Cammykitty returns to the 75ers - March

It's women's history month, and for that I'm going to subject you to a drawing of Toni Morrison I did in art class. Sadly, I couldn't capture her wicked smile, but it's the first time I've seriously tried to draw a person, so yes amateur, but not bad for that. And you guessed it, I'm going to focus this month's reading on women writers and the question will be "how does this work celebrate/show the progress/show the challenges of women." Predictable question, but hopefully it will lead to some interesting discussion.

That said, I do plan to finish reading Eifelheim even though it is (gasp) by a male. I started it last month and got sidelined by the TIOLI and Obama challenge and a tandem read of a meh book. I'm about 100 pages in to it, and what looked like a blah book in the beginning has just become something I haven't seen before, a Medieval First Contact novel.

I'm not sure what other reading I'm planning for this month, but will be reading something published by a woman between 1910 and 1930, probably Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. I've never read Stein before and expect I'll either love her writing or find it the most senseless drivel. I doubt she'll fall in between. As for the American Author challenge, I've read The Confessions of Nat Turner in college and haven't been able to forget a poem a friend of mine found that was simply "Nat Turner killed William Styron," and sadly, that's kind of my impression of him. Then I got him mixed up with Thomas Pynchon, so if the reviews I read are really favorable, I might be tempted to give him another try. As for the Obama read, I've already read Song of Solomon which I highly recommend, but may read A Mercy instead. From what I've seen, it looks like Obama is a fan of Morrison's writing, not just Song of Solomon so I don't feel it's bending the rules too much if I do. Berly will slap my hands though if I'm being too horrible.

Some of you know me already, but I'm guessing a lot of you don't. I'm certainly not the most chatty or active person on LT. I am a paraprofessional in a US Middle School, urban population. I think our demographics are about 30% white, 30% black including Somali, 30% Latino (mostly Mexican and Salvadoran descent) 10% "other" which is mostly Tibetan and Guyanese. It's an interesting and rewarding place to work, although I always say I've got to leave because it doesn't cover the bills well. I've said that for over 10 years.

I also am dog crazy, and volunteer as an assistant dog trainer at a local obedience school. This is a picture of my 5 month old pup, Bertie. She is an Irish Water Spaniel and daughter of my bitch Wanda. She'll eventually go to another home where she will be co-owned with the breeder, and she'll earn a title in conformation, rally, agility or obedience. I'd love to keep her, but don't feel I can do justice to three dogs.



This is my Wanda in her pregnancy shave. Bitches lose their coat during the whole pregnancy thing, so we decided not to fight it. Her smile makes up for her lack of traditional topknot.

This is Uncle Sage, my beautiful IWS scaredy dog. He was given to me by a breeder because he wasn't doing well, and he's gotten much braver and more comfortable here, but no, he'll never be D'Artagnan.



Fortunately, he doesn't have to be because Wishbone already has.

My home group for years has been the category group, and I find it hard to give up. I'm keeping three categories and the rest of my reading will land where it falls.

Ongoing topics:
Animal/Human Behavior

1. Winter World
2. A Kind and Just Parent
3.
4.
5.

Possibles:

Believe it or not, I find this category a bit hard to fill up. I own tons of dog books, but I also am an assistant trainer at TCOTC, Twin Cities Obedience Training Club. A dog book for me is part going "yeah, yeah, I know," part "I disagree," and hopefully part "Oh, that's an interesting way to look at it" or "that's a good way to explain it to my students" or even "Wow, that's useful." In other words, I've read so many that it takes an unusual book to interest me. Yet, I feel I need to keep reading to keep up-to-date. Dog training is just like every field. It is constantly changing, and some of the changes are just stupid trends but some of it is real growth or break-throughs. So since I'm talking about reading so many dog books, I've got to put in a plug for my favorite, The Other End of the Leash by Patricia McConnell. It isn't so much a dog training book, but shows the communication necessary in good training. And also the common dog/human misunderstandings.

I've been reading around the world, starting years ago with South Africa, then moving through Latin America. Now I've made it to Europe.

Ongoing Topics:
Southern European Authors
Authors from Italy, Andorra, Macedonia, Gibraltar, Greece, France, Spain, Portugal, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

visited 48 states (21.3%)
Create your own visited map of The World
1. My Father's Books by Luan Starova Albania and Macedonia
2. The Ministry of Pain croatia
3. Why I killed my best friend Greece
4.
5.

Possibles:

1. Bosnian Chronicles Ivo Andric
2. Tiger's wife Serbia

Ongoing topics:
Books in the Spanish Language

1. Spanish-American Short Stories
2. Spanish-American Short Stories counts as two because time-consuming
3. 1st 3rd of Cuentos de Eva Luna por Isabel Allende
4.
5.

Possibles:

The image is Blacksad, a Spanish graphic novel originally published in France but set in the United States. Love it! But sadly, I've caught up with what is available in the US. I've heard rumors about another coming out though.

Short stories - I have tons and tons of collections of short stories and tend to read a few stories and then set the collection aside, so here's where I'm going to keep track of my short stories because otherwise I'll have no clue. My brother would say "So what's new" but he doesn't know where to find me on LT, so I don't have to stick out my tongue and give him a raspberry back for that would-be comment.



from The Weird Compendium
The Town of Cats by Hagiwara Sakutaro
The Tarn
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson
Smoke Ghost by Fritz Lieber
White Rabbits by Leonora Carrington

from Long Hidden
The Witch of Tarup
Marigolds
Diyu

from Never at Home by L. Timmel Duchamp
Explanations are Clear
The Tears of Niobe
The Nones of Quintilus
A Question of Grammar

from Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
The Summer People

This is my space for Take it or Leave it - If I decide... I haven't done too well on these so far this year, but oh well... I'll do at least my suggestion, which I think is 10 - women's writing published between 1910-1930. Hopefully, I'll get more done but frankly, I've got so many books piled all over my house that I foresee myself choosing books by closing my eyes and grabbing the nearest one.
Ooooom...

March
1. Eifelheim Tioli #7 Author's first or last name has exactly 5 letters COMPLETED
2. A Mercy Tioli #4 Female author w female protag COMPLETED
3. Tender Buttons #10 published by a woman between 1910-30 COMPLETED
4. Ministry of Pain #2 book set in country other than US UK and Germany Completed
5. Diet for a Small Planet #5 author with three names COMPLETED
6. All American Boys #9 brings up a completely wrong touchstone.

Planned:
#4 Female author female main character Eva Luna

Possible group reads or team reads???


Obama reads:
February: A kind and just parent
March: The Souls of Black Folk
April: The three-body problem
planned for May The Defining Moment

I think I badly need a ticker if I really want to clear some books out of my house. Here's for the ones read from my collection owned previously to this post.

#13 is pearl ruled! Doesn't it figure the unlucky number would be a stinkbomb book.

space I may need later
if only to brag...

about the books I clear off my shelves...



before I replace them with more books.

Happy New Thread, Katie! So much architecture!

Hi Roni!!! You're the first!!! Yes, building a new thread is work!!!

>15 cammykitty: Love this picture!

Happy new thread! Also impressed with your Toni Morrison drawing.

Yay! Another thread! Books and puppies abound...or bound!

>16 banjo123: Thanks Rhonda! Got to admit I didn't take the puppy photo. My boyfriend did, and he's a really good dog photographer. He takes several photos and the whittles them down to about 5 out of 50 he likes.

>17 Berly: Yay!!! Yes, books and puppies! They go together, and I have the dental forensic evidence to prove it! She was nibbling on Eifelheim today. So I take it I can get away with A Mercy for the Obama read. ;)

#15

Book 15, off-shelf #6 Edgar Allan Crow by James Howe

Well, this goes for a TIOLI - Touchstone doesn't work - author brings up The Secret Garden


And look how good I'm doing at off the shelf! The plan was to read half the books off the shelf. 6/15, that's 2/5 off the shelf. Could be worse.

