Book 12: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Here it is! A book I liked!

Dave Eggers sure has changed since the last time I encountered him, in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I might retitle, A Massively Self-indulgent Work of a Guy Who Wants Us to Think His Title is Ironic, but Really He Thinks It's Pretty Much Spot-on. I'm certainly not the first to note the contrast; in fact I don't know that I've read a single review that didn't mention his first book and how very different this one is. It's a hard thing not to notice; Zeitoun is about as unselfish and non self-indulgent book--in both purpose and voice--as you're likely to find.

Eggers tells the story here of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant and contractor in New Orleans, and the ordeal he and his family (an American born wife and 4 children) go through in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I won't give away details, other than to say that Zeitoun stays behind in New Orleans while his family evacuates, but I'll say that Eggers tells a startlingly compelling and effective story here. He does it with only an occasional passing reference to Bush or FEMA, without lengthy lectures about ineffective bureaucracy or criminal negligence, but his story of this one family manages to give you all of that anyway. The prose is spare but effective, and Eggers disappears entirely as he tells Zeitoun's story (based mostly on interviews with the Zeitouns themselves).

I suppose I'm doomed to see everything through the lens of North Korea this year, but it was hard not to make comparisons as Zeitoun's story (and the story of New Orleans itself) rapidly descended into tragic absurdity. Zeitoun's experience rivals anything I've read about North Korea, and the similarities are sometimes eerie. I was thinking a few weeks ago, while reading Nothing to Envy, that reading about North Korea is easier emotionally than it probably should be because it seems so unreal and far away. Zeitoun's descriptions of the American government at work after Katrina brought that line of thinking into perspective.

Also, because I've always felt that books and movies need really explicit warnings about stuff that might give me nightmares, and to continue along the same lines of warning you about the squirrel torture in Ender's Game, I will disclose that this book should come with a "Warning: Dogs in Distress" label. There. Now you know.

Book 11: Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler

I've loved Anne Tyler for forever. I assigned her Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant to the first freshman comp. class I taught in grad school. I've read a handful of her books at least two or three times each, and I'm pretty sure I've read every one of them at least once. I think Tyler is almost always at least pretty good, but she is only sporadically wonderful. The aforementioned Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist, probably Celestial Navigation...I would put all of those in the "wonderful" category. And then there are others that stick with me and that I'm especially fond of like Searching For Caleb. And then there are some that I am, for whatever reason, not as personally charmed by, but that I recognize as impressive, ambitious achievements nonetheless (The Amateur Marriage, Back When We Were Grownups). So I'll just say it right off: Noah's Compass hasn't earned a spot in any of those categories. The protagonist, Liam Pennywell, is a 60 year old man with two failed marriages and three daughters whom he barely really knows. As the book opens, he's just lost his unimpressive, unfulfilling teaching job and is moving into a small apartment. He's attacked by a burglar his first night in the new apartment, and wakes up in a hospital, unable to remember anything about the attack. He becomes obsessed with regaining his memory, and this obsession leads, in a convoluted (some would say contrived) way to a relationship with a woman more than 20 years younger than he--one of Tyler's quirky women, this one named Eunice. It's hard not to read Noah's Compass as a sort of poor man's Accidental Tourist. We have the same sad, detached male protagonist, hoping to find redemption in the form of an offbeat woman. Tyler even gives us the same line about how love makes someone's flaws seem endearing. But Eunice's flaws never really do seem particularly endearing (she's no Muriel Pritchett), and her relationship with Liam never feels quite real. This was another audiobook, and the guy reading this one nearly drove me crazy. He sounded to be at least Liam's age, if not a good bit older, so it wasn't so bad when he was reading Liam's thoughts and words. But he gave most of the female characters grating, slightly cartoonish voices, and he read at a snail's pace. I won't say I didn't enjoy the book well enough, because I find Tyler endearing even at her worst, but I suspect this one will slip out of my mind in fairly short order. The ending still has me thinking, though. There's an almost frustrating lack of space oftentimes between Tyler's happy and sad endings. Or I guess between her hopeful and despairing endings. I remember reading an interview with her once in which she expressed amazement that many readers read the ending of The Clockwinder as happy when she thought it was so clearly not. I knew Noah's Compass was about to end, of course, but about 10 minutes out I started wondering how she was going to manage to finish it up with so little time. I don't know that the ending was unsatisfying, exactly, but it didn't really end up where I expected. Cryptic enough, yes? No spoilers! (because, after such a glowing review, I know everyone will be rushing out to read it).

My goal for next week is to read a book I unequivocally like!

More science! Update!

Speaking of going from researching to ordering in 20 seconds...

okay, okay, but it's just a sort of trial purchase that I made. We're all getting kind of bored with doing just the Discovery Education Science and not much else for science, so I decided to do a trial run of the Science in a Nutshell + readings + Discovery plan, and I ordered two of their human body kits plus David Macaulay's The Way We Work. We already have Open Me Up, so we'll use that, too. Yay--now I'm excited about science again!

Here it is! Science fretting!

