Reading report
Our first snowfall. Mary is polling the eight siblings and spouses – five of whom work for the schools – as to whether tomorrow’s school hours will be (a) normal, (b) truncated, or (c) canceled. My money is on (a). Not that money has been pooled. The prize is bragging rights.
UPDATE: It’s (b). I won’t have to go out early to put Samuel on the bus.
(I’ll have to drag Samuel and the other children down the snowy block two hours later, since Karin will’ve gone to work and I can’t leave Daniel and Abel at home.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My reading year is half over and I’ve completed just one-third of the intended total. I’ll have to devote the rest of the year to kiddie novels.
Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street, a.k.a. The Great Mouse Detective, will be my second “mouse” book of the year.
Later, I may attempt the “Watership Down” series, which is about rabbits.
(It’s time someone wrote a capybara epic. Or does one already exist?)
I also have begun reading the eight-novel “Adrian Mole” series: hugely popular in Britain, neglected in the USA, unknown to me until some months ago. The first book is very proto-Dog-in-Night-Time (there’s even a hapless cur). Except, the narrator isn’t neurodifferent, he’s just an ordinary, awful thirteen-year-old boy. He’s not literally a mole or any sort of vermin. The book also has things in common with Mike Leigh’s movies, and (I suppose) with What Maisie Knew.
I also must read two Agatha Christies/Mary Westmacotts per month; and I’m chipping away at my second Ed McBain police procedural, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (a title which, surprisingly enough, is meant to be taken literally).
As for the group’s reading, six weeks have been allocated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and associated texts. I also continue to read Austen and Trollope. In short, everything I’m reading, except the rather acid Mansfield Park, has broad, crowdpleasing, page-turning appeal; all the fiction, anyway.
UPDATE: It’s (b). I won’t have to go out early to put Samuel on the bus.
(I’ll have to drag Samuel and the other children down the snowy block two hours later, since Karin will’ve gone to work and I can’t leave Daniel and Abel at home.)
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My reading year is half over and I’ve completed just one-third of the intended total. I’ll have to devote the rest of the year to kiddie novels.
Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street, a.k.a. The Great Mouse Detective, will be my second “mouse” book of the year.
Later, I may attempt the “Watership Down” series, which is about rabbits.
(It’s time someone wrote a capybara epic. Or does one already exist?)
I also have begun reading the eight-novel “Adrian Mole” series: hugely popular in Britain, neglected in the USA, unknown to me until some months ago. The first book is very proto-Dog-in-Night-Time (there’s even a hapless cur). Except, the narrator isn’t neurodifferent, he’s just an ordinary, awful thirteen-year-old boy. He’s not literally a mole or any sort of vermin. The book also has things in common with Mike Leigh’s movies, and (I suppose) with What Maisie Knew.
I also must read two Agatha Christies/Mary Westmacotts per month; and I’m chipping away at my second Ed McBain police procedural, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (a title which, surprisingly enough, is meant to be taken literally).
As for the group’s reading, six weeks have been allocated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and associated texts. I also continue to read Austen and Trollope. In short, everything I’m reading, except the rather acid Mansfield Park, has broad, crowdpleasing, page-turning appeal; all the fiction, anyway.