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What Karate Kid Read: February/March 2010

Apr7

Crazy Lady by Jane Conly.

They Put Out to Sea: The Story of the Map by Roger Duvoisin.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. We read this play out loud together. I enjoyed it, not sure about KK.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes. Retold by Michael Harrison and illustrated by Victor Ambrus.

A Piece of the Mountain: The Story of Blaise Pascal by Joyce McPherson.

Escape Across the Wide Sea by Katherine McPherson.

He also read a few poems by John Donne and by John Milton.

Listened to:
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Well, actually, he’s still listening. It’s a very long book.

Karate Kid also read various books and articles on card tricks, magic, sleight of hand and all that jazz. He’s fascinated with card tricks particularly, and he carries a deck of cards around everywhere he goes, shuffling the cards, and cutting the cards in all kinds of flourishy ways. He has, as of late, been asking me or his father to gat him magic books at the library.

Many Happy Returns: March 8th

Mar8

Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, b. 1859. And isn’t it appropriate that Grahame’s birthday falls at the beginning of March? The Wind in the WIllows is definitely a spring sort of story, even though its scenes take the reader through the year from its beginning with spring-cleaning to a summer paddling boats on the river into fall and then winter in the Wild Wood.

“The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring cleaning his little home. First he swept; next he dusted. Then it was up on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash. Finally he had dust in his
throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above him, reaching even into his dark little underground house. Small wonder, then, that he suddenly threw his brush down on the floor, said “Bother!” and “Oh dash it!” and also “Hang spring-cleaning!” and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.”

A.A. Milne on Grahame’s book:

One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and, if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The older man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can’t criticize it, because it is criticizing us. But I must give you one word of warning. When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don’t know, But it is you who are on trial.”

Willows links:

Inspiraculum: “I’ve just read ‘The Wind in the Willows’ by Kenneth Grahame for about the fourth time.”

Ahab’s Quest: The Wind in the Willows is Charming. “Willows is a sensuous experience because Grahame so deliberately takes the reader through the small, pleasant things that fill our days. Every meal is described in detail, such that one tastes the picnic along with Mole and Rat.”

Beyond the WIld Wood by Alan Jacobs: “Best of all were those winter evenings when I crawled into bed and grinned a big grin as I picked up our lovely hardcover edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, with illustrations by Michael Hague. Before I cracked it open I knew I would like it, but I really never expected to be transported, as, evening by evening, I was. After the first night (I read only one chapter at a stretch), I wanted the experience to last as long as I could possibly drag it out. It was with a sigh compounded of pleasure and regret and satisfaction in Toad’s successful homecoming that I closed the book. I knew I would read The Wind in the Willows many times, but I could never again read it for the first time.”

The WInd in the WIllows at 100 by Gary Kamiya (Salon magazine): “It is apples and oranges to compare Grahame and the two other masters of genre-blurring imaginative prose, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Grahame cannot rival Tolkien’s epic grandeur, nor does he possess Lewis’ double ability to create completely different imaginary worlds and weave vivid and intricate stories. But neither of those geniuses handle English the way he does. Tolkien knows only the high style, and Lewis’ solid prose never soars. Grahame is the inheritor of the stately style of Thomas Browne and the lyrical effusions of Wordsworth, with a little Dickens and P.G. Wodehouse thrown in as ballast.”

Forest Born by Shannon Hale

Feb18

Forest Born is the fourth in Shannon Hale’s Books of Bayern series, a series that began with The Goose Girl, Ms. Hale’s debut novel and the one that made a name for her, winning all kinds of awards and accolades. The Goose Girl tells the story of crown princess Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee of Kildenree, aka Isi, who has the gift of being able to hear and speak to animals and to birds.

The next book in the series is about Isi’s friend Enna who has the more perilous gift of fire-speaking, hence the title Enna Burning. And the third book called River Secrets is about Razo and Dasha, two more Bayern characters whose lives become intertwined with that of Isis and Enna and the kingdom of Bayern and its neighboring kingdoms.

Forest Born tells the story of Razo’s little sister, Rin, who harbors deep within herself a gift and a secret. It’s a coming-of-age tale with elements of adventure and even a bit of romance. Rin is an intriguing character with depth, and she’s different enough from Isi, Enna, and Dasha that she seems real and provides a new slant on the culture and mythical world of Bayern.