Here is my goal for next year: pick a science program and actually finish the damn thing. I can do that, right? Right. This year my goal for the youngers (since Ari is taking outside classes) was to get some science done most every week. And I've done okay so far. Mostly. Next year's goal is harder, so I must choose wisely. I think I have narrowed it down to three different basic options. At least for right now I have. I'm still in the early stages of researching. But sometimes I go from early stages of research to ordering something in, like, 20 minutes. Which, come to think of it, might be part of the problem we've historically had with science around here. Hmm...Anyway. Pros and cons and other random thoughts:

Option #1: R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey
We tried the life science from Pandia Press last year, I guess? Sometime. We didn't get terribly far. I have a friend who just finished up the Chemistry with her kids and speaks well of it. The problem with this option might be that I can mainly think of cons: I tried it before and trouble sticking with it (probably more me than them, but still), I'm kind of leaning toward not focusing on one kind of science for the whole year; I'm in the mood to mix things up, lots of gathering materials involved, although this might be okay as long as I stay focused on my goal. I remember having to get a lot of crap together, but not anything especially obscure or hard to get ahold of. The Chemistry says for 2nd through 5th grade, so it should work well for both Ari and Milo with Gus following along. Actually, this is the big plus, I think. Easy to combine kids with minimal tweaking, although I might give Ari supplemental stuff.

Sidenote before moving on to option 2: With any of these, I might give Ari extra stuff. I'm looking at PLATO science, or maybe another outside class, depending on what I can find.

Option #2: Singapore Science
You know, I've been looking at this for years. I like the looks of the samples, not so much from the textbooks, but from the activity and higher order thinking books. I like that it's a tested curriculum that's been around for a long time. We've always done well with Singapore Math. The number of different books sort of overwhelms me. As far as I can tell, we'd need a teacher book, textbook, homework book, activity book, and higher order thinking skills book...and then several different volumes of some of those. I'm also not sure about combining kids. There's an Earlybird volume for 1/2 grade, then 3/4 grade, and 5/6 grade. So, really, they should all be in different books. I think trying to have Gus follow along with a higher level might be really frustrating all around, because of the workbookiness of it (Gus doesn't do well with not getting his own copy of whatever his brothers are working on). The Earlybird looks pretty easy to do, though, so what I might do is get that plus the 3/4, have Ari and Milo do 3/4 and then see previous sidenote re: supplementation for Ari.

Option #3: Science in a Nutshell kits
...plus lots of reading and possibly a renewal of our Discovery Education science subscription. This option is growing on me more the more I think about it (and the more I gaze longingly at the kits on the website). We did a kit last spring and really enjoyed it. They really do include pretty much EVERYTHING. Need a paperclip? Here it is! An index card? Don't worry--it's included! Again, it would be easy to combine everyone (they're supposed to be for 2-6 grade, but I think Gus could handle most of it). They even come with 3 journals, so it's like they were meant for our family. On the surface, it seems like more work to plan, since I'd need to pull together extra readings and whatnot. But I think in practice I'm much, much better about doing that sort of thing than tracking down epsom salt and 4 inch tall plastic cups. It also fulfills my need to mix it up, since we can alternate kits on different subjects throughout the year. One thing it's not is systematic. I wonder if I could find a good spine/s for reading, though, to give the year some shape and cohesion, and fit the experiment kits in around that. Or I could give up on being systematic for the youngers and see sidenote about supplementation for Ari.

So. Input very welcome. Typing out my initial thoughts has been clarifying and helpful. I didn't realize I was leaning toward option #3, but now I think I am. Interesting.

January 24-28, 2011: Week 22

My, it's been an odd week. Sunday Gus had a mysterious episode of not being able to catch his breath, and then it happened again on Monday and again on Tuesday, so we spent a lot of time at the doctor's office Monday and Tuesday trying to figure that whole thing out. Now we have an inhaler, but of course, it hasn't happened again. Anyway, though, that kind of messed up school for the early part of the week (we're usually at the doctor so rarely that it's not really a big deal that she's 30 minutes away, but it starts to add up when we go there twice in one week). And then the last half of the week was already going to be crazy, so....to sum up, not our most productive week. Wednesday was our usual classes at LEO, and Thursday we had an afternoon playdate plus Math Olympiad in the evening. And then this morning I suddenly remembered at 9:44 that we were supposed to be at LEO at 10 for make-up Spanish classes. We were all in pajamas at 9:44, but managed to leave the house by 9:51 (which still meant Milo and Gus missed the first 20 minutes of class). So there was lots of Spanish this week, anyway. Gus asks if he can have some "leche" all the time now. "I love leche," he muses.

Ari:
*did two writing assignments, both on this week's SOTW topic, which was Alexander the Great, one straight up summary; one assignment from Paragraph Town. He still needs to rewrite the second one a bit. That's one of the things I was planning for today back before I remembered about make-up Spanish classes.

*finally finished the first lesson in Growing Up Heroic. We're going to need to pick up the pace with that, if we're ever going to finish it. I think he's going to enjoy it and get a lot out of it as long as I pre-read and toss out the more touchy-feely journal assignments. I'm pretty much like Ari is about stuff like that, so I understand. Like when there's a wedding shower or whatever, and you're supposed to write down your special, thoughtful, gooey advice for a happy marriage? Yeah, I pretend to forget to do that.

*Worked on Life of Fred and Singapore; doesn't like decimals

*continued to read A Wrinkle in Time

*dissected a sheep's eyeball in his biology class. Yum.

Milo:
*sometimes spends, literally, 5 minutes working out a subtraction problem like 11-7. Other times can do the same problem in 5 seconds. I'm thinking the issue here is focus.

*still reading Chamber of Secrets for school. At bedtime he's working on the first Series of Unfortunate Events book, after tearing through all three Fog Mound books in about 4 days.

Gus:
*is reading a lot of "Frog and Toad" these days

*likes math as much as Milo dislikes it

Other stuff:
*we started reading Alexander the Great Rocks the World this week. Last year we went on a field trip to the Carlos Museum, and the woman who did the tour for our group wrote this book. I picked up her book on Cleopatra also, for later this year.

