Criss Cross, by Lynne Rae Perkins

Aug14

I started this book, didn’t think I’d like it, and put it down. Then, in about a month, I started it again. And, of course, I liked it. Because my first impressions of books are usually completely wrong.

I suppose you might say there are two main characters in this story. First, there’s Debra (Debbie), an imaginative, wishful and thoughtful girl. Some of her favorite pastimes are helping elderly Mrs. Bruning around the house (and consequently meeting and falling for Mrs. Bruning’s handsome grandson, Peter Bruning, later in the book), hanging out with her neighbourhood friends, and speculating over things (usually nothing at all).

Then, there’s Hector, a slightly pudgy adolescent boy who sees a guitarist and is inspired to learn how to play. Taking lessons from a Presbyterian minister with a few others is how he meets a young girl named Meadow and develops a hopeless crush on her, hopeless because the striking, football-playing Dan Persik is interested in her as well.

Debbie loses her necklace, which is found by a few different people, all of whom make an effort to get it back to her, but in the end of the story…

Well, now you’ll have to read it.

I really enjoyed this because of the different perspectives of all the different characters. The author didn’t just stick to following Debbie and Hector around, but decided to bring their friends more into the story. Just the way the book was written was intriguing.

I liked this book and hopefully anyone who reads this review will want to read it as well.

A Dillar, A Dollar

Aug13

We’re starting school this morning. Stay tuned for further updates . . .

12:15 P.M. Well, we’ve read two chapters from Banner in the Sky,, the story of a sixteen year old boy who wants to climb the only mountain in the Alps that hasn’t yet been conquered, called in the book The Citadel. It’s loosely based on the true story of the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. Karate Kid (10) also started on his reader, Freckles by Gene Stratton Porter.

I started The Story of the World: Ancient Times by Susan Wise Bauer and First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind by Jessie Wise with my two youngest, Betsy Bee (8) and Z-Baby (6). Karate Kid (10) is doing a mixture of Sonlight 6 and some other stuff I pulled in to study ancient history and literature with us, and Brown Bear Daughter is starting Ancient History: A Literature Approach from Beautiful Feet.

The younger two have done their math (Miquon), and the older two are doing theirs (Saxon 7/6) while we listen to cello music on the radio program, Exploring Music. It’s all going fairly well, despite a bit of grumbling. (Brown Bear Doesn’t want to listen to classical music, and Karate Kid doesn’t want to do Saxon math.) I’m determined to do everything on the list, at least on this first day. I’ll let you know how it goes . . .

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: The Great American Poem

Aug10

What this country needs is a great poem. John Brown’s Body was a step in the right direction. I’ve read it once, and I’m reading it again. But it’s too long to do what I mean. You can’t thrill people in 300 pages. The limit is about 300 words. Kipling’s “Recessional” really did something to England when it was published. It helped them through a bad time. Let me know if you find any great poems lying around.
Herbert Hoover, b. August 10, 1874

So, what is The Great American Poem, or who is the Great American Poet? Sandburg and Frost, I think, are too much tied to one area of the country, Sandburg to Chicago and the Midwest and Frost to New England. Emily Dickinson is too detailed and sometimes obscure. The British nowadays might not want to put Kipling in such a grand position, might prefer Yeats or Eliot or even Tennyson, but Kipling is inspirational.

Recessional
God of our fathers, known of old–
Lord of our far-flung battle line
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe–
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the law–
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard–
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard–
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!

So Herbert Hoover and I are taking nominations for the quintessential American poem, a poem that captures the American spirit and inspires us to live up to what is best about the United States of America. Maybe if we’re trying to mirror Kipling’s British poem, we should call it the Great American Hymn. Any suggestions?

As for art, I’m not sure who the Great American Artist is either. But I nominate Norman Rockwell. His best work is both inspirational and challenging.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Aug7

I spent the day yesterday, unexpectedly, in the emergency room at a nearby hospital. (Everybody’s OK now, but emergency rooms take t–i–m–e.) Of course, I had to take some reading material along, and I chose a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time: The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. The book is a nonfiction thriller about an outbreak of Ebola virus in suburban Washington, D.C. Did I mention that it’s NONfiction?