It’s also kind of fascinating that central to the plot of Forest Born is something called “people-speaking,” the ability to hear whether or not others are telling the truth and the ability to influence others with words. Kristin Cashore’s Fire and her previous book Graceling also play with this idea, the possibility that some people have a gift of being able to speak to other people and make them believe what they’re hearing and act upon it. In both Fire and in Forest Born this skill of being able to practically control others’ thoughts and actions through the use of words is a perilous gift, possibly helpful in defeating evil but also possibly soul-destroying to the gifted one. Perhaps each author is trying to say something about the power of words even in our world and the care with which we need to choose our words. There’s also a shared Spiderman-type message: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Forest Born is a worthy sequel to the other Bayern books and worth your reading, especially if you’re a Goose Girl fan.

School UNFriendly

Feb9

Maybe it’s my own personal homeschool bias, but a lot of the books I read for the Cybils (Middle Grade Fiction), didn’t feel very school-friendly.

I’ve already discussed the confusing mixed messages from and about school in Barbara Dee’s Solving Zoe, and how the protagonist, Zoe, learns and thrives much better outside of school than she does in classes.

In The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, Calpurnia has this conversation with her grandfather:

“What are you studying in school? You do go to school, don’t you?
“Of course I do. We’re studying Reading, Spelling, Arithmetic, and Penmanship. Oh, and Deportment. I got an “acceptable” for Posture but an “unsatisfactory” for Use of Hankie and Thimble. Mother was kind of unhappy about that.”
“Good G–,” he said. “It’s worse than I thought.”
This was an intriguing statement, though I didn’t understand it.
“And is there no science? No physics?” he said.
“We did have botany one day. What’s physics?”
“Have you never heard of Sir Isaac Newton? Sir Francis Bacon?”
“No.” . . .
“And I suppose they teach you that the world is flat and that there are dragons gobbling up the ships that fall over the edge.” He peered at me. “There are many things to talk about. I hope it’s not too late. Let us find a place to sit.”

Not exactly a plug for schools, even if the schools that are being criticized are turn of the century, c.1899.

In several of the books, the protagonist is flunking out of school even though he/she is capable of doing the work:
In Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams, Cam O’Mara is learning a lot more at home dealing with his injured brother, working on the family’s ranch, and practicing his skateboarding and bull riding skills than he does at school.
Author Andrew Clements is known for his “school stories”, and Extra Credit is not an exception to the genre. However, Abby learns more from her extra credit assignment of writing to a pen pal in Afghanistan, completed outside of school time, than she does from her work at school, even though she spends a great deal of time trying to “catch up” so that she can be promoted and go on to seventh grade with her classmates.
In Peace, Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson, Lonnie loses his motivation to study anything at all when an insensitive teacher tells him he’s too young to be a real poet. He gets his math instruction from his older foster brother at home.

The Homeschool Liberation League by Lucy Frank was actually more school-friendly than many of the other books that were not about homeschooling. The message I got from Frank’s book was that many different kinds of schooling situations work for different children and young adults at different times.

Which is what I believe. Different strokes for different folks, and let’s live and let live. I have a child in a nontraditional public high school, four young adults who have graduated from my homeschool and who have never been to a public or private school, a young daughter who is trying out an online virtual academy (public school) this semester, and two children who are still homeschooling. There are advantages and disadvantages to each situation. It takes time and energy to find the best educational setting for each child each year. And some times you just hope it’s not too late.

Let us find a place to sit.

Many Happy Returns: February 9th

Feb9

Hilda Gerarda van Stockum was born in Rotterdam in 1908. She grew up in Ireland and in the Netherlands. Her brother, Willem van Stockum, was a mathematician and disciple of Albert Einstein. He was “the first to notice the possibility of closed timelike curves, one of the strangest and most disconcerting phenomena in general relativity.” (I don’t know what that means exactly, but it does sound rather LOST-like, doesn’t it?) Willem died in combat a few days after the Normandy invasion.

The author’s first children’s book, A Day on Skates, won Newbery honors in 1935. Her aunt, the poet Edna St. VIncent Millay, wrote a preface to this story of a Dutch picnic, saying, “This is a book which mothers and fathers will sit up to finish, after the protesting child has been dragged firmly to bed.”

Ms. Van Stockum wrote two series of children’s stories: one set in Ireland about the O’Sullivan family and another set in the U.S. and Canada about the Mitchells, a family growing together and enduring the hardships of the homefront during World War II. Here’s my review of Pegeen, one of the books in the O’Sullivan family series. I found the book at ratty old thrift store in Pasadena, and knowing nothing of the book or its author, I took a twenty-five cent chance. Good call.

