flea

Chapter Books We've Loved Reading Aloud

2012-06-26T16:55:33Z

Both Kids:
The Hobbit
Swallows and Amazons (no sequels yet, but I plan to read some)
The Penderwicks (and sequel 1 so far)
Danny the Champion of the World (lesser-known Dahl, my favorite)
Alvin Ho (we've done 1 and 2; Dillo especially loves these)
Farmer Boy (no other Ingalls Wilders yet)
Kenny and the Dragon (Tony DiTerlizzi)
The Rescuers
All-of-a-Kind Family
They've both read the Captain Underpants books with mr. flea (not my cup of tea, but GREAT for a 4 year old with a shorter attention span).

Just Casper (so far):
The Secret Garden (get the version illustrated by Inga Moore)
The Wind in the Willows (also available illustrated by Inga Moore)
Sarah Plain and Tall
Mr. Popper's Penguins
The Twenty-One Balloons
Homer Price (Robert McCloskey chapter book)
She read The Spiderwick Chronicles and is working through Harry Potter with mr. flea; they like both series but I don't love 'em.

There are so many more things I want to read.

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Amusing bad prose, and my funk

2012-05-25T16:36:29Z

I browse the free romance novels for Kindle at Amazon, and download the ones that might be likely; I've found a couple of good ones, but many are examples of How Life Is So Terrible Now That Nobody Can Write Any More. One I tried last night had the advantage of some amusing word choice errors:

1. Laura shut her eyes as tightly as she could when she heard Nathaniel's admonition of love.

2. "No one wants to dance with me anymore!" Claire pouted. "How can you say no to your old friend?"

Leander looked back at his sister, letting her catch the pained expression on his face. ... "Very well," he capsized. "Let's go."

The book also uses "alright" throughout. Note, this is not self-published or anything; a press put this out.

***

I've had a bad week; at home, not working, not doing anything much worthwhile and as a result very unhappy. Each day I've meant to go out and do something but I have not yet succeeded (today I will; there's a school even I am going to.) It's Memorial Day weekend, and we were going to stay here because of a Girl Scout event tomorrow, but that's been postponed, so we could go somewhere. But I want a vacation, not a "listen to the kids act up and bicker in new places" weekend. We went out to dinner last night and Dillo was a jerk. I am so ready for the kids to act more mature, but I don't seem to be able to manage to teach them to be so.

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Bus riding, week 2

2012-04-10T22:37:18Z

Today on the (25-minute behind schedule) ride home, there was a woman on the bus with Tourette's. Not that she could help it, obviously, but there's nothing like a woman hand-flapping and screeching, "sweaty vagina!" in an odd, high voice to let you know you're on a public conveyance.

ION I started 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles,' and then went and spoiled myself for the plot via Wikipedia, and I'm not sure I want to go on. Maybe I will only read 19th-century novels written by women, since so far in the ones I've read written by men the women are all Symbols of Pure Womanhood and/or Connected To Nature (or actually named The Vengeance.)

IOON, week two of moving books 4 hours a day and I am not any less sore at the end of each day. Nor is my butt smaller. I suppose this is a consequence of being 39.

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stuff I can't post on Facebook; books

2012-04-01T23:29:21Z

mr. flea and Dillo (who is in the bath) are having a hilarious argument involving whether or not Dillo should pull back his foreskin and wash underneath it. Dillo had apparently never noticed that he is uncircumcised and mr. flea is, and I think mr. flea just got his junk out to demonstrate.

In higher-mind news, this year so far I have read Middlemarch, Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, and am halfway through A Tale of Two Cities - all on Kindle. Over break I also read Wide Sargasso Sea in print.

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Danny the Champion

2011-04-19T02:20:07Z

We started reading Roald Dahl's Danny the Champion of the World to both kids last night. After the success of reading The Hobbit over Xmas break, I want to do more reading to both of them at the same time, and we read Danny to Casper when she was 4 and she loved it. (Books that can engage both a 4 and a 7 year old are tricky; in a year or 2 it will be easier. Dillo did a lot of running around and playing during the Hobbit which he really liked, and was pretty bored by Wind in the Willows). Both kids love Danny this go around and beg for more, but Casper doesn't really remember it at all, although she loved it at 4! Very interesting. I've thought for a long time that things I love from my young childhood I remember well mostly because I got a second (and in some cases 3rd) dose of them with my siblings.

I have emailed the Girl Scout troop leaders telling them I'm not going to lead again next year. Now I just need to make it to May 17 without screaming at anyone.

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Two Books on Pandemic Disease

2011-01-07T17:45:49Z

So, my dear sister sent me two books for Christmas:

1. Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
2. John Barry, The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history (about the 1918 "Spanish Flu")

Number one is derived from the author's doctoral dissertation in American History at Yale, a signal for many dry and boring books; number two is a meticulously researched work, but one written by a journalist who began as a football coach. Number one was celebrated, but in mainly academic circles; number two received widspread popular acclaim.

But surprisingly, number one is much the better and more readable work of non-fiction. Maybe it's because Fenn left her grad program at Yale to spend eight years working as an auto mechanic in Durham, NC, but she's a MUCH better writer, and manages to balance deep scholarship and detail with lively writing, and understanding of why pandemics matter (aside from the inherent coolness of mass death, she has an historian/anthropologist's concerns for the social fallout of pandemics). Barry spends a lot of the book talking about the development of scientific medicine in the US, with its centers at Johns Hopkins and the Rockefeller Institute, which was fairly interesting to me, but he never managed to tie this thread of the book closely enough to the actual flu outbreak. His treatment of that was rather brief and almost cursory, with a focus only on one place (Philadelphia) and no characters who we could really get a grip on. (We got oodles about a guy named Welch who was pretty boring (despite founding Johns Hopkins medical school) and did nothing in the pandemic except catch the flu and stay in bed for a long time recuperating.) And his language and tone were needlessly melodramatic. Each chapter once the flu started (since the book begins when Welch was born in like 1860) began or ended with, "It was influenza, only influenza." I was considering making up a song.

Now, do you think we could get Elizabeth Fenn to write about the Spanish Flu? No? Well, I think I am going to look for her forthcoming book about the Mandan people of the Dakotas. And I am taking Barry's book about the 1923 New Orleans flood off my wish list.

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