Well, I did promise some lighter fare this month. This is the last book of the Bunnicula series, and it's as good as the others (I think) but the audio book is abysmal. The first five books of the series were read by Victor Garber who did a wonderful Chester, the erudite cat, and a hysterical Howie, the puppy punster. Then the last book is read by Patrick Mulvhill who, IMHO, has no sense of the characters. I enjoyed it despite him.

For those of you who don't know this Middle Grade series, if you like dipping into books for younger readers, you should try these. They were started by James Howe and ta-da, a woman thus making this fit in March, Deborah Howe, his wife. It's kind of a romantic yet sad story though. As a young couple, they loved watching the late night movie, which was often a cheesy horror show, and they made fun of them. Eventually, a vampire rabbit started living in James' imagination and his mother-in-law urged him to get it out. Around the same time, Deborah developed cancer so they wrote the first Bunnicula together to distract themselves from the pain of what they were going through. Deborah eventually lost the battle, but I'm sure part of her sense of humor shines through all of the Bunnicula books.

Edgar Allan Crow is a playful send-up of the horror genre, just like the ones that come before it, told by Howard the Russian Wolfhound and element X mutt who loves eating illicit desserts with his favorite boy Toby. In this book, they get to meet Howie's favorite horror writer, MT Graves (bad pun bad pun) who has a potentially sinister interest in Bunnicula. I won't tell ya more!

>18 cammykitty: No! Bad dog! No chewing on the BOOKS!! Ahem. No excuses on the Obama read for you, Katie. As I write this, it is still February, so you can still pull off a read for March. : D

Yes, bad bad Bertie!!! Very bad Bertie! I might read the WEB Du Bois, but unless Frederick Douglas is still alive he isn't a woman.

But you could read one of Michelle Obama's books...they are eligible any month. Or you could read any ole book from another month. They are just suggestions. Don't be such a rule follower! : P LOL

Happy new thread, Katie!

Happy new thread, Katie, I had to look up Toni Morrison to compare, but you did a very good job for a first portrait!
I have heard good things about Patricia McConnells books, sadly they aren't available in Dutch. The most eye-opening book was for me Calming signals by Turid Rugaas.
And give Sage, Wanda and Bertie a hug :-)

Happy new thread!

Happy new thread, Katie. I had to laugh at your comments about dog training trends - the clicker may work for some dogs, but it terrifies our normally self-confident Ivy. Luckily, she went through her basic training during football season, so she had private lessons, but she never warmed to the trainer after that first click.

Happy new thread, Katie. Love the Morrison drawing, and you have some cute pups.

>22 Berly: Rules shmules!

Amber, Jim & Beth. Thanks mucho for stopping by!

Anita, you read English??? Yes? They just aren't available that side of the pond? That's sad. And I love Calming Signals. I used what I learned from that book every day. Hugs returned!

Kay - Ha! Some of those clickers can be pretty loud, and considering that a dog's hearing is better than ours! I used to clicker train at night with a roommate in the house. That didn't go over well!

>3 cammykitty: Yay, Wishbone! :D

Happy new thread!

>1 cammykitty: Good job Katie as I knew immediately who it was a likeness of.

Happy new thread, my dear.

Loved the first three Bunnicula books! I got introduced to them by my nephews back when--they are now in their late, late 30s.

>28 cammykitty: I rarely read books in English, Katie, it is way more time consuming and very few English books are available at the library. So I wait for Dutch translations...

>29 rabbitprincess: Hah! I knew he would have fans on LT. Wishbone was the first kids show I started watching as an adult and wondering, am I normal? while I was watching it.

>30 PaulCranswick: Thanks! If I keep getting assigned to help in art class, I may actually get really good some day.

>31 ronincats: He's the best vampire rabbit out there! And what's funny is he's the most normal animal in the bunch.

>32 FAMeulstee: Anita, too bad but I know what you mean. My Spanish reading is pretty limited too, and one year I timed it at 8 minutes a page. It's better now, but I had to really work at it and still do. I know I get frustrated with the lack of books translated into English. I hope McConnell in Dutch happens soon.

Speaking of guilty pleasures, I've recently started watching the Netflix series of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Well done. Dan Handler, aka the real Lemony, wrote the screenplay and Neil Patrick Harris plays Olaf and directs. Way better than that miserable excuse of a movie that came out years ago. Sunny is great. They show the baby from the back trimming down a stone to be a skipping stone just like she's a wood chipper with a block of pine.

>34 cammykitty: I read the entire series to the kids when they were small, so we were all over this. Neil Patrick Harris is perfect as Olaf. The best episode was the third, where Olaf is Stefano. We quote so many lines from the show to each other but especially, "My name is not. . . anything but Stefano," and the kids love to recreate the scene with the pot-stickers, much to my dismay.

I'm way behind on threads. What's new? ;-) Dropping by to at least say hi!

>34 cammykitty: They made a series out of the Lemony Snicket books? And it's good? Neil Patrick Harris is Olaf? Gotta go! Bye!

Kay, I'm only through The Bad Beginning. They interviewed Monty on The Daily Show since he's a Muslim/ Middle Eastern actor. Wouldn't have known it from that role, which is great. Too easy to be typecast.

Berly, yes!!! You better run and catch up on Lemony! And Kit Snickett is running around from the beginning.

Hi Lori!!! I'm always way behind.

Aasif Mandvi was a favorite of mine when he was a regular on The Daily Show. I think he's originally from India. He's a good comedic actor. It's a lot of fun to spot the actors in ASoUE - there are so many big names involved.

Hi Kay - Yes, I looked it up. India. I wasn't watching The Daily Show when he was on regularly. I don't have cable and it took Trump to make me find it online. He is really funny.

Book 16 It Came from Beneath the Bed
Book 17 Invasion of the Mind Swappers from Asteroid 6
Book 18 Howie Monroe and the Doghouse of Doom
Book 19 Screaming Mummies of the Pharaoh's Tomb II

Yup, more Bunnicula. Now Bunnicula has moved out of the house. Harold isn't writing much, if at all, and punster pup Howie has taken over. His admiration for the writing of MT Graves is very clear in these works. Okay, these books are pretty funny, especially the audio versions, especially because of Harold's interspersed writing tips and Howie's lack of understanding. (Except I'm not too keen on the Harry Potter "parody", Howie Monroe and the Doghouse of Doom.) Delilah, the cute puppy down the street, becomes an important character in these.

As for women's history, we'll let Delilah comment on this:
Writing stinks. It gets you in trouble. I let Delilah read what I wrote and now she's not speaking to me. She said I'm making her sound stupid and that her character is an insult to females everywhere and what is that business with the picnic basket and the American flag anyway? I tried to explain, I said in a story like this the man is always the hero and the woman gets to admire him. I think that's when she stopped speaking to me. And what does she have against the American flag? She said it didn't make sense and I said it didn't have to because I have a literary license. She snatched the doggy treat I was eating right out of my mouth and said I wouldn't have room for it because I was too full of myself. Maybe that was when she stopped speaking to me. Is it my fault that Delilah doesn't know how stories work? I thought she'd at least like what I wrote about her eyelashes.

Ooooo, perhaps I'm fighting off a cold. I fell asleep last night with Bertie still out on the bed instead of her crate. She didn't wake me up to go out like she usually does, but when I finally got up because Sage woke me up to go out, she'd had a little accident as close to the door as she could and on some paper. Good grrl!

Then I fell into a dream that I'd had tons of people from fandom (SF&F) move into my house for financial reasons. Didn't know a lot of them, and the house had suddenly become huge to accommodate them, and we were playing a game that involved dice, cards and puzzle pieces and like Risk or Monopoly, it never ended and for some reason it kept putting me to sleep and...

