Category Archives: Books

Books

What’s in YOUR Backpack?

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So we took this little road trip. The girls packed their
own backpacks with a week’s worth of clothing and (prepare to gasp in
horror—at least, that was their reaction when I told them) only two books each.
TWO books. Not twenty-two, which is about how many Jane figured she’d
need for a six-day trip. I reminded her that 1) she was going to be too
busy talktalktalktalk- talking with her bosom buddies to (gasp) do any
reading while we were there and 2) if by some unimaginable chance there
came a lull in the talktalktalking (and swimming and eating and singing
of songs from the Snoopy soundtrack),
she was going to be staying at possibly the only house on the east
coast with MORE BOOKS THAN OURS.

(Actually, that’s not true, and is in fact somewhat of a slander against Alice. Between us, Scott and I have amassed more books than is sane and reasonable for any one person. Alice is both sane and reasonable. She has a lot of books, but not a basement full. But then, a lot of what we have are comp copies of our own books, and it is fairly reasonable to keep those around. Then, too, we have wound up with a lot of freebies. And both of us have kept pretty much every book we ever owned since, um, birth. And then all the stuff I’ve collected for homeschooling. It adds up. However, a massive subtraction will have to occur very soon, because with gas prices what they are there is no way I’m putting all these (beloved, sob!) volumes on a moving truck. And horrors! I hear they don’t have basements in Southern California! Nowhere! It is the Land of Perfect Weather But No Basements! I believe it’s a state law, and that border check Scott had to pass through as he entered California was not, in fact, to screen for illegal aliens but rather to make sure he wasn’t trying to smuggle any basements through in his trunk. They have specially trained German shepherds who can sniff out a basement a mile away. Grrrr…I smell cellar! What do you think this is, New England?)

So. Two books each. When I saw the girls’ choices, I had to laugh.
Sometimes it’s like we’re a parody of ourselves. I do believe I have
blogged about every one of those books at one time or another. For
example, Beanie picked one of her beloved Tintin books—a fine choice for a long ride, I must say. She can’t quite read them yet—Go Dog Go is more her speed—but she loves to pore over the pictures and puzzle out the story. Her other choice was one of Scott’s Disney adaptations, I think.

Jane’s two books were A Wind in the Door, Rakkety Tam, and Little Women. Apparently she thinks I can’t count.

And Rose chose The Children’s Homer and her tattered, read-to-shreds copy of Adventures of the Greek Heroes. Because no trip is complete without a little Hercules. (Whose little-known thirteenth labor, by the way, was to smuggle a basement into California. Since California as such didn’t even exist in his day, this was quite a feat indeed.)

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Who needs books when you can watch the traffic on I-81?

Blog, Books, Clippings

Taking Care of Blogness

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I’m here, I really am. Just: five kids, one me, and of course if something’s gotta give, it’s going to be Mr. iMac. (Fred, I call him. Ole Fred, actually, in honor of my former professor and favorite living writer.)

(And yes, Down to the Bonny Glen was dedicated to the author, not the computer. I didn’t even have this computer when I wrote this book. I think that one was named Harvey. After the rabbit.)

Anyway, right now, at this moment, both my little ones are asleep and the three older girls are occupied. In descending order: Where the Red Fern Grows; a giant dirt hill and the little boy across the street; Zoombinis. Now, I am aware that my calling attention to this fact (that none of my children need me at this moment) all but guarantees someone is about to—

UNBELIEVABLE. I am not making this up: at the very second I was typing that, the door opened and one of the children DID need me. Well, sort of. She needed to tell me that she’d come home for her jaguar. Because, you know, what good is a giant dirt hill and the little boy across the street if you’re  short one jaguar? Priorities, you know.

OK. She’s gone again, wild beast in hand. What I should do now is typereallyfast and finish this post before someone needs (a) feeding, (b) hugging, or (c) wiping. So let me think. What was I going to write about today. Well, first, there was this: I have a brief sequel to my post about the funny things you hear in the background when you talk to Alice on the phone. (Such as: "Mommy, may I please jump on the bed?" Her children may be hard on the mattress springs, but they are so POLITE!) I took my gang to the pool this morning and I snuck in a phone call to Alice while the big girls were splashing and hollering "She splashed me!" in indignant tones swimming.

Alice: So when you come visit what we’ll do is—

Me (interrupting): No, no, DON’T THROW THE STRING CHEESE IN THE POOL! Oh, shoot.

(Question: would you let your two-year-old eat a stick of string cheese that had been fished out of the neighborhood pool? I mean, what’s a little chlorine marinade, right?)

Next. Lots of interesting reading elsewhere in the ‘sphere today. Spunky has three or four posts I’d like to sink my teeth into, as soon as I have a bit of a lull around here (a less tenuous lull than this one, I mean).

