rivka

Some friends invited us over for dinner tonight, a lovely relaxed end to what has been a very hectic (albeit enjoyable) day. Their youngest son, who I think is around ten and has only spoken a few words to me in passing before, somehow fixated on me and spent much of the evening telling me about the plot of his fantasy trilogy. He is 103 pages into the first book, but he seems to have the full trilogy planned out. It is very complicated. My comprehension was not helped by the fact that he spoke very quietly (either so that Alex would not hear the scary parts or that his brother wouldn't hear the details, I'm not sure which) but at about a hundred words a minute.

He offered to e-mail me his book-so-far. It just arrived.

I am charmed, and a little mystified, and extremely honored that he has given me his manuscript to read.

"Most people who read it say it's the best thing they've ever read," he told me modestly.

I think I love this kid.

I'm reading A Little Princess to Alex right now. If you don't know the book, the rest of this post won't make any sense to you, but I feel compelled to post it anyway.

Apparently, at some point in the past I gave Alex a brief plot synopsis of the whole book so that she could decide whether or not it was too sad to read. It's the only thing that kept her going through today's chapter, "The Diamond Mines Again," in which Sara is orphaned and impoverished in one stroke.

She sniffled a little as she leaned against my side. Then she looked up at me trustingly. "Mom? When Sara's father's friends come to find her in the end, do they kill Miss Minchin?"

...It occurs to me that she may not feel that my promise of a happy ending holds up.

I'm not sure I've ever done this before, but I have to promote this comment to a main post:

Emma commented on the post I titled "My mom says some days are like that. Even in Australia."

Are you quoting the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day? You must be! In Australia, it reads "Some days are like that, even in Timbuktu". Just so you know.

I don't know why, but I am so unbelievably charmed to know this. Logically, it makes perfect sense that Australian children wouldn't want to face down an awful day by muttering "I think I'll move to Australia." I just never knew they had an alternative. Now I do, and I'm sharing that knowledge with you.

If you haven't been reading Mark Reads Harry Potter, you totally should be. Mark is a 26-year-old guy who somehow made it to adulthood without ever reading a Harry Potter book, watching a Harry Potter movie, or encountering fandom. Now he's reading the series a chapter at a time and blogging his reactions before going on to read any further. His hundreds of commenters are all sitting on their hands desperately trying not to post spoilers - especially when he says things like "I'm really interested to see how Sirius's plotline develops" halfway through Order of the Phoenix.

This might be a good time to pick it up - he's just published an annotated index to his entries which makes navigation much easier. He's going to be starting Half-Blood Prince on Monday.

This is the worst job of professional copyediting I have ever seen.

I understand spell-check errors. I can tolerate "silting" for "sitting," I guess, and I can rescue the meaning when "for" is substituted for "floor." I wince, but I see how it happens.

But then there are the errors that make the author look stupid. Please do not have a character adjust her "economically perfect desk chair," because you will jolt me right out of the story. And FOR THE LOVE OF GOD do not have a bunch of college-educated professionals who work with language for a living as newspaper reporters and columnists keep using the construction "suppose to."

Somewhere in the dimly-lit corners of Cornell University, a bust of William Strunk, Jr. has tears trickling down its dusty face.

Updated to add: ZOMG someone just ordered "trench fries."

Alex is in the middle of having three different chapter books read aloud to her.

We had been reading Louis Sachar's Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger at bedtime. We're almost done, so when we went to the library today I picked up All-of-a-Kind Family, and we had to start it as soon as we got home. We've read four chapters already. When Michael came home, I took a break, and she asked him to start re-reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.

She's my daughter, all right.

Last night we went to our first homeschooling event. It was billed as a "curriculum fair;" it turned out to be a massive flea market for homeschooling families to get rid of old books, curricula, games, software, resources, et cetera. (There were workshops, too, but we skipped them because they didn't seem like a good fit.) Everything I saw was very cheap, and it was nice to be able to chat a bit about how people had used things.