*Lord of the Rings continues to be a hit with the bigs, and Gus still likes ("no, I LOVE it" he says) The Hobbit. Who knew? I tried to read The Hobbit to Ari about 3 different times, starting when he was a good year older than Gus, before he'd finally listen to it.

*I'm fretting a lot about science for next year. Stay tuned for special fretting about science blog post in the near future!

Book 10: The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald

I suspect The Irresistible Henry House is getting a lot of attention (I came to it through NPR) more because its premise is so fascinating than because it's a great novel. The premise is this: up until the '60's, a number of home economics programs in colleges around the country borrowed real babies from orphanages so that the students could gain experience in child care and try out the latest scientific theories on child rearing. Grunwald tells the story of fictional "practice baby" Henry Gaines, who started out as an orphan in the practice house and was then adopted and raised by the program's supervisor, who couldn't let him go.

Aside: strange intersections in my reading thus far this year: 1. abusive-by-today's-standards parenting techniques (here and in Franklin and Eleanor, in which we learn that Eleanor Roosevelt hung her first baby outside every day, in all weather, for hours. The baby screamed and screamed until the neighbors finally threatened to call the authorities) 2. The 1964/65 World's Fair (here and in After This)

I found Henry House pleasant and enjoyable enough. The characters were well-drawn; I wanted good things for Henry, and the descriptions of his adoptive mother Martha's life of quiet desperation were devastating. But the book never seemed to do much more than the obvious with its premise: Henry has a hard time forming attachments because he had so many different caretakers as an infant. Yes, and? Honestly, his problems forming attachments weren't even all that impressive; plenty of young adult men with perfectly conventional upbringings can boast of greater commitment phobia than Henry. The book mentions that he was born in June, and I thought he was acting like a pretty typical Gemini, really. This is (according to a blurb I just read on Amazon) Grunwald's first foray into historical fiction, and it shows. Henry runs around bumping into various 60's icons (Walt Disney, Julie Andrews, the Beatles), but it all feels a bit forced. Henry never seems like a product of his time; more like a tourist plunked down in the '60's and observing it from the outside along with the reader.

I feel like I never say nice things about books. Or like I have a lot more to say about books I don't like than books I like. Or what I don't like about books than what I do like about them, anyway.  Hmm. I will have to work on that.

Book 9: All I Did Was Ask by Terry Gross

In the introduction, Gross writes, "You may be wondering what the point is of reading interviews that were meant to be listened to." Why, yes, actually, I kind of was wondering exactly that. She continues, "I've asked myself that. But in going through transcripts in preparation for this book, I was pleasantly surprised that so many of the interviews I remembered as having been good radio also made for enjoyable reading." This strikes me as sort of faint praise for one's own book, but it's pretty accurate. It is "enjoyable" reading this collection of transcripts from Fresh Air interviews, but not really much more than that. They're all interviews with people in the arts (interviews with journalists and politicians about current events don't hold up as well over time, Gross explains). The transcripts are heavily edited, best-of, sorts of things, so certainly this is faster than wading through the archives on the website. The downside is that Gross is the one who picks the interviews, so they're not necessarily with people you care about (or have even heard of). I was hoping for more gossip about what the various interview subjects were like behind the scenes; there's a little of that, but not enough. Staid, tasteful, public radio gossip is all you get.

January 17-21, 2011: Week 21

The snow has melted, so it was back to business as usual this week. Some highlights:

Ari:
*spent a lot of time multiplying and dividing by decimals in Singapore. He did well, but I think the plan to go back and do LOF Decimals and Percents once he finishes Pre-algebra is a good one. He can definitely use the practice
*wrote a summary about the war between the Greeks and the Persians for history
*never protests about doing extra sentences from Practice Town; the boy loves his four level analysis
*I think I'm going to drop spelling in favor of more frequent dictation. He's a good speller, I'm not convinced Spelling Workout is improving his spelling at all, and I'd rather he use his limited time on something that's more of a multi-tasker, like dictation.
*started reading A Wrinkle In Time
*is still not a big fan of Growing Up Heroic, but likes it a lot better when I tell him we can just talk about a lot of the journal entries instead of writing them

Milo:
*read a book about the Trojan War and more of Chamber of Secrets
*is reading The Penderwicks at bedtime
*complained very little about math this week!
*is doing great with spelling, and I'm not dropping it for him, because I think he does benefit from formal spelling

Gus:
*is tearing through Handwriting Without Tears in his mad quest to get to start Writing With Ease
*is reading Frog and Toad are Friends
*is having no problems whatsoever with his Singapore 1A...this week he worked on pairs that make 10.

Other stuff:
*Ari and Milo are loving The Fellowship of the Ring (our bedtime reading). Milo asked me, "is it important that Sam is the only one who didn't get attacked by the willow tree and that he's the only one who didn't have bad dreams?" Future English major? I thought it was awesome that he noticed it.
*Gus asked Dave to read The Hobbit to him this week after they finished Little House on the Prairie. They started it last night. Curious to see how that goes
*We did Magic School Bus science this week, using the materials on the Scholastic website that go with each episode. I really need to think about science for next year. Sigh. Science.
*I absolutely can't decide whether to go to the homeschool convention in Greenville, but I'm leaning toward no this week. If I could go with just Dave it would be different. As it is, though, I think I'd rather spend the money on Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party.