(For example, during that paragraph the Zoombinis had a heated argument with the upstairs computer, also known as Marge the Barely-Functioning Laptop, requiring intervention from local peacekeeping agencies.)

(Operation Reconciliation: a success. Marge has somewhat grudgingly permitted the ‘Binis access to her territory. She is temperamental, though, and their position is precarious in the extreme.)

(Personally I think she is just sulking because she heard me say it was a shame I wouldn’t be able to live-blog our cross-country trip, whenever that actually happens, because Marge doesn’t have Wi-Fi capability. She takes these things very personally.)

There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on at Liz’s place today, too, such as this post on how people get started reading the classics. (I’d like to respond to this topic, too, at some point, but today is all about the meta-blogging, not the actual Blogging of Intelligent Stuff.) She also links to the list of 100 Cool Teachers in Literature list being compiled by the teachers at A Year of Reading, which will make a great companion to the fascinating lists of Cool Boys and Cool Girls in Children’s Lit that Jen Robinson has assembled. Up next, Cool Mothers? Seems like someone had a list like that going not long ago. High on my list: Marmee (obviously—and Mrs. Jo, too; she grew up rather nicely), Anne Blythe (but of course), Mrs. Austin, and the light-footed, lighthearted Mrs. Ray, mother of Betsy. But tops on my list has to be Susan Sowerby from The Secret Garden. Smart, down-to-earth, cheerful, observant, plain-spoken, unflappable, and a good cook to boot.

The Coolest Dad in Fiction has got to be Atticus, right?

(I’m having deja vu. Surely we have discussed this before.)

Moving on: Spunky mentions this too but I first read it on Bloglines, ’cause I’m a PHATMommy subscriber. Shannon reminds us that this weekend is the big BlogHer conference in San Jose where hundreds (thousands?) of female bloggers are getting together for panel discussions, networking, and cocktails. Lots of cocktails. Shannon has posted some BlogHer-in-Spirit discussion questions for those of us who are not at the convention in body. I hope to tackle them myself later on, but right now I can hear that Marge is being inhospitable to the Zoombinis again, and I think my own little Zoom-Beanie is in need of a Cool Mom in body, not just in spirit.


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Books, Family Adventures

Keeping Calm During the Storm

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Well, we’re beginning to catch our breath here after the whirlwind of the last few weeks. Not that the whirlwind is over, since there’s still the whole sell-the-house-pack-the-house-move- cross-country thing ahead of us. But now that the house is on the market, we’re settling into a new rhythm of cleaning and waiting, and I’m finding that it’s really quite a mellow rhythm after the frenzy of the past two weeks.

Rhythm is good. Lesley Austin has some lovely thoughts on that subject this morning. (I love her idea of making cards with the kids’ daily chores on them—Jane oohed and ahhed over her examples.) During times of upheaval like this, pegs become even more useful and atmosphere more important than ever. I am leaning heavily on our pegs these days: poetry with meals to keep them from being rushed and cursory; singing (very loud; seldom very good) with housework to make the work merry; and the all-important bedtime read-aloud to keep things cozy while the hurricane roars.

For a while there, we had cast aside all read-alouds. It was
comforting, last night, to start a new one. I went with something light
and easy: James and the Giant Peach. Jane has read it before
but doesn’t mind listening in, and neither of the other girls has ever
heard it. Beanie was appalled by the first chapter’s breezy depiction
of the grisly demise of James’s parents, but the satisfyingly
ridiculous names of Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker reconciled her to the
tone of the book. I always remember that Jim Trelease (he of The Read-Aloud Handbook fame) calls James and the Giant Peach the best read-aloud ever, and while I don’t agree with him (I’d put By the Great Horn Spoon and Understood Betsy above it, to name two), it does fit the bill when you want something fast-paced and funny.

One thing my pegs are not helping me with at all is email. I have over a hundred emails piled up and waiting for answers. If yours is one of them, forgive me! (But don’t stop writing…I can read mail, just can’t find the time with both hands free to answer it!)

Books, Picture Book Spotlight

Picture Book Spotlight: How Do I Love You?

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006001200501_aa_scmzzzzzzz_v51207944_How Do I Love You? by Leslie Kimmelman, pictures by Lisa McCue.

“How do I love you, little one? Let me count the ways…” says the mama alligator. (Or maybe it’s the daddy; who can tell with alligators?) And she begins to name all the ways she adores her young’un, much to my own young’un’s delight.