It's going to be a rough day!

>42 cammykitty: I hope your day turned out a bit better than you expected, Katie. That is quiet a dream you had.

Hello, Katie!

Hi Katie! Love the Bunnicula series. My brother was a huge fan when he was a kid. I always love it when a student reads them.

just a quick fly by to wish you a wonderful week ahead, Katie.

Hi Anita, Ann, Stasia and Paul! Thanks for stopping by. It was a weird day. I think I've got a touch of stomach flu or something or basic ick so I stayed home from school today but am feeling guilty about it because I'm not feeling as weak as yesterday. Sort of feels like a skip or d.e.a.r (drop everything and read) day. So I've been reading Eifelheim and The Souls of Black Folk in between eating rice crackers, toast and "ginger soother." Ginger is wonderful stuff!

I am back to both jobs and turkey sandwiches today. Yeah! But of course, far less Eifelheim. 200 pages left and I want to get to the end. Answers, yah know.

I'm so glad none of our dogs have bee book chewers!

Our Maia is another that gets upset at the clicker. Or any that clicks for that matter.

Morphy - a bit my fault for the first one. Oh, okay. I won't take the blame for Bertie. She's just a puppy, but I inadvertently trained my first dog to chew books. I worked at Borders at the time and had bought a discount book that was terribly popular at the time (still is) and I won't say which one because I don't want to hear "but I loved that book." I know not from you, but most people did love it, but I found it worthy of throwing at the wall. And predictable. And the main character was spineless and the author was dragging me through the muck and I knew the end wasn't going to pay off for the mucky time with spineless boy, so when Dillon started chewing it, I said "Good boy!" Then he started shaking it like a rabbit and I said "Good boy!" Soon he was disemboweling it and I was praising him, but he didn't figure out that it was praise for his judgement on that particular book. Not all books.

Hope you are feeling better! If not, I hope I at least made you laugh.

P.S. Morphy, you would have found the main character to be "whimpy."

And on to a completely different subject. I completed book #20, this month's Obama read The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. I listened to the librivox recording here: librivox.org/souls-of-black-folks-by-web-du-bois/ It's free and well done. As for the book, I had mixed reactions. Each chapter began with a quote or some poetry and the poetry was quite beautiful and usually very touching. As for the book, it was an odd experience. Du Bois grew up in the North and much of his commentary was on the Southern negro shortly after reformation, so yes, share cropper time. The time when many of them were getting further and further in debt to the point that they couldn't be said to be free people. I had the assumption going into this that this was a book by a black talking about his own culture and people, but it became clear that the South was not his culture. At times he even sounded like an anthropologist studying something that didn't concern him. Part of this tone was probably to appeal to a white audience, but part of it I'm sure was due to cultural differences.

The other thing that bothered me was that pronoun "men." It is blatantly obvious use of sexist language from a modern point of view, or is it? Since this is women's history month and I meant to be reading women authors but so far haven't been, this was on my mind as I read this. Then I realized that he wasn't discrediting women but he did mean "men" as the male gender most of the time he used the pronoun. It was a case of choose your battles. One of the issues he talks about a lot is education, especially higher education, for blacks and the forming of Tuskegee Institute. At that time, very few women went to universities and the concept of an educated woman was more to set her up as a good mother, teacher or homemaker. He did teach girls as a one-room schoolhouse teacher and his personal stories included female students, but not at the upper levels. And as for his concerns on labor and fair wages, it was assumed that the man was head of household so if the man was properly paid, the women would be okay although it was clear that the average family unit earned money through any family member it could.

He also talked about what slavery did to the concept of family in black culture, and the pressures of poverty on the family. That was very interesting and by no means sexist. So dinging the book for being sexist isn't really being fair. It was pragmatic and a product of its times. That said, a lot of his observations still shed light on what is happening today.

And one more thing about the book, don't be put off by the statistic chapters and the scientific look at the "negro problem" chapters. It isn't all written with emotional distance. The book ends with some very personal, emotional chapters that are absolutely beautiful.

You know you have to tell me the title of the book. PM me if you must.

>51 cammykitty: I read that one in a university class and felt like it gave me a lot of insight into that particular era in African-American history.

>53 rosalita: Definitely a lot of insight. I think I was just surprised by the tone in some places. So factual rather than impassioned. Definitely explained some of the feelings around Booker T Washington. I'd heard of course that many people thought he'd sold them out and that he'd basically said don't make waves, but I didn't really know what he sought to gain from the establishment although I was sure it was some sort of compromise. I didn't know it was partly over Tuskegee. It may have been expedient at the time, but obviously a lot more should be expected today.

Book 21&22, off-shelf #8&9



Eifelheim This is a 4 1/2 to 5 star read with a slow start. For the right reader that is. I'd recommend it for the anthropological science fiction fans. It's a medieval first contact novel. Yup, you heard me right. The Black Forest and the plague with aliens. Framed like a metafiction with researchers who don't quite get it right. The book is touted as Eco meets Sagan, and part of me wants to say that isn't quite right. It isn't, but it's about as close to describing the feel of reading it as possible. What this description lacks is the intricacies of personal relationships that Flynn successfully builds. I don't want to say much more about this book because one of its joys is its freshness. I have to say, I've never read a book with a plot quite like this before and even though I'd been warned, it hit me as totally unexpected.

So I guess it's like dieting. I need something more to keep me accountable... like a ticker. See lovely ticker I added to encourage me to read books I already own! And yes, I intend to take a pile of books to the post office today to send out for bookmooch. It isn't as active as it used to be, but bookmooch is still alive.

>56 cammykitty: Good idea to have a ticker! I like having one for books I own, too. Keeps me focused on those shelves!

>57 rabbitprincess: Yes! But I somehow set my goal too high! I meant 35! Now it won't let me change the ticker. Well, it will but the changed ticker doesn't change. Sigh. May have to accept higher target. Or may redo ticker. Apathetic today!

>56 cammykitty: It's good to hear that BookMooch is still out there. I stopped using it when I was in Germany, because no one is sending internationally anymore. And now I have a local charity that gets my books, but I'm glad it's still out there. I loved it so much for a long time.

And Kay, 2 of the books on the pile are headed your way. Bookmooch needs to rethink the 3 points for international. It's financially more like 4. I still send overseas because I assume that some books are hard to find in other countries. I rehome a lot to school and little free libraries too.

Katie--I am going to have to steal "d.e.a.r (drop everything and read) day." That would be me today!! Love your review of Eifelheim--sounds very intriguing. And you get a "Bad Girl" on teaching your puppy to chew books. What a mistake! LOL

I think that the group should come together and fix a D.E.A.R. day - t'would be fun.

Have a lovely weekend, Katie.

Hi Paul & Berly, yes a group D.E.A.R. day would be good! And yes Berly, I do deserve a "bad girl." I've got a more recent dog story. My dogs stolle a tangerine from the refrigerator. First Sage ran around with it. Then it became a ball. Bertie rolled it around a bit. Then Wanda got it and was clever enough to bite it in half and then eat all the good stuff. Why is this a "bad mommy" situation? I watched. I knew they liked tangerine slices and wanted to know what they would do. Good entertainment, bad training!

#23

Book 23, off-shelf #10 A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Wow! You expected me to say that. Didn't you. Wow! I'm not sure where to begin telling you about this book, including what it is about. It is set in the 1680s in what is now the eastern United States. It covers slavery not by race but also including people enslaved by indentured servitude, slave owning, responsibility toward others, motherhood, death and the vulnerable status of women. It jumps from the point of view of many characters weaving back and forth to tell the story of a group of orphans brought together for survival. Sort of orphans. Unwanteds.