As I read about Ebola, maybe the nastiest virus yet discovered, and about how 60-90% of people infected by the virus don’t survive, and about a hospital in Africa that was literally wiped out by an outbreak of Ebola virus, I was sitting in the emergency room listening to a baby crying and people groaning, and I was wondering what kinds of germs, bacteria, and nasty viruses were floating around in the air. The emergency room nurse saw what I was reading and reassured me that “most of those hemorrhagic fevers stay in Africa or Asia, hardly ever here in the U.S.” Since I was reading, at that very minute, about how monkeys from the Philippines carried Ebola to Reston, Virginia in 1989, I was not convinced that the danger was as minimal as the nurse seemed to think. In other words, “hardly ever” isn’t good enough. Do we really need to import thousands of monkeys into the U.S. each year for medical research, anyway? Can’t the researchers go to the monkeys, if it’s really necessary?

Philosophical and practical questions aside, The Hot Zone is well-written, informative, exciting, and scary. The book was best-seller back when it was first published over ten years ago (1994). So some of you have probably read it. If you haven’t and you’re looking for a plot device for your terrorist thriller or apocalyptic dystopian novel, you could probably find it in this book. I can only imagine what that emergency room would look like if one of the viruses in this book managed to get loose in Houston. A long wait would be the least of our worries.

The Rule of Six, or Seven, or Eight, or Ten

Aug2

My Betsy-Bee asked me for a list of things to do today, and I thought again of Melissa’s Rule of Six. Melissa of The Lilting House has such a nice, simple list of “six things to include in your child’s day.” I’ve been meaning to use her list with my urchins, but I have such a cluttered mind that I keep forgetting the things on the list. SO, here it is, plagiarized but attributed, in which case I guess it’s just borrowed.

Six Things to Include in Your Child’s Day:
• meaningful work
• imaginative play
• good books
• beauty (art, music, nature)
• ideas to ponder and discuss
• prayer

Melissa even says that “Miss (Charlotte) Mason believed children needed three things every day: something to love, something to think about, and something to do.” So educator Charlotte Mason started with three things each day, Melissa made it six, and I’m making my own list of ????

I’ve been thinking about starting school next week, and I have a list of things in my head that I want to include in each day. These things fit into the six, but are more school/subject specific. I always make things more complicated than they need to be, but anyway here’s my list of things to include in our (school) days:

1. Meaningful work
2. Meals
3. Prayer and Bible reading.
4. Poetry
5. Good books
6. Mathematics
7. Beautiful art and music
8. Play or work outdoors
9. Imaginative play
10. Adventure

The ideas and discussion should flow out of these ten tasks. I know I always try to cram more into a day than is humanly possible, but please tell me that these ten things are possible, doable, and somewhat sane.

1. My children have assigned household tasks, that have been only loosely supervised this summer. We need to be more disciplined about the jobs.
2. Meal planning has been a little loosey-goosey this summer, too. I need to get a plan and a schedule.
3. We plan to have family prayer and Bible reading each morning at 7:00 AM so that my working/college kids can participate. It’s going to take some work to get us all up that early since we’ve been a bunch of ten o’clock scholars this summer.
4. We usually sing a hymn together at family prayer time, and I’d like to read a poem aloud each morning.
5. Not too hard. We are a reading family.
6. Math is the only school subject that I insist on getting done each and every day. I really think that for math proficiency, daily practice is essential.
7. I’d like for us to listen to this program each day on our local NPR radio station. It comes at about lunch time, so maybe we can listen over lunch. I’m not sure about the whole art thing, whether I want us to do art or look at art, or some combination of the two, but I’ll take suggestions.
8. We tend to stay indoors too much. I need more exercise, and the urchins need more nature. Maybe we should start nature journals again.
9. I think if we turn off the TV, the imaginative play will take care of itself.
10. Adventure. I must be open to taking the adventure that comes into each day, whether it’s a great adventurous field trip or a small adventure of exploring the nearest anthill. Adventures can’t always be programmed, but they can be recognized and enjoyed.