“Twelve, I’ll love you when you’re grown; thirteen, I love you small,” I read. “Read that part again, Mommy,” Beanie begs. She caught me in the midst of my Tasmanian-devil impersonation as I was whirling through the house trying to get it ready to go on the market (which it now officially is, gulp) and asked me to read this book to her, and when we snuggled up together on the couch with the smell of Windex still lingering in the air, the look on her face was like the end of a Mastercard commercial. Putting your house on the market on the spur of the moment: Hours of labor. Reading to your kid even though the realtor is about to walk in the door and the house ISN’T READY YET: Priceless.

“Read that part again!”

She loves those lines, about how the mama will love her little one when she’s grown and loves her when she’s small. At the end of the book she turns back to that page and asks me to read it “two more times.” The art makes her giggle: now the baby alligator is grinning at its reflection in funhouse mirrors. And the breadth of the mama’s assertions of love seem infinitely satisfying to this five-year-old lass.

It’s a simple book, and a sweet one. The art is lively and fun, whimsically painted in a palette of greens and blues—cool colors that manage to convey deep warmth. This parent and child adore one another, and that’s what my little girl wants to hear.

“Fourteen fifteen sixteen
each silly dance you do,
or spin you spin, or grin you grin
when you try something new.”

Eventually the alligator pair runs out of fingers and toes to count off, and the mama says that “when it comes to loving you, well, twenty’s not enough.” The little alligator is glowing with glee by this point, and Beanie’s face mirrors that emotion.

“Go back to twelve,” she says, snuggling in a little closer.

The Windex will just have to wait.

Books

The World eBook Fair

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Oh my goodness.

In celebration of Project Gutenberg’s 35th anniversary, the World eBook Library Consortia is offering free downloads of its entire collection from July 4th through August 4th. I have barely scratched the surface but there’s some fine stuff there, including tons of scans of children’s books—with color illustrations! This is really very exciting. Ambleside Online users will be happy to know that Ruskin’s King of the Golden River is there, in a full color pdf.

Other offerings: the Classic Literature Collection, the Education Resource Collection (whatever that is), the eMovies Collection, and about a million more books. Literally. A million. More than a million. Books. To download. For free.

Oh, I’m all trembly just browsing. Bye-bye hard drive.

(Major HT to Jinkies.)

Books

Tintin, Meet Me in Southern California

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I have a realtor coming this afternoon to laugh hysterically when I tell her how soon I’d like to get the house on the market. (This weekend would be nice.) (But totally unrealistic.) (But I’m an optimist.) (An exhausted one.)

Anyhoo. Saw this post by Gail Gauthier about a new book called Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and one day when things settle down around here (bahahahahahaha, oh, that was a good one) I will enjoy reading it. We are huge Tintin fans. HUGE. Beanie is catapulting herself toward literacy mainly because she wants to be able to read the Tintin collections she got for her birthday ALL BY HERSELF. She will pore over the pictures for hours, literally. Jane reads the books to her, I read them to her, Rose spirits them away and reads them to herself.

So I very much look forward to reading more about this:

“McCarthy shows how the themes this story generates—expulsion from home, violation of the sacred, the host-guest relationship turned sour, and anxieties around questions of forgery and fakeness—are the same that have fuelled and troubled writers from the classical era to the present day. His startling conclusion is that Tintin’s ultimate ‘secret’ is that of literature itself.”

Thanks for the tip-off, Gail.

Books, Picture Book Spotlight, Poetry

Only Opal

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069811564301_aa_scmzzzzzzz_Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, adapted by Jane Boulton, illustrated by Barbara Cooney.

I put this book on hold at the library after reading a review of it—somewhere. I couldn’t remember where. After I read it to my girls, I had to Google Blogsearch it because I needed to know a) who to thank for steering me toward it and b) if other homeschoolers were writing about the thing that pierced my heart about this book.

When the blogsearch landed on Karen Edmisten I thought: Well, of COURSE.

This heartbreakingly beautiful picture book is based on the diary of a young girl named Opal Whitely, a turn-of-the-century child whose parents died and left her to be bounced from one lumber camp to the next in the care of cold and uncaring foster parents. Opal’s surviving record of her very early days—she was only five or six when she kept this diary—is a stunning portrait of a tender, hopeful spirit clinging to every tiny shred of beauty to be found in a grim world. A dark-eyed mouse lives in her pocket; a tall, straight-backed tree offers her strength and support. Opal has no one to love her, so she pours out her own love upon the calf in the field, even though her kind attentions earn her harsh words from the nameless woman who houses her (and works her half to death).

That the foster mother is nameless is telling: Opal is overflowing with names for the creatures she loves. As Karen Edmisten writes,

“Opal finds solace and beauty in nature and in the books her parents left her. From these books, she discovers names for her friends: her pet mouse becomes Felix Mendelssohn, her calf is Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her favorite tree is christened Michael Raphael.”