Anything I can say about this book sounds awkward in comparison to Toni's words. It's like a poem in that if I could summarize it, what would be the point of the poem. If you haven't read something by her, you should.

#24

Book 24, off-shelf #11 Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
TIOLI #10

Can't believe I finished this. Made less sense than "T'was brillig and the slithy toves..." It did have a certain sound to it, and a quality, not sure what kind of quality... Suppose I should quote some for you:
ASPARAGUS

Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet.

Gertrude Stein is a contemporary of my Grandmother. My Grandmother was an avid reader and my Dad once told me she had read all the books in the Duluth library. I believed him. So, I was imagining my Grandmother coming across this in a college town in Iowa at a diner with some of her girlfriends. Yow!

Hi Katie, I read Eifelheim this month as well and love your review. It was a very different read for me, but although it started off slowly, it built to a great finish.

>55 cammykitty: I read Eifelheim pre-LT and like most books then I didn't keep notes. I've wanted to re-read it because I know I should have liked it more than I did the first time. I will one day. As you note, it is quite unique.

>66 DeltaQueen50: Judy! What a coincidence. I'll have to swing by to see what you said about it.

>67 RBeffa: Ron, I would think it would have enough in there for a re-read. It was rich in detail. It was kind of long though, and it almost got pearl ruled by me when I noticed it had a list of characters in the beginning. If you need a list, usually that means something is wrong! In this case, I didn't really need the list but did look at it a few times. I think if you aren't really into it in the first 40, there's something in it's tone that isn't for you.

Not much going on over here. I'm reading The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic which so far is a very interesting book about displacement and language. She is Yugoslavian/Croatian and I just finished reading about how language became a weapon of war in the Balkans.

Also re-listening to Wylding Hall. It still has that slightly boring but you keep watching anyway feel of a music documentary, but of course I know what I suspected early on then. Any folk musician described as talented, unearthly gorgeous and wearing a watch that is valuable but still needs to be wound by hand must be a faerie. Now I'm skipping through it because part of it's function is as a familiar story to help me sleep. But I also want to see if I can pick up on the clues better this time. And what is the significance of the wren in Celtic folklore? There are tons of dead wrens in this book! I've found a little, but don't feel I have a complete understanding by any means.

And since we're talking Celtic, and since St Paddy's day is coming up, here's a detail from a chalk drawing I'm doing for a friend.

Squashed faerie. The dog sat on it.

>69 cammykitty: Must be one heck of a dog to manage to sit on a faerie!

>70 PaulCranswick: Just a three-legged sheltie. Small faerie.

>55 cammykitty: Eifelheim sounds interesting. I went to grab a free sample for my kindle and found that only the French edition is available for kindle! Weird. I can have the audiobook in English though!

In any case I grabbed the French sample and if I like it I will either continue with that or choose one of the non kindle English options.

>68 cammykitty: I think that is what it was Katie. The beginning put me off enough I almost gave it up, but the result was that I think I didn't give it the attention I should have. I have Eifelheim still (haven't purged it) so I will give it another try.

>73 RBeffa: Let me know what you think of it if you do reread it.

#25 Finished Ministry of Pain and still don't know what to think of it, so I'll review later! I liked it, but it's a bit to wrap your head around.

Can't resist political/grammar comment today. Huffington post quotes ex-Trump supporter "I was under the influence that he was going to help us." - So, was she being facetious? Or is the post kind of making fun of her by quoting her little Ms Malaprop moment. Under the impression... Under the influence is when you have taken drugs or been drinking.

>55 cammykitty: I will give that one a shot! Sounds interesting.

Stasia, I think you'll like Eifelheim!

Just finished reading an incredibly sad story, "Explanations are always clear" from Never at Home by Timmy Duchamp. Anyone still looking for something that comes up with a completely wrong touchstone, this collection would work. It was a kind of slipstreamy fantasy about a lesbian couple who decides to visit parents. Thing is, one of the couple wanders in bodies other than her own.

So book #25, Ministry of Pain from Croatia - still don't know what to say about it. I enjoyed it. It's a novel about being a refugee, about identity, and about language with just a little s&m sprinkled in. Thought provoking, and makes me think of Milan Kundera but I'm not sure if that's a real comparison, or just one I started thinking about because the book has a scene about watching the movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Quote from the book: A language is a dialect backed by an army. This is the scary truth that underpins the novel.

>75 cammykitty: It may be a question of needing to be under the influence to get through it, Katie.

That totally explains it Paul! Although I thought it might explain her state as she went to the voting booth. I sort of feel mean making fun of Trump supporters that have finally figured out that they didn't really understand what he intended to do. I wonder if there's any leftover Guinness about the house...

Hi Katie. I like your drawing.

>69 cammykitty: The picture is very small on my screen, so please forgive me...

Is that a picture specifically of a squished fairy or is it a fairy that later got squished?

>81 BLBera: Thanks Beth!
>82 Morphidae: Hi Morphy. I'm guessing you've got a very small screen, all the better to hide from the nurses after lights out. Deliberately squished on my part, alaLady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Album. The whole picture will be a portrait of a friend's dog, but since they use a lot of Irish folklore at their house (black dogs are protectors) I decided Maha had sat on the faerie.

>83 cammykitty: Got it! Actually, I used my iPad since I didn't want to risk my laptop if I left the room.

I like the wings and their structure.

>84 Morphidae: I wouldn't want to risk a laptop at a subacute either! Especially not if you're still at the one you were talking about on your thread. :( & thanks! I actually looked up photos of sulfur butterflies to do the faeries wings.

Two books today. #26 is a re-listen to Wylding Hall. Still like it but still stand by my earlier words about it, acid folkumentary with shock of all shocks, the lead singer/songwriter/guitarist is a faerie. Or a faerie god. Or something like. I noticed enough new things and found some new information that made the reread worthwhile. If you love folk music and weird tales about spooky old houses, you'll like this one. Do look up wren mythology though. If you don't, it won't make much sense.

#27 All American Boys works as one for the completely wrong touchstone!!! It comes up as Huck Finn. Anyway, we've done this book as a read-aloud for the sixth graders. It's a novel told in two voices, Rashad: an ROTC high school boy that is beat up by a police officer, and Quinn: the white teen who watched the police officer do it. The book made me uncomfortable, especially since imho the police officer broke protocol by arresting Rashad for shoplifting before he left the store. I've worked retail off and on for years, and in Minnesota it is very clear that you can't arrest anyone for shoplifting unless they leave the store with unpaid merchandise on them. Other than that, the characterization felt real. The authors complicated the issue. Quinn was a family friend of the police officer. The police officer had beaten up kids for picking on Quinn in the past. The father of Rashad was an ex-police officer that had paralyzed a black kid who had actually been innocent. I really admired the depth the authors brought to the situation, without making the novel sound like a disguised essay on the subject. The one thing that still bothered me was if Rashad was arrested for shoplifting without leaving the store, then it was an open and shut case of police incompetence and seemed unrealistic to me. Well, today I googled "police brutality shoplifting" and I take back those words. Yes, it is believable. Perhaps not common, but certainly believable. I didn't look far, but this clip http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/12/02/corrections-officer-sues-garden-city-poli... felt a bit like the kind of thing the book was talking about.

Just dropping by to wish you a wonderful weekend, Katie.

Thanks Paul! It's been a busy weekend so far. We left at 5:50 am yesterday and got back at 10:30 pm from the Future Problem Solving State competition. My team didn't make it to Internationals, but I'm going anyway. The coach at the Elementary school is retiring right before Internationals so I'll be taking his kids. 7 5th graders! Yikes. Must get parents to accompany! My team, I knew wouldn't make it but they had fun which was the point.

