’ll heat up your brain, too, because what happens down in those warrens is, well, human history.

But wait, if I start spouting in that direction you’ll never pick up the book. Let’s just stick with the fact that it’s a tremendously gripping story. With characters who will burrow into your heart and live there forever.

I know I’m too late. You already landed on my site and Googled right back out again, not having found your pat answers here. (Or there.)

I hope that wherever you wound up, there was something in the information you cribbed that made you want to go back and read the book yourself. Not for a grade, not because you had to, but because some essay you skimmed about Hazel-rah, an average rabbit who was surprised by his own capabilities, whispered to you that you, too, might have latent strengths and gifts to call upon when life bares its pointed teeth at you.

Our beloved Virginia pals, the Jones girls, will be pulling into our driveway any minute for a delirious, delightful week-long visit. My girls are beside themselves. Rose has been stationed at the door for the past half hour and may well combust from sheer excitement if they don’t arrive soon.

I thought I’d get a Harry Potter post up during the weekend—a delusional notion, since this was San Diego Comicon weekend and Scott had to work long, late hours every day since the middle of last week. I’ve enjoyed some good discussion about the book, though, in the comments of this Studeo post and also at Kelly Herold’s GoodReads review. Spoiler alerts apply in both cases.

I also wanted to share the link to this very interesting take on the Harry Potter books by another of our former Virginia neighbors, Steve the Llamabutcher (posted before he read Book 7). Steve’s a big fan of the HP books but sees a failing in the wizarding world:

The bone I have to pick with J.K. Rowling—or maybe it’s
intentional, and therefore something to credit her with—is the
complete absence of the humanities from the course of education at her
magical school. The wizarding world as she presents it is completely
bereft of art and music of their own creation which is not derivative
of the creations of the non-magical world. In many respects the
wizarding world—or, at the very least, wizard Britain—is a world
which never really left the medieval: they never went through the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the revolutions of capitalism,
industrialism, and Darwinism. Now, I can see how a number of our
readers would probably say a combination of the last three aint bad
(and certainly the Shire of Tolkein was Rousseauian presentation of
Britain minus the last three), how many of us would want to live in a
world without the humanism and individualism and rationalism and
science that were the crowning achievements of the first two? Not me,
for one.

The first book—and I have a gut hunch the last book—pivots on the character never actually met by the reader of Nicolas Flamel,
a historical figure with a long history of being used by authors as a
representative of the obsession with alchemy. To me, the series rises
and falls with the fate of another obsessed alchemist born several
centuries after Flamel lived: Isaac Newton. Newton turned away from
alchemy in the end and embraced science and the scientific method, and
with it the principles of rationalism and free inquiry. Rowling’s
wizards remain profoundly uncurious about the nature of their world,
and the small few who inquire are kept hidden away within the
Department of Mysteries, their work kept secret. The Wizards, from the
fragments that Rowling provide, turned within themselves in Europe at
least at exactly the time the Europeans reached out to understand the
world, the universe, and the place of human beings within it.

Whether intentionally or not, Rowling has shown us a world within a
world free from imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, religion and
industrialism—yet it is a society racked profoundly with racism and
slavery, governed oppressively without any pretense of due process, the
rule of law, equality, or democracy, and in a world without great art,
sculpture, literature, poetry, dance, or music of its own.

They have Dumbledore.  We have DaVinci, Newton, Smith, Darwin, Einstein, Watson, Dickens, and Neil Armstrong.

Compelling perspective, and I’d love to comment but can’t just now because Rose is chanting "Aretheyhere? Aretheyhere?" ad nauseum and I can’t hear myself think. Posting will probably be light this week because we will be running around town keeping up with the Joneses!

I’m compiling a list of my favorite booklists over at The Lilting House. Feel free to drop by and add your suggestions in the comments!

I promised some friends I’d put together a list of my favorite booklists. Here we go, then:

Ambleside Online—click "Books" under each year. Don’t miss the "Additional Books for Free Reading" at the bottom of each list.

Reading Your Way Through History and Love2Learn.net.

Chinaberry Books.

The Sonlight catalog—order a paper copy to keep around for good historical fiction recommendations.

MacBeth’s Opinion—especially good for nature & science books, but lots of other categories there as well.

The 1000 Good Books list and its sister list, 100 Great Books.

Lots to choose from at The Baldwin Project, which I posted about here.

Here are the Newbery and Caldecott winners from 1922 and 1938, respectively, through 2007.

The Horn Book Awards.

Join the Literature Alive discussion group for lively conversation about favorite books.

The Real Learning Booklist—especially the picture book suggestions in the early years.

Also good for picture book ideas: the books used in Before Five in a Row and Five in a Row, even if you aren’t planning on "rowing."

Oh, and Sherry Early’s Picture Book Preschool recommends wonderful books for your youngest listeners.

For enjoyable books for kids of all ages, you can’t go wrong with the selection at FUN-Books.

Speaking of fun, here’s a fun one: the "100 Cool Girls of Children’s Literature" list at Jen Robinson’s Books Page. I’m mighty proud to say that my Martha made the list.

I have a list of our Favorite Fictional Families over at Bonny Glen.

I’ll add more lists here as I think of them…I know there are other good ones I’ve used.