More posts about the Rule of Six:
Whence It Came
All Roads Lead to Rome (Especially for Bunnies)
Other people’s thoughts

Works for Me Wednesday: Parenting Advice

Aug1

Shannon at Rocks in my Dryer asks: “What parenting lessons have you learned the hard way? What would you tell a first-time parent? Save us all some headaches and share!”

I would not presume to tell first-time parents much of anything. I couldn’t even get the lessons I learned with the first child to work with the second. Every one of them is different, and since I have eight urchins, I feel qualified to say that whatever advice you read or hear may or may not be good advice for you and your child.

However, I do have one hard-learned truth that some of you may be wondering about: It never gets harder than three. What I mean is, one child is difficult because it’s the first, and with my first I had no idea what I was doing. I made a lot of mistakes. The second child was hard, too, because he was a boy and different from Eldest Daughter. (I know now that he would have been different even if he had been a she.) Even so, with two children I hardly ever felt out-numbered or overwhelmed. I had two hands, one for each child to hold. When Engineer Husband was around, there were two of us to supervise, one for each child.

Then came my third child, a beautiful baby girl. She slept through the night at an early age, sucked her thumb contentedly to comfort herself, and fit into our family perfectly. BUT parenting was no longer something that was manageable, something that I would eventually get the hang of if I spent enough time and energy studying the matter. Now there were three, and I was in over my head. They outnumbered ME; They outnumbered US. One child could easily escape and use red tempera paint as ammunition in his cannon while I was cleaning up after the other two.

The wonderful part of this story is that adding another and another and another never gets any harder than three. When you realize that it’s really, truly only by God’s grace that any of them survive to adulthood, that each child is a gift, and that the molding and shaping and even educating that parents do is somewhat limited in scope and influence, and that as a parent you are almost completely deficient in the skills, patience, and wisdom that are needed to parent these children . . . well, then you can begin to relax, do the best you can and depend on God to fill in the gaps.

You can find links to more parenting advice at Rocks in My Dryer today.

Of Camels and Salt and Deserts and Books

Aug1

The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton.

Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold by Michael Benanav.

Sister O’ Mine suggested The Camel Bookmobile as the July Selection for our family book club, and since I already had it on my TBR list, I concurred with the selection. Then, while browsing at the library I found the book Men of Salt and knew it would make a perfect companion to the fictional story of carrying books to bush villages in northeastern Kenya. Even though Men of Salt takes place in the desert of Mali, the concern in both books about changing cultures and intruding technologies and Western values is the same.

In The Camel Bookmobile Fiona Sweeney, a single librarian in Brooklyn with a boyfriend named Chris, a family who doesn’t understand her need for adventure, and friends who expect her home by March, makes a decision to go to Kenya to help start a travelling library. The books will be carried to outlying areas by camel. Fiona’s job is to take the books and make sure they are returned. She finds out that while her main concern is the first part of the job (“Books are their future. A link to the modern world.”), her African counterpart, Mr. Abasi, is more concerned about getting the books back and not at all sure that they should be taking books out into the countryside at all. And the people of Mididima, one of the villages on their route, have their own worries and agendas. When one of the villagers, nicknamed “Scar Boy”, fails to return his library book, the entire scheme starts to unravel, and the villagers learn more about themselves as Fiona explores the value of books versus traditional wisdom in her attempts to reclaim the overdue library books. The book never comes to a definite conclusion or answer to the central question: are change and cultural adaptation good, or bad, or inevitable?