Hope you have a great weekend too!

#28 fits in the author with three names tioli. Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe. This is an updated version but still felt dated. The data seemed to end in the mid 1980s. Still worth reading though. Haven't tried any of the recipes yet though. The book is a call to political action. The basic premise is that scarcity is not the cause of hunger in the world. Poverty isn't even the cause. The root cause is the distribution of power. I got to say, I believe her. So she talked about the way our political system and corporate system drives what is produced and who gets it and calls for more people to take power and to help the powerless gain voices.

Ironically, when I was on my way back home from Future Problem Solving I was talking to the other coach and he was talking about all the past topics FPS has had and how much he learned from them, and unequal distribution of food was one of the topics. Before my time as a coach. The first topic I coached was on genetically modified/processed foods.

>86 cammykitty: Have you ever read the original urban fantasy introducing that meme about musicians? It's still the best, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks. circa 1987. See also Gossamer Axe by Gael Baudino (1990) for a more feminist version.

Roni - I'll look for the Gossamer Axe. Of course I've read War for the Oaks. Its setting is my old stomping grounds, and it's described really well. Well enough that I've discussed with a friend whether or not my friend Roberta lived in the apartment building, or they were talking about the one next door. That book is still a big deal in Minneapolis, and the St. Paulites are jealous and it isn't that unlikely to hear one of them say "I'm going to write a War for the Oaks for St. Paul."

I've done a bit of short story reading. The first story in Get in Trouble by Kelly Link - The Summer People. I liked this one, it was an odd mix of faerie folklore, honeybee behavior, bootlegging and Bluebeard. Yup, Kelly Link does mash-ups like no one else. I've tried "reading" the next one but keep falling asleep, literally, on it. Which doesn't mean it's bad. It may mean the reader has a soothing voice. As an aside, I must have fallen asleep at least 10 times on the movie Harvey before I stayed awake for it, and I love that movie.

I also feel asleep while reading The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass too, but did finish it the next morning. It's only logical that I did, because it's about a sanatorium where they take dead people and move back time so they can live again, but this time movement has a lot to do with sleep.

Hi Katie, stopping by to get caught up and loved your story of how you inadvertently taught Dillon to chew on books. ;-) I am like you... I need motivation to read the books I already own, and then allowing myself the luxury to check out the audio book version from the local library to help me read my "dust collectors".

Sign me up to the D.E.A.R club!

I am looking forward to seeing your review for The Ministry of Pain. It was a 4.5 star read for me when I read it back in 2010.

Wishing you a lovely week ahead, Katie.

Hi Katie. I've been doing DEAR with students in one of my classes. I'll have to check at the end of the semester to see whether it was worthwhile. I'd like to do something like that school wide.

All American Boys sounds great although, in defense of police officers, they do not have easy jobs. My son-in-law is a police officer, so I have changed the way I think about them since I've known him. I worry about his safety every time he goes to work.

Beth, that was my initial problem with All American Boys. I tend to be cautious about judging police officers. For example, the Philando Castile case that happened in Falcon Heights/St Paul. It looks unprovoked, but Castille did have a gun with him and also matched, and I do mean matched, the description of an armed burglar caught on camera in that same general area. There's other circumstantial evidence too. So... I'm not willing to say that the officer's life wasn't in danger. In All American Boys, the officer was clearly in the wrong but his father had been a cop and misread a situation that cost an innocent person the use of their legs for life. so I felt it was a little more balanced than some accounts are. As for DEAR, what I've heard is that it helps kids who already are readers but doesn't do much for those struggling way below grade level. I hope you get some good results!

Lori - Hi! Dear is great! I really liked The Ministry of Pain. It was a fascinating look at language, and surprise surprise, it managed to be literary and intellectual and have a plot. Sometimes literary and plot seem to be mutually exclusive. It's either or 4 or 5 star read for me, and I found my next Southern European read that same evening because I was so energized. The next one will be from Greece Why I killed my best friend.

Hmm--- Ministry of Pain sounds interesting---I need to look for it.

I had to go search my old category challenge threads to find my review of The Ministry of Pain. My one sentence summary of the books is "Overall, the story is an ambitious examination of the struggle and conflicting emotions that can course through a group of people, or an individual, having fled a homeland that, for them, no longer exists, to a land that can never feel like home."

>96 banjo123: - It is a great story Rhonda, and rather timely given the refugee situation.

>97 lkernagh: Yes, very timely, and Lori, your one sentence summary says it as well as anything else.

So maybe I should say something more formal about it. Dubravka Ugresic, the author of Ministry of Pain is from the former Yugoslavia/Croatia, and examines that experience in the novel.

What is more pointless than teaching the literature of the non-existent country to refugees from that country because they need an easy college credit? The language itself has become a mumbling, shambling thing due to... a lot of things. Due to being a "foreign language" in the host country. Due to lack of confidence of the speakers. Due to loss. Due to fragmentation. Ugresic says "A language is a dialect backed by an army," not to be clever, but because that is what the Slavic language has become. It has shattered into new "languages," Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, because politically people are emphasising the differences in the languages when pre break-up, they knew they were mutually understandable. With the change in language status, comes a change in the people. They are all Yugo-refugees and therefore a community that needs to stick together, but they are also Serb, Croat, Bosnian etc and sometimes the differences erupt. With the war deliberately forgotten, is it any wonder that a lot of them are working at the Ministry of Pain making kinky sex toys?

Okay, how's that for a teaser.

Puppy stepped on the keyboard and deleted everything I'd written. Oh woes!

#28 Eva Luna by Isabel Allende. Talk about metafiction. Once you finish reading it, you have the feeling you've read Isabel Allende's autobiography, but what little I know about her proves that is untrue. It is a work of fiction, and probably whole cloth. The characters in it are larger than life, all with quirks that push them into the unbelievable side, but while you are reading you do believe in them. As for the plot, it's a coming of age story, a generic Latin American story post-Cuban revolution complete with dictators, censorship, guerrillas and Indians caught in the middle, and it's a love story with a bit of bizarre sex. Not nearly as much bizarre sex as Dhalgren, but enough that it is a strong element of the novel. Enough for a telenovela audience, yes?

>98 cammykitty: Great reviews here, especially the last two. Yes, nice teaser!!

Thanks Kim! I might have time to squeeze one more book into March, and then it's April and The Three-Body Problem. Have to read Obama SF.

As most of you know already, April is poetry month. What you didn't know was that I was a poetry writing major in college. After college, I published in a few literary littles but then my mother died and with her, so did my love of poetry. After that, I thought much of it was morbid and morose. So, for poetry month, I'm going to give it another try. I pulled a book of poems at random from my poetry bookcase - an antique barrister bookcase that used to belong to my grandmother - and I plan to read it. What found me was Minutes by Daryl Hine. Daryl Hine was the editor of Poetry for several years, one of the premier poetry literary littles, as well as a translator of classical poetry. He taught, before my time, at my alma mater Northwestern University so of course the professors there made sure we read at least one or two of his poems.


So, this should tell you something about the financial security of a poet partnered with a philosopher. Look at the glasses. Is it just me, or are they the same frames. Probably 40 years with the same frames. Ah, but I'm sure he was happy.


And for the big question of the month: Poets are the experts at language, paying attention to rhythm, diction, figurative language and symbolism. At one point in time, I swear I could tell a novelist that had trained as a poet. Now, looking at my own writing, I'm not so sure. Since I write for YA mainly and work with kids who can't read well, I've toned all the bells and whistles down. So, drumroll, the big question is how does the writer's use of language enhance the piece?