Book 8

Ender's Game: Orson Scott Card

  

Wow. I really disliked this book. Putting aside what I thought about the writing (mediocre) and the argument (it seems to be, essentially, a lengthy defense of genocide), Ender's Game bored the crap out of me. Ender is six, and we can tell he's really, really smart because he figures out that 1. you have to really beat the sh*t out of (or, heck, even kill) people who pick on you because otherwise they'll keep picking on you and 2. there's no up or down in zero gravity. So they send him off to Battle School to compete in endless fake battles with a bunch of other ethnic stereotypes/kids, who, oddly, are often naked (and sometimes in the shower together, fighting) and must be described as such over and over again by Card (who, interestingly, is a tireless political activist against gay marriage)....where was I? Oh, yes. So they have these battles, and we get to hear about pretty much every single one of them in excruciating detail. Even though Ender absolutely always wins, so there's really not much suspense. Also, there's squirrel torture. There really should be a "Warning: Squirrel torture!" label on this book, because I love squirrels, and I hate it when people torture them. Then there's a surprise! twist! at the end, or at least near the end. And video games. And witty insults like "fart-breath." I did not care for this book. Book #8; snarky review #1.

Another one! I can't stop! Book 7!

Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home by Laura Ling and Lisa Ling. Wow. That's a cumbersome title. This is my first library borrowed e-book, and I wound up staying up until 2 this morning, finishing it in one day. So I guess it was kind of riveting. I don't envy the Ling sisters the task of writing this book. Searching for the right tone must have been as difficult as trying to figure out what to say when interrogated by North Koreans. Laura Ling, of course, is one of the two journalists who was captured and held prisoner by North Korea for several months in 2009 after crossing the border from China illegally. Difficult to find the tone because what Ling did was, inarguably, both foolish and illegal. While filming a documentary about the situation of North Korean defectors living in China, she and her two crew members, along with their guide, crossed the frozen river that forms the border between China and North Korea, stepped onto North Korean soil for, they say, less than a minute, then turned to head back. Midway back, they were spotted and chased by North Korean soldiers, who arrested Ling and Euna Lee (the third crew member and their guide escaped) after they were back in China. They don't deny they crossed the border, and they don't even have any good reason for having done it; it seems to have just been a whim of their guide, and they followed him without questioning--it wasn't to conduct an interview or get some powerful footage. I.e. it wasn't an act of journalistic courage so much as just...dumb. And they weren't even breaking some special, oppressive law specific to North Korea; it's illegal to cross borders without permission everywhere. We certainly arrest people in America for it, too.

Ling and Lee are then held in North Korea for 5 months, during which time they manage to cause enormous headaches for pretty much anyone who's ever had anything to do with governing the US. While their personal crisis is going on, President Obama has just started his presidency and North Korea is busy launching satellites and testing nuclear weapons and generally pissing off everyone in the international community. Meanwhile, back home, Lisa Ling is pestering Al Gore, Bill Richardson, Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, various state department officials, Brad and Angelina, and President Obama himself (she gets his sister Maya to pass an e-mail to him for her) to drop everything and help get her sister home. And, of course, you can't really fault her for this; it's what family does. But, nonetheless, the end result is that the Obama administration was put into a very difficult and awkward position because Laura Ling did something stupid.

So, then, how about this book? Well, as I said, it's a page turner (even though I knew how it was going to turn out from the beginning). It's always fascinating to hear they do things in North Korea. In this case, it was striking how much better Ling and Lee were treated than ordinary North Korean citizens would have been. Indeed, how much better off they were during their captivity than North Koreans who haven't been arrested for anything. Ling was beaten and suffered from a head injury while actually being arrested, but, after that, she is treated very well physically. She's mostly confined to a room (not a cell) with a private bath and two female guards, with whom she develops a tenuous friendship. She has regular meals, is eventually allowed letters and packages from home, and takes walks outside every day with her interrogator and translator. The interrogator asks her lots of questions, but seems to genuinely want to help her (i.e. to help her tell the North Koreans what they want to hear so she can go home). Though she deliberately withholds names of defectors that he asks for, claiming not to remember them, the "interrogation" never gets more intense than just hours of questioning. The worst thing that seems to happen is that sometimes the people she encounters give her mean looks. Of course, it's the uncertainty about when and if she'll get to go home that's the real hardship.

And the tone? I think Ling does as well as she can, given the basic situation. Particularly in the epilogue, she's careful to note the guilt she feels for her actions and their consequences; it's a tricky balancing act--acknowledging what's wrong about what she did without justifying North Korea, acknowledging the kindness she was shown by individual North Koreans while still criticizing, albeit fairly subtly, the government. And telling her own story without pushing to the background the ultimately much more difficult struggles of North Koreans themselves.

January 10-14: Week Twenty

In between all the snow-playing and Nook-reading and the having Dave at home-ing, we did a fairly regular week of school. Everything outside of the house was canceled, so that meant we could take it fairly easy every day but still wind up fitting in most everything. The run-down:

Ari: started working on Caesar's English Lesson 12, did a bunch of sentences in Practice Town, and finished lesson 9 in Paragraph Town. He did a few chapters in Life of Fred Pre-algebra, but with DH supervising, so I'm fuzzy on the details. He worked on Duke TIP's Growing Up Heroic. I fear it might be a little...touchy-feely for his tastes. One of his writing assignments this week was to write down one of our "family stories" and then think what makes it a good story and how it tells our family's story, etc. He wrote about getting Athena for Christmas, but insisted on writing it in verse. Umm. Yes, we'll see how it goes. He's still not quite finished with Lesson 1, so I think it also might take more time than I was hoping (there are 20 lessons total, and it's supposed to a be a semester-long course; I was hoping he could work on it for an hour and a half or two hours a week, but I don't think that's going to cut it if I want him to finish before the end of the year). He finished all his Spanish homework for the class that didn't happen, and worked a good bit on his Galore Park Spanish.