Links and Thinks

Feb3

Melissa at Book Nut has an interview with Roseanne Parry, author of one of my favorite Middle Grade Fiction books of 2009.

This movie sounds good. Has anyone seen it?
Actually, Brown Bear Daughter went to see it with some friends from church and she said it was pretty good. She didn’t rave about it; however, she wants me to see it so that we can discuss.

Haitian author Edwidge Danticat: “My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.”

Sarah Palin on Rahm Emmanuel’s hate speech: “His recent tirade against participants in a strategy session was such a strong slap in many American faces that our president is doing himself a disservice by seeming to condone Rahm’s recent sick and offensive tactic.”
I tend to not agree that people should be fired from their jobs because of the words they use, no matter how crude, rude or socially unacceptable. However, Mr. Emmanuel really doesn’t get it, does he?

What Karate Kid Read: January 2010

Feb1

Operation Redwood by S. Terrell French.
Julian’s uncle decides to chop down all the redwoods around Big Tree, which is a large redwood next to the farm of Robin Elder. Julian and Robin try to save the trees.
I didn’t enjoy this book as much as others, to tell the truth. But it was still pretty interesting. I thought the characters were very funny. I think that this is a good book for really any age, as long as you can read.

Other blog reviews and interviews: Cynsations interview with author S. Terrell French, The Reading Zone, A Patchwork of Books, Into the Wardrobe interviews S. Terrell French.

Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli.
Maniac’s parents hate each other. Maniac hates his parents. So he runs away from home and meets up with a black family who take him in and let him live with them.
Definitely a great book! It was funny, creative, and kept you on the edge of your seat. I think that the ending could have been a little better, but all in all, this book is awesome.

(Maniac Magee won the Newbery Medal in 1991, and a movie version of the book was released in 2003.)

Jerry Spinelli’s homepage.

Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner.
This book is full of math puzzles. Some were easy, some were hard, but they were all great. I challenged my parents to few of them. This book strains your brain, but is still lots of fun. Don’t be deceived by the fact that it has math, it has some puzzles that can be solved by pure logic. A fun book, and a good one too.
(I think KK read an older edition of the book pictured to the right. His book was a hardback, and it had a different cover. But the author is the same. Martin Gardner is “an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, pseudoscience, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and he has published over 70 books.” See Wikipedia for more information)

Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer Choldenko.
Moose lives on Alacatraz Island where the most dangerous criminals are kept. His father is a prison guard.
This book was just a little confusing, but still my favorite for the month. The characters were interesting, and the plot was great. This book has many twists and turns in the story. Betrayals, roses, flies, criminals, shoes, babies, you name it, this book has it. I was confused by the ending, though.

What Betsy-Bee (age almost 11) Read: January 2010

Feb1

11 Birthdays by Wendy Mass. The book was about a girl and a boy. Since they were born on the same day, a lady thought that they should spend every birthday together, and they did–until their tenth birthday when the boy said something that made the girl mad, and they didn’t talk to each other for a whole year. Then, on their 11th birthday strange things started happening to them, but I won’t tell you what they were because you have to read the story.

The story reminded me of the movie Groundhog Day, and my mom says it also reminds her of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. However, I don’t think it’s like Sleeping Beauty much.

The Watsons Go to Birmingham by Christopher Paul Curtis wasn’t my favorite, but it was interesting. We talked about the book in my online book club. We talked about how Byron was kind of a bad influence and didn’t exactly follow the rules. He liked playing with matches, and he almost started a fire. It was good book.

The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale was my favorite book of the month. It was about a goose girl named
Ani, and you always wondered what would happen next and if people were going to catch her. It was very adventurous, and Ani gets almost captured so many times, but she always escapes. Ani also knows how to hear animals and talk to them and to the wind. I wouldn’t like to be in her situation, but I would like to talk to animals and to the wind. And Ani was a princess, and that’s always awesomeness.

(Betsy-Bee actually listened to the audio version of this book and followed along sometimes in the book. I think she could read the book herself if she wanted, but I’m not sure she’s quite ready for the other books in the series.)

Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Practicing Piano by Peggy Gifford. I’ve read other Moxy Maxwell books, and she is funny and very determined. In this book, she doesn’t like to practice the piano. Her mom wants her to just play the piece Heart and Soul all the way through with her little sister Pansy, but she won’t because she’s busy making fur-trimmed capes with cut-up towels and a black marker, and getting ready to get on stage, and be applauded. And while she’s doing that, her father is trying to figure out a word that rhymes with “spear” because he’s a poet. And her aunt is sleeping, after falling off of a ladder where she was feeding a giraffe. But her mom is frustrated that Moxy won’t play the piano. Moxy is just crazy.

What Z-Baby Read

Jan27

Z-Baby (age eight) listens to a lot of books, but I think this is the longest one she’s read herself, not by herself, mind you; I slogged through each and every page with her. But she read it and finished it and enjoyed it.

Amelia Bedelia, Bookworm by Herman Parish. Illustrated by Lynn Sweat.

Z-Baby’s Thoughts:

Amelia Bedelia takes everything literally. Mrs. Page says, “Take our bookmobile . . .” And Amelia Bedelia thinks she means literally “take our bookmobile.”

Amelia Bedelia makes coats (jackets) for the books. A girl named Lisa says that Sam devoured the book, and Amelia Bedelia thinks that an actual person ate the book. But it was a dog named Sam. And there’s one more funny part. When they tell Mrs. Page that Sam devoured the book, Mrs. Page thinks that Lisa means that Sam really, really liked learning form that book. So she asks Lisa, “Did he enjoy it?”

And Lisa says, “He sure did.”

I learned that a thesaurus is a book that has words that mean the same.

Texas Tuesday: Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith

Jan26

What an inspiring and absorbing book! Ms. Smith writes about Ida Mae Jones, a self-identified “colored girl” who is light-skinned enough to pass for white. The book begins in late 1941, and of course, that means Pearl Harbor, and World War II. Ida Mae learned to fly airplanes from her daddy, who was a crop duster. So when she hears that the U.S. Army has formed a group called the WASPs, Women Airforce Service Pilots, Ida Mae Jones is determined to sign up, even though she lives in Louisiana and the training is to take place in Sweetwater, Texas, two places where the very idea of a young black woman serving alongside white women is sure to be anathema. So in order to get into the WASP’s, Ida Mae basically pretends to be white.

A lot of the book is about the training and the dangers these pioneering women pilots faced as they bravely gave themselves and their abilities to the war effort. I don’t know much about flying airplanes, so although I thought the parts of the book that described the training and the women’s heroics were wonderfully written, I don’t know how accurate they were. I assume Ms. Smith did her research since the book Flygirl started out as a master’s thesis.

Another aspect of the book is the discussion and treatment of race and skin color. I thought this was fascinating, especially in light of recent discussions in the kidlitosphere. What does it mean to be black or to be a person of color? How do POC themselves see the variations in skin color? Is it wrong to pretend to be white and leave your darker-skinned family and friends behind? Even for a good cause?

One of the scenes in the book reminded me of Esther in particular. Ida Mae, like Esther has hidden her heritage and her connection with her people, but she is asked by her mother to go to the military authorities and ask for help in finding her brother who is MIA. Ida Mae knows that if she asks about her brother, she may be discovered and sent home. Her story doesn’t exactly parallel Esther’s, but it is similar. And Ida Mae shows similar courage.

All the issues, discrimination against women and against people of color, the varied reasons that people have for volunteering to fight in a war, misunderstandings and rifts between family members and friends, the cost of following one’s dreams, are explored with both sensitivity and humor. I would recommend this book to all young women who are in the middle of deciding who they are and what they want to be. And as an older woman, I enjoyed reading about Ida Mae Jones and her adventures. I wanted her to be able to “have it all,” even as I knew that the time and place where the story was set wouldn’t allow for a completely happy ending.

Reading in Color: “Flygirl made me want to go out and learn how to fly an airplane (or at least fly in one so that I can sit in the front and observe the pilot). The way the characters describe their love of flying makes you want to try it.”

One Librarian’s Book Reviews: “The setting is absolutely perfect, with the details from the time period completely enhancing the whole feel of the book. I absolutely felt like every part of it seemed like it could be true.”

Liz at the YALSA blog: Flygirl examines universal questions of identity, family, and growing up, with flying being both what Ida Mae wants to do, as well as working as a metaphor for a young woman trying to escape the limitations her country places on her because of her race and her sex.

Interview with Sherri L. Smith at the YaYaYa’s