And for some reason, that question mark makes me think of this:

The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

This is for my TIOLIs
March: Book One by John Lewis - TIOLI 18 A Graphic Autobio or biography
Minutes by Daryl Hine - TIOLI 15 a book of poems by a non-traditional poet

For group reads, special categories and Obama reads, they are at the top of the thread. I've bought The Three-Body Problem for the April Obama read. Good to know he reads science fiction, and this one is twice interesting. One, because it is from China, and two, because it will be exploring alternate sexualities.

Geez, I don't know why I thought I needed this space - Perhaps I'll put a puppy photo in it later. BTW, Bertie will be going to live with her other human mama on Monday or Tuesday. Wahhhhh!!! and also relief. I haven't been able to give her the attention I feel she deserves and hopefully at the other house, she'll get more attention. And it's not an etched in stone thing. If I miss her too much, I can always plead and get her back. In the meantime though, I'm looking forward to having brushes, combs and underwear that hasn't been destroyed by a puppy.

Katie--Happy new April half of the thread!!! I am looking forward to your thoughts on The Three-Body Problem; it sounds really interesting. And heres to not-chewed things. And weekends.

I hope you find a renewed love for poetry and maybe...maybe!...you can share one or two of yours?

Thanks Kim!!! Today I'm thinking about how cute and cuddly Bertie is and not everything she's destroyed. I'm going to miss her! And so will Sage and Wanda! So far, the Daryl Hine is interesting. I'll think about digging up one of my old poems. Honestly, I don't even know where they are now.

I think that I am also going to try for the Three Body Problem.

It's really good!

Sorry that you've had to say goodbye to Bertie, but what a great start in life you gave her, Katie.

I am not a huge reader of sci-fi, but I read The Three-Body Problem last year and enjoyed it even though I felt a fair bit of the really science-y stuff went over my head. I'll look forward to your thoughts.

Hi Rhonda, Jim & Rosalita! House is quiet without Bertie, so I'm finally getting sleep but do miss my cuddly shark. She's having a great time at her current home playing with a younger pup named CC.

I'll be starting the three-body problem next and am really looking forward to it after your recommendation, Jim.

Book 29 Why I Killed My Best Friend takes me to Greece, following a coming of age novel during the 70s and 80s. Same fashions, same bands, same AIDS epidemic. Political scene completely different though. Maria's best friend Anna is charismatic and controlling. If Maria gets into something, so does Anna. When Maria hates a girl that calls her "Tea Pot" pot tea potty..., Anna hates that girl too. When Maria admires Patty Hearst, Anna does too. When Maria wins an art project, Anna decides to go to art school. When Maria dates someone, Anna dates them too. They do everything, even their passionate anarchism protests, together - even while they are sending hate mail to each other between Paris and Greece. After awhile Maria feels consumed by Anna, and especially that thing that happened...

At times, the book reads like Gone Girl but it proves to be much more than that in the end. Its a tribute to every girl who has had one of those passionate, all-consuming relationships that girls call being "best friends."

Book 30 March: Book One by John Lewis. I was a little disappointed in this one, only because I've seen so much praise for the trilogy. It didn't tell me much that was surprising to me or that I didn't already know. I'm planning on reading Two and Three though because I'm sure it is going to get better as he becomes more and more involved in the Civil Rights Movement. As an introduction to the Civil Rights movement for middle school kids though, this is perfect. I'm torn between wanting to keep the book and wanting to take it to school to share with the kids that I read New Boy with. I know they would love it, and this one is actually at their reading level.

>115 cammykitty: That's great that you have kids that would love March!

I picked up the three March books, but haven't gotten to even page through as my son has taken them. I hope to get them back some time, and a 13-year-old boy's room is not the worst place for them to live.

Just delurking to say Hi! and happy weekend.

>115 cammykitty: I bought that one yesterday also based on all the positive reviews it has garnered here, Katie. Since my knowledge of the civil rights movement in the US is rudimentary then this is perhaps a good one for me too.
Have a great Sunday.

Paul, you should like it then. I'm not sure when I'm going to run out and by #2 which is more about the Freedom Riders, black and white people who rode buses together into the South. I haven't heard much about them, but I know some of them were murdered for their beliefs. For doing something we take for granted now.

Rhonda, the kids I read New Boy with are all very confident African-American kids who know bits and pieces about the Civil Rights movement but also have huge gaps. I know they'd love it.

Kay, yes, perfect place for March! But you've got to sneak it out for one afternoon.

Berly - Hi! Waving hi! Hi! Good to see ya! I was thinking about you because I did my annual update of my 1001 books to read before you die spreadsheet and guess what was on there. Nights at the Circus Well, I read it. Think I could've missed it though.

>120 cammykitty: Nights at the Circus, not so much. No idea why Bowie liked it or why it's on the 1001 books list. It was a miss for me. I gave it a 2.5 rating. Now The Night Circus, that's a great read!! I have never checked to see how many I have read off that list. Having just updated your spreadsheet, where are you?

>121 Berly: I've read 120 right now, and have just a few stories left in The Arabian Nights. It's taken me years to read that! I haven't been consciously trying to read off the 1001 books list but it seems like quite a few happen each year just from the zeitgeist around here. I can see why Bowie liked Nights at the Circus but it feels dated to me. He was a weird guy, and it was a weird book. It makes sense.

Since it is poetry month, here's a poem:

The Survivors
by Daryl Hine

Nowadays the mess is everywhere
And getting worse. Earth after all
Is a battlefield. Through the static
We used to call the music of the spheres

Someone, a survivor, sends this message:
"When it happened I was reading Homer.
Sing--will nobody sing?--the wrath,
Rats and tanks and radioactive rain."

That was before rationing was enforced
On words, of course. Particles went first,
Then the substantives. Now only verbs abide
The law, and the odd anachronistic scrawl

How above the crumbling horizon
Brightly shine our neighbours, Venus, Mars.

Obviously time for another news fast. When I went to the internet, I couldn't help but see the quote "Sean Spicer says even Hitler didn't use chemical weapons." I start to nod yes, and then think "only because there wasn't much left after World War I and then I did a double take and thought what was in the Gas Chambers if it wasn't chemical weapons. Gas instead of bullets because gas was cheaper. Bullets=weapons therefore gas=weapons.

I don't need my brain dragged down to such levels of stupidity on a daily basis!

>124 cammykitty: I saw that too and was flabergasted by so much ignorance, Katie, it is incomprehensible.

"The Red Wheelbarrow" is one of my favorites, Katie. I like the Hine poem as well.

I loved the Lewis memoirs, but Books two and three were better than the first one, I thought. I would also like to read The Three-Body Problem, but I don't think it's going to happen this month.

>124 cammykitty: I know. That was an amazing gaffe.

120/1001 is pretty good!! Now keep it up. ; )

>125 FAMeulstee: Anita, yes. Apologies to the rest of the world! This is what the American education system has created. Or maybe not. At times, the Trump administration has obviously deliberately offered up misinformation and when they've gotten called on it, they let the spokesperson take the blame while they also do the "Oh, look at the mean, biased journalists" dance. Apologies again. I'm wondering if they are trying to create confusion, and if so, why?

>Beth I've always loved William Carlos Williams. Hine has a few gems too, but a lot of his poems aren't for me as the audience. When he hits though, he's good. --- I just made sure the person who orders books for the school library gets all three of the March books. I loaned my copy out, but to a friend's kids so I'm sure to get it back! If I took it to school, I'd never see it again. I was pretty certain that the series only got better. Good to have that confirmed.

127 12%!!! I don't know if that is going to change significantly any time soon! I seem to be reading all over the place lately.

Hope everyone else is doing well!

Bertie update - her home is still a little up in the air, but she's enjoying herself. Right now, she's back to her birth home and playing with a younger puppy "sister" and the sister's dad. Hopefully, I'll get to go visit her sometime next week.