He finished reading The Giver, and we had a really good discussion about it. We talked about the anti-Giver arguments in Deconstructing Penguins and we read a positive review by Natalie Babbitt from the Washington Post. He had already brought up some of the suspension of disbelief issues that both reviews mention in different ways, so we talked about that. Babbitt compared the story to a beautiful soap bubble; if you poke and prod at it too much, it will break--but ultimately says it's a story that needs to be told and it's worth overlooking some gaps in the logic. I think Ari is conflicted. He doesn't like overlooking gaps in logic, but he really enjoyed the book.

Milo: more math! I broke up the Singapore with a couple of different games. I should probably keep doing that. This week's workbook stuff was pretty easy for him (it always is, as long as it's not adding or subtracting). He finished Matilda! And then read a book about Hercules (an Usborne early reader), so now he's going to finish Chamber of Secrets for school reading. At night he's reading The Penderwicks--at least until we get to the library to get the next Magic Tree House book (it's in our house somewhere, but we can't find it). He finished week 9 in WWE, did some ETC, and got 9 (out of 10) words right on his spelling test.

Gus: was sick for part of the week, so didn't do a whole lot. Today he did several pages of handwriting because I told him I'd get WWE 1 for him when he finishes it. He's been listening while I do it with Milo, and he likes to whisper the answers to the questions in my ear (so as not to interfere with Milo's answering).

History: the SOTW chapter this week was on the Greek Gods, so we skipped it since we're covering it in more detail with Jim Weiss CDs and the Du'laire's book. We did some reading, though.

Other stuff: Everyone worked on piano a good bit this week, since our piano teacher was home every day. Ari's working on a song from a book Dave used as a kid. We made more progress with Greek Code Cracker. We did the first lesson from PHP's new Bible curriculum, Telling God's Story and made some Roman coins for the activity. It's a 1st grade curriculum, so a bit simple for Ari, but I think it will work for now.

Book 6: Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry

whoo hoo! I'm on a roll! 4 days stuck in your house will do that for you. Reading kids' books is so nice: everything is so in your face. I learned from this book that we should be kind to each other and not ostracize people who are different, and that friendship is really important. Heh. No, really, another good read--I'll probably even let Ari use my Nook to read it if he wants to. Gathering Blue  is a sort of companion to The Giver, in that it's set in the same fictional future (or so I've read; I actually can't remember anything in the book that makes that necessarily true, but maybe Lowry herself has said so?) but it has completely different characters. Instead of a collectivist society where everyone's eerily nice to each other and everything's completely safe and sterile, Gathering Blue's society is brutal, filled with people so selfish they push their own hungry children away to keep food for themselves. I preferred reading about The Giver's world, I think--the creepy almost familiarity of its "community" was just kind of more fun.

Books 4 and 5

Book 4: The Giver by Lois Lowry : I've read The Giver before, but not since...sometime in college maybe? I can't remember. I read it again because Ari's reading it right now. Apparently, I've decided to count such books in the Lots Of Books project; I can't remember if I'd already decided that before. But it seems only fair, since I need to read the books anyway, and it takes time that I could be spending doing other reading. Also, it's not like there's a prize. Maybe I should give myself a prize if I hit, say, 50 books. Maybe a Nook color! Anyway. The Giver was a very quick, enjoyable read. Ari's liking it a lot so far, and I think it's a great introduction to Fahrenheit 451/1984-esque themes for the younger set. It was interesting reading it immediately after the North Korea book. While I was reading it, I was really looking forward to revisiting the chapter on it in Deconstructing Penguins. I remembered that DP pretty much trashed it, but I couldn't remember why (and when I was reading DP a couple of years ago, I couldn't remember The Giver well enough to tell whether I agreed with them or not). So I finished The Giver and immediately turned to DP....and had my opinion that the authors of DP are often full of crap reconfirmed. I won't get into it in much detail here, since it would take forever and be a spoiler-rama, but they basically argue that Lowry plays dirty pool--that her story lacks logical consistency and falls apart under scrutiny. But I think it's actually their critique that falls apart under scrutiny. One example that I don't think will give anything away: a very big part of their argument is that people don't lie unless they know they've done something wrong. And this simply isn't true. Again with the North Korea parallels....I could immediately call to mind several examples of people in a collectivist, totalitarian society lying because they firmly believe it's the right and necessary thing to do. I do think The Giver occasionally requires more suspension of disbelief than is easy to muster (at least for adult readers), but not to the fatal flaw levels the DP people claim.

Book 5: After This by Alice McDermott: I think the first Alice McDermott I read was Charming Billy, picked up at a thrift store somewhere. I was impressed, so I moved on to At Weddings and Wakes and liked it even better. I think all of McDermott's books are, to some degree or another, elegant meditations on the nature of mortality. The story follows the Keane family of Long Island from the late 40's when the parents marry through the 70's when the children are all more or less grown. It's more a series of vignettes than a continuous story--a child is born, there's a storm, a new church here, a wedding over here. The characters are relentlessly, aggressively ordinary--nothing remarkable, nothing to make you love them--and that's one of the things McDermott meditates on here: what is it that makes us reach out and forge connections? For the characters here at least, it is much more the need for connection itself than anything appealing or lovable about the person being reached out to. There's a lot more here--about the past and the future, about mothers and sons, about spirituality, about, as always, life and death. The prose is unfailingly lovely--this is one of the things I didn't like about listening to it as an audiobook--not being able to slow down and savor some of the sentences and passages.

