Alexandre Dumas, pere, b.1802. I’m planning to read The Three Musketeers to my urchins this next school year. It’s such a great story.

I’ll let you know how the urchins like it. I expect to have a lot more swordplay going on around here as soon as I do read it–as if Karate Kid didn’t practice his sword and light saber techniques often enough as it is.

Robert Graves, b.1895. I, Claudius is a good novel, but I read that Graves thought of himself more as a poet than a novelist. We read some of his poetry in British literature class last year, but I don’t think my un-war-experienced high schoolers (nor I) appreciated his images and poems of the horrors of WW I too well. I do rather like this image:

Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
“Symptoms of Love,” lines 1-3, from More Poems (1961)

Athos would agree with the idea of love as a migraine. Maybe Aramis would, too.

Amelia Earhart, b.1897. Have you ever seen the picture book Amelia and Eleanor Go For a Ride by Pam Munoz Ryan about how Amelia Earhart gave First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt a ride in her airplane?