And that’s the thing that so moved me—and frightened me, in a way—about this book. Did little Opal encountered the composer, the poet, and the archangels on her own in the books her parents left behind, or were their names already familiar to her because she had learned them at her mama’s knee? I can imagine the young mother in the lumber camp, reciting poetry to her tiny daughter; a father humming snatches of a Mendelssohn melody he caught in a drawing room somewhere far away.

Am I just projecting? Is it that I read poetry—some of the very same poems, no doubt—to my own children, and their father the classical music buff plays them symphonies (very loudly) and waxes enthusiastic about the talents of certain composers? Does Only Opal pierce my heart because my children have learned about St. Michael and St. Raphael at my knee, and seeing this delicate child left abandoned to callous strangers reminds me that we are none of us guaranteed the chance to nurture our little ones all the way to adulthood? Suppose (I don’t like to suppose it) something were to happen, and Scott and I were gone. Have we planted enough fruit-bearing seeds in the children’s hearts to nourish them through whatever trials life might hold for them?

I came away from Only Opal feeling profoundly grateful for the time we have had thus far, and for the freedom we have had to make the most of that time. Thankful for the books that have shaped our days together: the many, many mornings we have spent curled up over a volume of poetry and the evenings when I had to shout “Pass the salt” over the crescendo of a Shostakovich symphony. I cannot imagine a scenario in which my children had no one to love them but a ragged little field mouse, but surely there will be times of distress or loss in their lives sooner or later. I cannot protect them from that. What I can do, what I must do, is bequeath to them a store of treasures—the fine music, the fine words, the fine and glorious tenets of our faith—that will sustain them through the unknowns that lie ahead.

Books

The 48-Hour Book Challenge Recap

I didn’t participate in Mother Reader’s very cool read-and-review-as-many-books-as-you-possibly-can-without-going-blind internet mass-read extravaganza. I know my limits. Once so proud of my ability to devour a book or four a week, I have meekly accepted the new reality: I am now a slow reader. It’s a time-and-tired thing. If I go to bed early just so I can read, I’m asleep before the chapter ends. Scott laughs when the book falls on my face. Sometimes this wakes me up enough to read another paragraph. Once the book fell on the baby’s face. She didn’t seem to notice, but it made me realize I need to rethink this whole reading in bed thing.

Fortunately, a lot of other bloggers have more stamina. Mother Reader gives a thorough recap of the competition here. And look!

“The winner of the 48 Hour Book Challenge is Midwestern Lodestar! This dark horse librarian by training read an amazing fourteen books with a total of 3155 pages! She read and blogged for about 26 of the 48 hours. What an introduction to the kidlitosphere!”

Did you catch it? It’s a real word now! Kathryn Judson (whose blog I quite enjoy) sent me a note the other day asking if I’d Googled “kidlitosphere” lately—she’s right! Just look at all those hits! ::sniff:: They grow up so fast…

Books

Steinbeck’s Turtle With the Old Humorous Face

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So today I’m thinking about that turtle in the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath. It’s chapter three and he’s just an old turtle plodding along in the dust beside the fields of dying corn. We heard about the dust and the corn in the opening chapter, how the wind and the heat are blowing the life out of the crops, and how the sharecroppers are close to breaking but still hold on to enough stubborn grit that their women know somehow, no matter what happens, they’ll survive. As long as the men don’t break, Steinbeck says, and when he shows us this turtle a few pages later, we know he’s showing us how a humble, homely creature can be tough enough to endure a serious battering and keep going. Even after a car hits him, “flipping him like a tiddly wink,” like a pawn in some cosmic game, into the fringes of the crisping corn, he gets himself turned back onto his feet and resumes his steady plodding.

Some wild oat seeds get stuck in his shell and eventually they fall underneath him and his body drags dust over them as he goes along. Sooner or later, some rain will fall—it has to, sometime. And those seeds will sprout, and it will be the turtle who gave them a chance at life. Here, too, we’re seeing a glimpse of these men we’re about to meet, men whose accidental actions will cause chains of events, men whose steady plodding will bring life out of the dust—sooner or later.

And then along comes Tom Joad and he sees that turtle and scoops him up. Rolls him up in his jacket to take home as a present for a little brother he hasn’t seen in we don’t know how many years. Fresh out of prison, not even sure his family is still holding on to the forty acres they’ve sharecropped time out of mind.

I love how Steinbeck does this: how Joad is that turtle though he doesn’t know it; how forces so big he can’t see them will catch him up and carry him along, and at times he’ll feel as blind and helpless as that turtle he’s got wrapped up in his coat.

Only three and a half chapters, and Steinbeck’s got me trembling.