Next up: I'm reading Gathering Blue, a not-quite a sequel, but a companion book, I guess, to The Giver. And I just put Ender's Game on my Nook. I'm going to read it and decide when and if to give it to Ari--probably not this year.

Fancy new ways to read books

I guess the fancy ways to read books that I'm going to talk about are actually not so very new, but they are new to me. And I haven't been able to leave my house for two days, so I have to blog about something.

I did not really mean to get a Nook. I was pretty sure I didn't want one up until a few weeks ago, in fact. I was kind of surprised that I didn't want one, because last year I wanted both a Flip and an iPhone so very much. An e-reader of some sort seemed like this year's equivalent. Then I got two new books for Christmas. Only two. And yet I realized, looking at my two new books, that I had nowhere to put them when I finished reading them. I could tell, because I have giant piles of books all over my house that have no permanent home. I actually have a bookshelf whose sole purpose is to hold books that I have not yet figured out where to put. I have 21 bookcases in my not super big house, so I'm not sure the answer can really, practically speaking, be to get more shelves. The answer might be getting rid of some books, but that's hard for me. I start thinking, "but what if some sort of catastrophic, apocalyptic, book-destroying event happens, and there are no more libraries or bookstores, but we still have this house and a ready enough supply of food that I'm not so concerned with basic survival that I don't worry about providing the kids with a good education and a solid foundation in great literature? I'll need my books then!"

Then I wanted some more books. I have a bunch on my Amazon wish list, and one night, the night after Christmas I believe it was, I started to load my cart up. I had about 3 books in my cart when it occurred to me that if I bought many more new, hardcover books, I could save money by buying an e-reader. Hmm. An financially justifiable answer to my book/space issues? Maybe I DID want an e-reader after all! And I had some Christmas money...why, yes, yes I did want an e-reader!

I probably should have spent hours and hours researching Kindle vs. Nook vs. Sony....instead, I found out that Overstock.com had refurbished Nooks on sale, and I was sold. One reason I was leaning toward the Nook anyway, though, before I found the refurbished ones, was that you can check out library books for Nook and not for Kindle. So while I was waiting for my Nook to arrive, I went to my library's website to see if they have e-books. They don't. But they DO have audiobooks that can be checked out online, which I'd never realized before.

It took me most of an evening to figure out the whole process of downloading audiobooks and loading them onto my computer, but I did it! My county's library has just under 400 online audiobooks available...so not a huge selection, but I found several that I'm interested in. Most of the books that sound at all appealing are already checked out (for both e-books and online audiobooks at libraries, it works just like a regular book: the library buys the license for one or more "copies" and then can only check them out to one person at a time), though most of them only have one or two people waiting for them. I pretty much never bother to check out new, popular real books at the library, because the waiting list is generally long and I know that the odds are not great that I would find time to make it to the library when my turn came up anyway. With the audiobooks, it's no big deal. You put a hold on it, they e-mail you when it's available, and you can check it out from the comfort of your crappy Ikea office chair. That I can handle.

I am not especially patient, though, so I was determined to find one book that was not on checked out and that I could have right away. I found After This by Alice McDermott. More on the content when I've actually finished it, but I'm nearly through with it now, so I can give a quick overview of my thoughts on the audiobook experience thus way. I think I had the option to choose how long to keep the book--1 week, 2 weeks, or 3 weeks--when I checked it out. There's no way to return it early (apparently it will just magically disappear when it's due), so the advantage of a shorter period is that it will be "returned" early, leaving more room on your account to check out books (you can only have 3 out at a time). I let it default to 2 weeks, which is going to turn out to be exactly perfect; it's due tomorrow, and I have maybe half an hour left to listen to. It's a relatively short book, though (about 280 pages, according to Amazon, which translates to just over 9 hours). My audiobook listening time is pretty much exclusively while I walk the dog and while I walk on my treadmill. I sometimes manage to put in an hour a day at these two activities, but it's never really going to go much higher than that. I am not the perfect audiobook listener. The perfect audiobook listener, I imagine, has a long, childless commute. I usually listen to podcasts when I walk, and I haven't done that at all since getting the book--partially because I've been enjoying the book, but also partially because of the time limit and the need to finish it up. Aside from the logistics, I had no idea whether I would enjoy the actual experience of listening to a book instead of reading it. We've listened to kid audiobooks on occasion in the past, but I've never listened to a grown-up one. Turns out I like it pretty well. It's a little tough sometimes to keep my mind from wandering--it's terribly inconvenient to have my mind wander, because then I have to try to go back and figure out what I missed--but I've managed okay. And there have been a few times when I've wished (particularly in light of the fact that I'm blogging about books right now) for a pen and paper so I could note  some particularly interesting passage. But other than that, it's been a good experience. I think I'll probably be ready to take a break for a few days when I finish this book and catch up on podcasts. And I think I'll try to relieve the pressure by extending the check-out period next time.

That wasn't actually brief at all. I used to be so good at brevity. Like in grad school; I was a master at using Bookman Old Style to make my papers look longer without resorting to the glaringly obvious Courier. Anyway. Onward.

My Nook finally arrived, and I was very excited...but I was also in the middle of Franklin and Eleanor so I had to wait a few days to start reading on it. I spent some time playing around, though, and downloaded Calibre because I'd read that would make getting stuff onto my Nook easier. And, umm, I guess it does? I've never tried doing it any other way, so I can't really be sure.