The biggest thing we learned is to get a babysitter next time. It was in Annapolis, which is a long way to go in after-work traffic, and when we got there the church where it was being held was swelteringly hot. Alex alternated between desperately needing everything she saw and whining that she didn't want to look at anything else. I would've liked to have more time to page through potential resources, consult with Michael, and sift through the big bins of fiction books. Oh well. There will be more.

The sponsoring group was a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling group, and, well. Mixed in with the sane resources on the various tables would be things like Astronomy God's Way. There's a good-sized secular homeschooling organization in Baltimore, so we won't be dependent on these folks for an ongoing social network. Which is good, because there's only so much biting my tongue that I can do.

At any rate, we came home with ( loot! )

You guys know it's going to take me a while to get to all of these, right? Here are the book questions, grouped together.

kate_nepveu: Of the Aubrey-Maturin books you've read so far, which is your favorite and least favorite? Or, if that's too difficult, most memorable/lingering and least?

The Aubrey-Maturin books are so clearly chapters in the same long novel, rather than separate books, that I have great difficulty keeping track of what happens in which book. If I had to choose by whole novels, I think I'd say that Master and Commander might be my favorite. I love the beginning of Jack and Stephen's relationship, and Jack's first experiences of command. Least favorite: the last two books. I think O'Brian started to lose his touch about when to show and when to tell, and also in many ways he was just rewriting earlier bits; ( spoilers! )

Sumana: Are you missing any Cherry Ames books you wish people would send you?

It turns out that there's a sharp drop-off in quality after the first few books. The first four take you through Cherry's training, her efforts to decide between military service and civilian nursing, and her military career. Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse takes place in jungle hospitals on Pacific islands and is quite harrowing. I'm interested in the next one after that, Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse, because it continues the wartime setting, but judging from the poor quality of the later Cherry Ameses I've read, I have no interest in seeking out titles like Cherry Ames, Department Store Nurse.

marydell: What's your all-time favorite book, and why?

I can't do a singular favorite book! Hmm... it's totally cliche to say Pride and Prejudice, isn't it, but Jane Austen's books are ones that I never get sick of rereading, and P&P is my favorite of them. But yeah, total cliche. Jeez. Okay, the other book that comes to mind is Lois McMaster Bujold, either Barrayar or Memory. I'd say that Barrayar stands better on its own. I love the way it examines womanhood and motherhood from so many different angles, through so many different characters, and I love Cordelia. Memory is an even better book in some ways, but it needs the rest of the series to give it full resonance.

moobabe: What's your favorite nonfiction book?

If I had to pick one nonfiction book to have on a desert island, it would be the Norton Anthology of Women's Lives, which is a huge collection of excerpts from women's autobiographies.

ororo: What's the last book you read for your own pleasure? What did you like best about it?

It was Georgette Heyer's Cotillion. No, wait, it was Jennifer Crusie's Fast Women. That's not the best Crusie by any means, but I like that, like all her books, it has strong secondary characters who are important in their own rights - not just as appendages to the protagonists - and because there is much more going on than just the romance. Cotillion is the book I read just before Fast Women. It's my very favorite Heyer. The first time I read it, I misinterpreted the signals and thought the hero was gay. Not in a slash sense - I thought I was supposed to read the hero as gay. Boy, did the ending surprise me.

Last night our young friend Sarah came over to babysit so that Michael and I could go out to dinner. While I was driving her home, she mentioned that "sci fi is all I feel like reading these days." She loves it. But the only SF she has actually encountered is the stuff her mother has passed along - meaning Asimov and Heinlein. I don't think she's read any SF published in her own lifetime.

Obviously this was a public service opportunity I couldn't pass up. I told her I'd pack up a bagful of books published in the last 20 or so years and bring them to church on Sunday.

The unfortunate part is being limited to books we actually own. We haven't bought that many new books in the last few years, except for continuations of series we collect; I do most of my reading from the library. That said, I've put together a good pile for her. Only three of the books were published before she was born in 1991 or 1992.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor and The Warrior's Apprentice.
Emma Bull, Bone Dance
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (not SF, but I couldn't resist)
Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife
Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas, & Electric
Charlie Stross, The Family Trade
Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Shari S. Tepper, The Family Tree
Joan D. Vinge, Psion
Connie Willis, The Doomsday Book

The two Bujolds and the Vinge are older than Sarah. But I had to get her started on Bujold, and the Vinge book is such an incredible example of Adolescent Emo that I couldn't resist giving it to a teen.