The nonfiction book Men of Salt approaches the same question from the point of view of the azalai, salt merchants, of the Sahara Desert. Michael Benanav, an experienced wilderness guide in the U.S., takes the journey of his life when he decides to travel along with the salt caravans from Timbuktu to the salt mines of Taouodenni and back. The caravans travel by camel, but Mr. Benevav has read that trucks are beginiing to make the camel caravans obsolete. The truth he learns on his trip about the interaction between modern technology and ancient tradition is much more complicated and interesting than a simple story of how Western technology destroys the traditional culture. The story tells of the challenges Benavav faces as he crosses the desert in the company of men who have made the same journey many times and who are accustomed to its hardships. Benavav finds himself tested to the limits of his endurance and amazed at the ability of the azalai and the salt miners to survive and even thrive in the most extreme desert environment. I was amazed, too, and thankful to be able to read about it instead of experiencing it for myself.

I recommend both books for anyone who wants to do a little “armchair adventuring.” A short reading trip to Africa and back this summer certainly gave me the illusion of exploring new territory.

By the way, I found Men of Salt shelved in the juvenile/young adult section of the library, but I’m not sure why. The characters are all adults, and the story is one that, although certainly appealing to adventurous young adults, would also interest those of us with a few more years behind us. Who can fathom the classification decisions of librarians and publishers? Also by the way, I tried to read Mark Kurlansky’s well-publicized tome, Salt: A World History several months ago, and I never got past the first chapter. It was laborious reading with an attitude –not that I put much labor into it. I learned a lot about the history of salt from Mr. Benavav’s adventure, and I enjoyed it, too.

Visiting the Cassons

Jul31

Saffy’s Angel, Indigo’s Star, and Permanent Rose by British author Hilary McKay make up a series of books featuring one of the most dysfunctional functioning familes in children’s literature. The Casson family consists of Cadmium (Caddy), Saffron (Saffy), Indigo, Permanent Rose, mother Eve, and absentee father Bill. Caddy spends most of the three books being wishy-washy about her multiple boyfriends, while she remains somewhat committed to her driving instructor boyfriend, Michael. Saffy, who’s really the daughter of Eve’s twin sister, is an adopted Casson. She and her friend Sarah careen about town and home, Sarah in a wheelchair, seriously shopping, sunbathing in the nude, doing mountains of homework for fun, and creating culinary disasters. Indigo represents stability, sort of the strong, silent type, but totally accepting of his insane family’s eccentricities. Tom, Indigo’s American friend, is a callous dope, but Indigo and Rose “like dopes.” Permanent Rose (all the children are named after artist’s paint colors) is a feisty eight year old who sometimes shoplifts for the fun of it and who paints murals on the walls of the Cassons’ house. Eve, the mother of all these children, is an artist who produces what her husband Bill calls “not really art.” She spends her days and most of her nights in a backyard shed where she paints and dozes and daydreams. Eve also teaches art to juvenile deliquents and paints murals at the hospital to make a little addition to the family income. Bill, the father of this ridiculous family, is a “real artist” based in London in an immaculately orderly flat where he creates great art and lives with his girlfriend, Samantha. Bill and Eve are not divorced, and Bill sometimes visits his family and contributes to the housekeeping fund in a jar on the kitchen counter.

I forgot to mention that the Cassons keep pet guinea pigs in the garden, and Eve doesn’t know how to shop for groceries or cook. Sarah decides by the end of the third book that Eve is “a saint or just more or less totally bonkers. . . probably both.” If you can suspend disbelief for a while and take it on faith that a family like the Cassons could survive in modern-day England, then you might enjoy a visit with the Cassons. It’s a nice place to visit, but I think, like Bill, I’d have a hard time living there. At the very least, Ms. McKay keeps the reader guessing as to what totally bonkers thing will happen next. There’s a fourth book about the Casson family, Caddy Ever After, that I’m going to pick up soon, just for that very purpose, to see what will happen next. I feel a bit responsible after three books to see that they all come out all right.