I loaded it up with a bunch of free books from Project Gutenberg, et. al. but the North Korea book was the first book I read on it. And....it was fine. Not really a substantially different experience from just...reading a book. Except for the part where I didn't need to find somewhere to put it at the end. I feel like I should have more to say about my reading experience, after my not-brief audiobook thing. But I don't. I actually read all of Persuasion on my iphone last year, so I guess if I could handle that, it's not surprising that Nook reading didn't bother me. Also, the possibility for immediate gratification in obtaining books is quite nice. I read The Giver (Ari's current book) the other day and then bought its sequel The Messenger that same night. Of course, when I say it's "quite nice" I really mean, "potentially financially ruinous."

Re: library books. My library, as noted, has no ebooks. I was thinking of getting a non-resident card, for $40, to the library system one county over. But then a friend mentioned the Free Library of Philadelphia to me. You can apply through the mail for a non-resident card there, it's only $15, and they have more than 4000 e-books. I sent a check off immediately and am waiting breathlessly for my card. To pass the time, I look through their catalog and make lists of books I want to read--I have 35 on my list already, and I'm only midway through the As in fiction and the Fs in non-fiction. Quite a few things from my Amazon wish list are available there. Of course, as with my library, there are holds already on most of the good stuff. But most of them, except for the very new and very popular titles, only have a couple of people waiting for them. They have a big selection of audiobooks, too, and also online videos (I haven't looked around much at that to see what there is, but it could be a great homeschooling resource, too). It makes me very, very glad that I went with the Nook over the Kindle.

And now I should probably stop talking about my Nook and go read something on it!

Snow!

 Having two full days to play in a significant amount of snow (with the promise of at least a third) is a very rare event here in exurban Atlanta. Rarer still is having 5 or 6 whole inches of snow to play in. It happened my senior year of high school, but that's the last time I was here for such a thing. In the interim, of course, I lived in northern Ohio and in Boston, so I have seen much more snow than this...but my kids haven't (well, Ari did when we lived in Boston, but he was one then, so I kind of doubt he remembers it). This (above) is the view firstish thing Monday morning from my front door.

Below is Gable the dog, with a snowy nose:

Snow Angel!

 Our house:

 Crazy boys:

 The biggest snowman on the block:

Book 3: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

North Korea fascinates me; it's like a real life dystopian novel. I might just spend the rest of the year reading books about North Korea, so fascinated am I by it. Not really. Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy is another NPR pick. Demick was the LA Times Seoul bureau chief for several years, and the stories in this book come from interviews she conducted with North Korean defectors living in South Korea. It doesn't read at all like a collection of interviews, though; Demick does a wonderful job turning the stories of the six people she focuses on into a cohesive narrative, even managing some dramatic suspense despite the fact that we know from the outset that all these people survive and make it to South Korea. And, of course, focusing on this group of survivors also gives a bit of light and hope to a pretty relentlessly dark subject.

Next up: I might finally finish listening to Alice McDermott's After This before the library makes it disappear from my iphone. And I'm either going to keep reading The Picture of Dorian Gray on my Nook (started it this morning) or I'm going to break down and buy Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Science fiction set in the Disney World of the future? Yes, please. Oscar Wilde vs. escapist fluff. Hmm....

January 3-7, 2011: Week 19

Even though it was the first week back after a long break, school was very pleasant this week, because we had a new kitten to keep us company:

 

The kids got her for Christmas and promptly named her Athena. I was pretty impressed that Greek mythology won out over both Harry Potter and Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Besides cuddling with a kitten, here are some things we did:

Ari: Ari picked back up with Singapore this week, working on lessons 5-8 in 5B. I'm a little annoyed with how they're teaching division with decimals and with the systematic vagueness of the textbook. He finished much of I, Robot, but he was getting a little tired of it, so we switched gears this week, and I gave him The Giver. The same day he started reading it, a thread appeared on the WTM boards, asking what age kids should be before reading The Giver. The consensus seemed to be not before 12 or 13. Oops. I hadn't read it in years, so maybe I blocked out some of the especially disturbing stuff. I think we'll just go with it at this point, though, as he's not an especially sensitive kid. Usually. 

He finished Lesson 10 in Paragraph Town, all except for the writing assignment, because I had him repeat the writing assignment from Lesson 9 with a new topic. He wrote a short biography of Isaac Asimov, with much hand holding. Weaning him off the hand holding will save me a great deal of time in the future. He also wrote a summary of the story of Athena's (the goddess, not the kitten) birth this week. He finished lesson something or other in Caesar's English (too lazy to get up and check; it's the one with "spec" in it), but we forgot to do the quiz this morning.

He started reading from History: The Definitive Visual Guide this week. He also started Duke TIP's Growing Up Heroic online course. There was much moaning and complaining about his first journal entry, which was "impossible." The impossible assignment? Make a list of stories you've enjoyed, then pick one of them and list three things that made it memorable. Yep. Impossible! 

He started Galore Park's "So You Really Want to Learn Spanish," and he's enjoying it so far. We're spending a lot of time on Spanish lately. He has his class at LEO for an hour once a week, and then he's spending 30 minutes, 3 times a week, on Galore Park and his homework from class. We also do a workbook page from Puertas Abiertas all together in the mornings, but that's just a 5-10 minute thing. I want to get a portable CD player so he can do Spanish a little more easily. A lot of the exercises require listening to the CD, so he has to haul everything into the office to use the CD Rom drive on the computer.

Ari spent much of the month before Christmas teaching himself to play "Deck the Halls" on the piano. He got quite good at it, but now he wants to continue playing "Deck the Halls," in various keys, and nothing else. We are all very tired of "Deck the Halls" so Dave is forcing him to switch to working out of a book he used when he was a kid. He just worked on it for 30 seconds and then switched back to Deck the Halls." Sigh.