I really want to add Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden, but I can't seem to find our copies anywhere.

Talking it over with lynsaurus and unodelman, we all agreed that Octavia Butler belongs in there, but I read those books from the library. I also realized when talking to them that there needs to be something about the Singularity and posthumans and so forth. I'm not a fan of that side of the genre, but I do have a couple of Ken MacLeod books - The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division - and I could throw in one of them. I'm not sure about whether there needs to be any cyberpunk in there. On the one hand, important subgenre. On the other hand, isn't it an important subgenre that's kind of over?

Michael reminded me that Scott Westerfeld should be represented. I totally agree, but we read it all from the library. I'd like to be able to put in Uglies or Peeps. He also suggested something by John Scalzi - I thought maybe Zoe's Tale - but we don't have a copy of that either. If she likes these books, we can give her a reading list with more. I also need to find out if she likes fantasy.

What would you put in the bag, from your shelves?

A while back, I asked for recommendations for read-aloud chapter books. Since there was a lot of interest in the topic, I figured I'd provide an update about which books have worked well for us.

So far we've tried:

The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh, by A.A. Milne.
I don't have to supply a plot summary for this one, right? A few of the stories went over well, but other stories are fairly pointless from a three-year-old's perspective. We never got that far into it. Principally valuable at this point because it started us off on chapter-book reading, although I'm sure she'll like it more when she's a bit older.

My Father's Dragon and The Dragons of Blueland, by Ruth Stiles Gannett.
Little boy rescues dragons from terrible predicaments, using only his ingenuity and an oddball set of supplies. These books are amazing. Really, really wonderful. Alex just completely ate them up. There is a lot of adventure, but almost nothing is actually scary. The plots move quickly. These books are charming and funny and don't show their age at all.

Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Little girl grows up in the backwoods of Wisconsin in the 1870s. We read half of this very quickly, and then stopped. Some of the chapters make for great read-alouds. Others, like, uh, the hog-butchering chapter, not so much. We've had some interesting conversations about how people used to live. I guess we might take this one to Williamsburg, even though the period is off. Alex is still very fond of Laura and Mary, but she doesn't really ask for me to read this one. She's getting Little House in the Big Woods paper dolls for Christmas.

Mr. Popper's Penguins, by Richard and Florence Atwater.
Polar-obsessed housepainter raises a family of penguins in his suburban home. We started off fine with this one, and then Alex got bored after a few chapters and we didn't continue. I had to do a lot of modification of old-fashioned language. She might like this more in a year or two. I thought it was charming.

James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl.
Abused little boy rolls off for adventure inside a giant peach, accompanied by giant insects. Alex's verdict: "Really good, but a little bit scary." We gulped this book down in just a couple of days, although I confess that I skipped the very long songs that the Centipede sings. There's a lot of brisk adventure and not too much description in this book, which is good for a three-year-old. Michael thought Alex would be traumatized by James's mean aunts, but she seemed intrigued by them instead.

Ramona the Pest and Ramona the Brave, by Beverly Cleary.
A little girl lives a little girl's life. Massive, massive hits. Ramona the Brave is 190 pages long. We got it from the library on Sunday afternoon, and finished it this morning. Plus, Alex has been pretending that Ramona is her friend who comes to her parties. I wasn't sure how much she would get these stories, because they're very elementary-school-centric, but apparently Ramona's appeal is universal. Her beautiful new red boots get stuck in the mud. Another kid copies her owl picture. She's simultaneously excited and a little creeped out by Halloween. Just, you know, kid stuff. I'm loving the books, and so is Alex.

Where next? One of the children's librarians sent us home with Ursula LeGuin's Catwings. Alex is plugging for Ramona and Her Father, although I remember it being kind of sad. And I've ordered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle from an Amazon Marketplace seller. It feels like the whole world of reading is open to us now. We're having a lot of fun.