#31

Book 31, off-shelf #12 Minutes by Daryl Hine

This is a collection of poems, originally published in the late 60s but Hine certainly wasn't one of the Beat Poets. He was a masterful formalist, who also translated the classics - meaning from the Latin, not just something a few hundred years old. His poetry is full of allusions, very intellectual but sometimes zinging into the modern, contemporary with a voice so every day that, like deliberate dissonance in music, it shocks you out of the mood the rest of the poem creates. Some of his poems connected with me, but much of them, I wasn't the right audience. I was either missing information I needed or who knows. Let me quote one more of his poems:

Noon

Once powdered angel courtiers with short swords
And red-heeled shoes attended on the Lord's
Levee, to greet the roi soleil, who said,
"Sometime remember me when I am dead."
A flutter of wings, of fans ran through the court
Provoking a spiritual lackey to retort,
"As if the bull's eye of the world could die!
Why, has not death ben banished from Versailles
And never received here, even in embassy?"

That morning in the parterre du midi
Two peasants were apprehended gathering figs,
Male and female. Scandalized, the seraphic periwigs
Soon covered their confusion with a yawn.
Politely though the parc du Trianon
A grand seigneur escorted them, to show
Them the gates of gilt. They would not take the hint and go
Banned from the artificial wilderness
Till naked amid such shameless fancy dress
And bored by the eternal Sunday, so to speak,
The two turned to the workdays of the week
At last and left she to spin and he to delve,
As all the clocks in paradise struck twelve.

BTW, I've put Minutes on my bookmooch so if you'd like to mooch it off me, let me know.

At school, we are doing "book clubs" with the kids again, and the theme is Minnesota history. Here's the list they got to pick from.

The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich - I have read this one several times with sixth grade groups. It gives them a real feel of what it was like to be an Ojibwe, and a lot of the kids try to pretend they are not into it, but when a certain event happens, even the boys in the class cry.

THE ONE I'M READING
Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline This is actually an adult novel, and an adaptation called Orphan Train Girl is due out in May. Not soon enough to help the girl I'm working with, who isn't the best reader but likes serious themes. Of course she picked this one, which is the most difficult book we offered. We've found an audio version though to help her, so she'll read along as it is read to her. Her best frenemy is reading it too. I'm wondering if we could get some ARCs of Orphan Train Girl?

Kunu by Kenneth Thomasma is a hard to find novel on a seldom covered subject. It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember liking it a lot and most of the kids liked it. It is a story about a Winnebago boy, after the Dakota War of 1862. I don't know if non-Minnesotans know about the Dakota War. Basically, Minnesota was being settled by European-Americans and the Dakota were being forced into either a farming lifestyle or being forced onto reservations. The money matter of the treaty got all messed up, and they found themselves in debt to the traders and eventually the store owners refused the reservation Dakota credit. They were starving and a violent incident finally happened, as they always do in situations like this. The Dakota decided to back their 6 men who had gotten in trouble and went to war, which was brutal and short. To punish them, the Dakota were gathered up and sent to Pike Island to live there throughout the winter while the US government decided what to do with them. The Winnebago tribe had not been involved in the war, but their people were rounded up and sent to Pike Island as well. BTW, you can walk the outside edges of Pike Island in a half hour. So, this is the background for the story.

Kunu and his family are sent to Pike Island where they are freezing and starving, so he and his grandfather escape by canoe. This is the story of their escape and it makes a pretty good adventure story.

The Broken Blade by William Durbin is an adventure story about the Voyageurs.

While the Locust Slept is a memoir by Peter Razor about the boarding schools that the Native Americans were sent to in order to become assimilated

Soldier's Heart by Gary Paulsen is a fictionalized account of Charlie Goddard's life. Charlie Goddard was a Minnesota farm boy who lied about his age so he could go fight in the Civil War. Paulsen uses a lot of fact from Goddard's letters, but he fudges a bit to make sure he can get in every major battle that the Minnesota regiment fought in. I've read this one several times with kids. It is well done, but a real downer. I found it amazingly tedious, but kids who are interested in the Civil War will like it. I usually like Paulsen's writing, but I'm very happy this book has lost its place in our curriculum. It used to be that every 6th grader had to read it in Social Studies.

Green Card, Youth Voices sounds interesting, but may have a few challenges for the book groups just because of what it is. It is a collection of true stories by immigrants from the Minneapolis school system. If I get time, I may read this one too and hop between book groups.

What a great selection of books, Katie. I saw Peter Razor speak; his experience was pretty grim. I haven't read the book yet. It will be interesting to see what the kids think about their choices.

Beth, I'll bet it was grim. I keep wondering what that experience has done to the Native American community as a whole. It disrupted the family life for a complete generation, so what people usually learn from their parents??? Who taught them that, and what was left out? Or different than what their parents would have wanted them to know?

So I decided, since I finished my poetry book before the month was up, I'd pick up another one. And what do you know, the random book I chose started with a poem about a baby snake being sliced and diced by a lawn mower. Nope! That was why I quit reading poetry in the first place. ... I'll pick another book. I'lll pearl rule with two poems, but the month is still on.

Better luck with the next poetry selection!! Ugh. And...



Or just Happy Sunday!!

>78 cammykitty: Adding The Ministry of Pain to the BlackHole! Thanks for the recommendation, Katie.

Happy Easter!

>130 cammykitty: That''s quite a collection of books! The kids are lucky to have you to help them with the reading.

>134 Berly: Hi Kim! The next poetry selection is much better. Last Poems of Elinor Wylie. Elinor Wylie was a favorite of my poetry professor, Mary Kinzie. I haven't gotten very far in them but pretty much like every one.

>135 alcottacre: Stasia, I hope you get a chance to read it! BlackHole is a pretty accurate name for my WL.

>136 banjo123: Hi Rhonda! It is quite a collection. There's more than one of them that I hope to read someday. Right now, I haven't been much help to them though! I've been sick so am on my third day of missing school and am now a bit behind on Orphan Train. I'll catch up with them somehow!

Well, read "Smoke Ghosts" by Fritz Lieber a few days ago which makes the tenth short story of the year. I think I'm going to count every ten as a book, but I'm not going to add them to the count until the end of the year. Fritz Lieber is a favorite of our mover/shaker behind the convention scene in Minneapolis, Eric Heideman. I haven't read much Fritz Lieber, but can see why Eric likes him so much from this piece. A smoke ghost is definitely a ghost of the times, and something to be feared.

And of course, since I've been sick and lying in bed for hours at a time, I've finished # 32 in audio As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley. Our Flavia is beginning to sound a little deranged in this one, and she begins to juggle with different moralities - practical morality and amorality - as well as being away from home for the first time. It is what it is, an escapist bit of mystery, but not terribly believable.

#33 on audio. Can you guess? A bit like SheLob works with David Lynch, then gets interrupted by Sponge Bob and the Birds. Yes, you didn't guess, it was The Incredible Shrinking Man by everyone's favorite commercial writer from the 1950s, Richard Matheson. I was for sure that the cat was going to snarf him up but no, we ended with Ms Frizzle and her Magic School Bus.

Worth reading when you're sick and stuck at home, but this has nothing on his I am Legend.

Witches
by Elinor Wylie

Green eyes, gold hair, great beauty,
Have witches while they're girls,
Or dark eyes soft and sooty,
Bright lips and cloudy curls.

Though this one looks like Helen
And that one looks like Eve,
They'll slice your heart like a melon
With never a by-your-leave.

So mind your mother and daddy
And do as you are told,
Or the witches will gobble you up, my lad,
When they are starved and old.