Indie Blogs

Jul30

Ariel at BitterSweet Life thought up this whole Indie Blog thing. To be an indie blogger, you’re supposed to have minimal overall influence and negligible financial impact, and also be fiercely unique, illogically dedicated, unapologetically eclectic, and typically ignored. Or at least five out of the seven. Ariel thinks I qualify, and I’m honored to be an Indie Blog. Go here for the origins of the Idie Blog tag.

indie+blog+5-1

Now, these blogs that I’ve chosen are INDIE, not likely to become the most influential or talked-about blogs in the blogosphere. In fact they all feature material only a confirmed bibliophile (or bibliomaniac) could love, but I’m hooked:

The Book Inscriptions Project: “We collect personal messages written in ink (or pen or marker or crayon or grape jelly) inside books.
Pictures count. So do poems. So do notes on paper found in a book. The more heartfelt the better.
Send a copy of the cover and the inscription and any details about how, when and where you found it.”

Wonders for Oyarsa is blogging the Bible: “Blogs about reading a book I’ve read all my life don’t sound too exciting. And maybe it isn’t exciting, and I don’t really expect that many readers. However, it does seem like a really good idea for any Christian – to read the entire Bible, reflect on it, honestly write what comes to mind, and welcome conversation from others.”

Postman’s Horn is “a daily selection of correspondence by authors, writers, painters, poets and others: A letter can provide that sense of everyday life, a glimpse of the the trials and tribulations of another human soul; and they can underscore the humanity of writers who have become so very famous. I enjoy reading them, as does my wife, and we thought it would be a type of commonplace book where others could read them as well.”

Chesterton and Friends is “a site dedicated to G.K. Chesterton, his friends, and the writers he influenced: Belloc, Baring, Lewis, Tolkien, Dawson, Barfield, Knox, Muggeridge, and others.” It’s a case of independent bloggers celebrating some rather independent writers.

Self

Jul29

MFS at Mental Multivitamin makes me think, and that’s a very good thing. Especially lately, my mind is so caught up in daily concerns and necessities that it is renewing to stop and think for a moment.

Yes, the images of Amish teenagers attending what amounts to rave parties fueled by copious amounts of alcohol, drugs, and bad music are, as one reviewer describes it, ‘jarring,’ but it was the reminder that if a child returns to his church community following rumspringa (and ninety percent do), he is, in effect, denying his sense of self: Amish religious convictions are predicated on the erasure of self.

SHUDDER.”

I haven’t seen the documentary Devil’s Playground that MFS is writing about in this post, but I have read about it. And I would probably have some disagreement with what I perceive from a distance as a legalistic theology in Amish Christianity. Nevertheless, denying self is a very Christian concept. In fact, Jesus commanded us, “Deny yourself. Take up your cross, and follow me.” I was reminded of this quotation from Methodist missionary Stanley Jones’s The Christ of the Indian Road, published back in 1925.

Greece said, ‘Be moderate—know thyself.’
Rome said, ‘Be strong—order thyself.’
Confucianism says, ‘Be superior—correct thyself.’
Shintoism says, ‘Be loyal—suppress thyself.’
Buddhism says, ‘Be disillusioned—annihilate thyself.’
Hinduism says, ‘Be separated—merge thyself.’
Mohammedanism says, ‘Be submissive—assert thyself.’
Judaism says, ‘Be holy—conform thyself.’
Materialism says, ‘Be industrious—enjoy thyself.’
Modern Dilettantism says, ‘Be broad—cultivate thyself.’
Christianity says, ‘Be Christlike—give thyself.'”

The self-denial that Christians preach is not self-annihilation, but rather a giving of self as God created it to service in His name. Are we sure that the Amish are advocating “the erasure of self”? Or could it be that they believe in giving a higher priority to Christian community and to the glorification of God in that community? And could a lifetime of this sort of self-denial lead to a greater sense of self within a Christian community than most of us experience in our rush for self-fulfillment?

Again Jesus said, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Matthew 16:25-26.

It’s the daily working out of this concept that gets sticky, and I agree that self-annihilation or self-erasure is not the way to go. Neither is a mad race for self-realization or self-assertion.