#34 on audio My Man Jeeves Can you tell I'm sick? Comfort reads. Not too taxing. Bertie and Jeeves go to New York to solve everybody else's problems. I got to say, I think Fry and Laurie got this right on their BBC series. There does seem to be a not quite realized homosexual relationship between the two, and a bit dysfunctional of a one too. Bertie is completely dependent on Jeeves, and Jeeves passive-aggressively controls everything Bertie wears if not what he does too.

And on an aside, I bought a bunch of hangers at Goodwill today, put them in the closet where they would be safe from the dogs... but I hear Wanda chewing on something... Yup, hanger chew toys. Cheaper than nylabones, but I've got questions on their safety. Better go confiscate.

#35 the Obama Read The Three-Body Problem wasn't what I expected, but I mostly loved it. The chapter where the aliens spoke didn't do it for me though. It wasn't as emotionally believable as the rest, and to be honest, I liked that part being something somewhat unknowable up to that point. I know there are a few more books in the series, but this one seems complete. I don't think I'll read the others. Not any time soon at least. This one felt a little all-consuming, like the game it described.

I hope you start feeling better soon, Katie. I'm working on The Three-Body Problem myself so I'm saving your spoiler for later.

Hi Katie - I have THe Three-Body Problem on my shelf, but I'm not sure when I'll get to it.

The Three-Body Problem is up next for me, once I get through another library book. Noting your comment on how complete it feels.

Hi Roni, Beth & RP! It's going to be interesting to see all the different comments on The Three-Body Problem. I find it interesting how the history of China affects what happens in the book, and leads to the deep cynicism of some of the characters. And I was also trying to make a political allegory, the three bodies perhaps being countries rather than suns. Much of the science in the book is real, so I was wondering if some of the first contact social theories were real too.

#36

Book 36, off-shelf #14 Last Poems of Elinor Wylie by Elinor Wylie



This is a posthumous collection of Elinor Wylie's work, and the name "Last Poems" is a little misleading. Much of the book includes her unpublished poems, dug up through her manuscripts and scrupulously documented as "early" or "late" plus a section of poems that had been published in journals but never collected. She died in 1938, back when poetry was still mostly formal. She used mostly ballad verse and sonnet forms. Probably fair to assume that she may have been read by some of our grandparents. That said, some of the poems have a weird up-to-dateness. For example "Three Elegies" looks at the lives and deaths of Keats, Byron and Shelley and ends with:
Yet we are fireless
For all ttheir dying;
We have the wireless
And commercial flying.

I had to stop a minute and realise her "wireless" is not our wireless internet, but the radio. An equally strange revolutionizing invention of its day.

I'll leave you with one more of her poems.

Ophelia

My locks are shorn for sorrow
Of love which may not be;
Tomorrow and tomorrow
Are plotting cruelty.

The winter wind tangles
These ringlets half-grown,
The sun sprays with spangles
And rays like his own.

Oh, quieter and colder
Is the stream; he will wait;
When my curls touch my shoulder
He will comb them straight.

So, updates. Still sick but getting better. Wanda and Sage think I'm horribly boring, but enjoy the extra cuddle time with mom. Wanda is talking to me right now, trying to convince me to let her outside so she can... ? Not sure what, but it involves a dog down the block and I'm sure a hunting possibility. Nope, can't catch the Easter bunny.

I've got about 100 pages left of Orphan Train but am a little irked with them at work. I got pulled from my language arts class two days in a row to help some kids in a team taught (meaning always two teachers for same amount of kids one usually takes) anyway, kids in a team taught math class. The problem with the class isn't that they are dumb, it's that they've got a few undisciplined boys that make the class look like a stereotyped comedy of an inner-city classroom. Apparently one of the boys is new and has managed to make a bad situation insane in just a couple weeks. Anyway, one of the kids knew nothing. One of the kids took an instant dislike to me because I told him I wouldn't go back and read a question he had missed because he was screwing around. One worked hard. One, seemed to work hard but I think he rushed through it and finished early because he didn't know it that well. Etc... So basically, I felt it was two days totally wasted when I should have been helping my language arts kids. And I'm afraid that they are going to end up pulling me for the rest of the school year because the la class only has one kid who has paperwork for special ed. Which is really unfair to that kid because her team doesn't have a lot of sped kids so she usually doesn't get the support she needs. I was already pulled from one of her classes, just at the point where we'd gotten her doing and turning in her homework and her grades had gone up from Ds and Fs to Bs and Cs. So, in short I'm afraid I'm going to go from a classroom where I'm seeing results to one that will just be damage control. Argh!

And on the reading front, I've enjoyed having a book of poems by the bed so I think I'm going to continue on in May with a collection of Mona Van Duyn's. I used to love Mona Van Duyn's work. So emotional, straight to the core.

I read L Timmel duchamp's short story "The Tears of Niobe" about an orphan from a destroyed city who Dreams of destroyed cities. Very meta. A story of witness.

Hi Katie, I hope you feel better soon!

Katie--Hope you feel much better soon. Sounds like your classroom situation is more than frustrating. Sorry. Hope you get to do more than damage control. Happy Friday!! Oh, and post your comments for the Three-Body Problemon the Obama thread, too!!

Hi Judy and Kim! Slowly but surely I'm getting better. Soon to be out of antibiotics... might need to check in with doctor again. :( Kim, I did swing by the Obama thread to talk about The Three-Body Problem. Thanks for reminding me. I don't say much on the Obama thread, but I am enjoying the challenge!

Book 37 sort of - I've read the first third of Cuentos de Eva Luna en espanol, pero leyendo en espanol es demasiado lento! I'm sure my Spanish has a mistake in it somewhere but what I was saying was I'm reading The Stories of Eva Luna in the original Spanish but reading in Spanish takes much more time than reading in English, so I've broken it into thirds and each third counts as one book.

Talk about meta! This is a collection of stories written by Isabel Allende as one of her characters, Eva Luna, would've written them. Eva Luna is first introduced in a novel Eva Luna and these stories are in addition to the novel. They sort of sound like Allende, but they have a different style than her typical short story. These have a folkloric, oral tradition feel and come from the people and world of her novel, Eva Luna. I'm enjoying it and am quite proud of myself because it will be my first novel length adult fiction in Spanish that I have completed that isn't accompanied by a translation to help me when I get stuck. Usually, when I read complex stories in Spanish, I lose a lot of the higher level functions of reading - understanding tone, predicting what will happen, picking up nuances like foreshadowing - and sometimes I even get confused on who is the subject of the particular sentence I'm on, which actually is easy in Spanish because the subject is sometimes only referred to in the verb. I haven't had much of those problems with Cuentos de Eva Luna and don't know if it is because I've read the novel Eva Luna in English, I'm getting better, or her writing is more contemporary and accessible than some of the writing I've attempted.

So, perhaps I'm graduating from Goosebumps en Espanol. Escalofrios - that's how you say goosebumps.

Book 38 on Audio - Speaking of Goosebumps - this is on the same level Guys Read: Funny Business is the only one of the Guys Read collections that I don't like much. Perhaps truly boy humor - involving a lot of body parts, bad smells and bad breath. The last story is "The Bloody Souvenir' by Jack Gantos and if you've read any of his older books for boys, you can guess what was in it. The boy with the self-destructive but way cool neighbor boys that he's always trying to live up to does something dangerous and stupid. In this one, young Jack (hidden for the benefit of the squeamish, not really a spoiler) removes a wart from his foot using a rusty pair of pliers and then goes to the doctor more than once to get the complications resolved. Nope, this book hasn't been encouraging sweet dreams. Won't be revisited by me like the other Guys Read books are.

Congrats on graduating from "goosebumps" Spanish! Hope you are feeling better!

Thanks Rhonda!!! I'm mostly on the mend. Well enough that I dragged Sage on a walk around the neighborhood where he spooked over an empty baby stroller. Poor boy! Wait till he runs into a zombie baby in a stroller.