His Spanish and biology classes started back up this week, as did basketball practice and math team.

Milo: is STILL reading Matilda. I seem to remember thinking he was going to be finished with that before Christmas break. Not sure what happened there. He finished the first Harry Potter over the break, and quickly abandoned Chamber of Secrets because it was "too creepy" to read at night. I told him he could read it for his school reading after he finishes Matilda. He's started in on Magic Tree House at bedtime right now, reading a book a night for the past two nights. I'm not sure why I could never interest him in these before now.

He started Singapore 2A this week, and it's...slow as usual. He keeps talking about he hates math, and I keep reminding him that he hated reading, too, until it got easier for him. Of course, he also might always hate math. He sat in on math club this week with Ari, and announced cheerfully afterward that math club was "impossible!" At least he's cheerful when he's declaring things to be impossible, unlike his big brother.

He did Week 8 in WWE2, finished a few pages in Explode the Code 5, started up book two of RFWP's Aesop books, and aced the Lesson 14 spelling test in Spelling Workout B. His (and Gus') Spanish class also started back this week, so he worked on Spanish homework a good bit as well.

Gus: is now reading Magic Tree House books with virtually no help, but often with great reluctance. Probably mostly just to drive me crazy. Anyway, he's ever so slowly making his way through "The Night at Dawn," reading, after much cajoling, 2 or 3 pages at a time to me. He also did a few pages of ETC 1 and worked on Us, Vs, and Ws in Handwriting Without Tears. He's working on Singapore 1A, but I'm trying to mix it up with lots of other addition practice so he doesn't hit a wall with it. Dave is reading Little House on the Prairie to him at bedtime, and they're both very into that (Dave had never read it before!)

Everyone: We read about Athenians and Spartans in SOTW and did the mapwork. Gus and Milo did narrations while Ari worked on his Athena summary. We read "You Wouldn't Want to Be a Greek Athlete," and continued reading D'aulaire's Greek Myths. I started Mary Pope Osborne's adaptation of The Odyssey with Milo and Gus while Ari worked on Growing Up Heroic (he'll read a translation of the Odyssey on his own as part of that).

For science this week we spent an afternoon working on experiments from the various science kits the kids got for Christmas (Wizard Science for Milo and Gus; EcoToys for Ari--he made a hovercraft. sort of) and then played the "Totally Gross" board game Ari got from one of Dave's aunts. And Ari spent forever on his biology homework.

Overall, it was a very productive first week back, I think, and everyone seemed pretty fine with being back to work (though Milo was "tired" a lot when he had to do math, of course).

Book 2: Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage

I read through NPR's book page every couple of weeks, scanning for things that sound interesting (I rarely get to actually listen to NPR these days, other than podcasts while I'm walking the dog), and I found Hazel Rowley's Franklin and Eleanor there awhile back and put it on my Amazon wishlist. The kids, with Dave's help, bought it for me for Christmas. I enjoyed reading the book, and I learned a lot I hadn't known before...but this was true in spite of my not finding Rowley's thesis especially compelling. Rowley argues that the Roosevelt's marriage was, essentially, an open one, with more than one outside romance on both sides, and that this was a mutually agreed upon and beneficial arrangement. It's not so much that I doubt this is true as that I'm not sure how extraordinary I find it. I wouldn't be surprised if such arrangements were actually relatively common in wealthy families at the time, when divorce was not a socially acceptable option. I guess there's really no doubt about and nothing new in saying that both FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt had romantic relationships outside of their marriage, though...I take it the innovative part of Rowley's argument is that she claims this was, or at least became, a satisfactory arrangement for both of them, that they both loved and respected each other even as they looked outside of the marriage for romance. The open relationship wasn't just a way to preserve a loveless marriage and save face; it was the result of an enlightened, progressive view of gender relations and marriage. This is a harder case to make, and I'm not sure if Rowley succeeds or not. I think it's certainly possible, perhaps even likely, but so much speculation is necessary to try to ascertain FDR and Eleanor's true feelings about each other and their various companions through the years, that it's hard to come to any firm conclusions, and Rowley is careful not to push her assertions farther than the evidence will bear (sadly for the reader, most of the letters that might have revealed the really fun details were destroyed long ago by the parties involved).

The most interesting parts of the book for me, someone relatively unschooled in Roosevelt history, tended to be only tangentially related to the Eleanor/Franklin relationship. I'm always fascinated to hear how different American politics was in the past. I had, of course, read before that FDR was careful to avoid having his picture taken in a wheelchair, and that the press was complicit in this sort of cover-up be omission, but it was really interesting to hear details about just it was orchestrated and how far it went. I'd never heard before about FDR's attempts to get a constitutional amendment allowing him to appoint extra Supreme Court justices (and it's difficult to imagine any president today being bold enough to suggest such a thing, much less being surprised and angered by resistance to the idea). One review I read said that FDR comes off looking like a narcissist in the book, while the reader's sympathies lie with Eleanor, but I didn't find this to be true at all. I was at least little annoyed with both of them in places. Ultimately, Franklin and Eleanor drew me in enough that I'd like to read more (and different) takes on the Roosevelts, and I guess that's a pretty good sign of success for a book about history.

First day back.

I spent most of Christmas break dreading the end of it. This is largely because Dave is home for all of it; had he needed to go back to work between Christmas and New Year's, I'm not sure I would have been able to handle the little monsters without imposing some kind of routine on them. But by a couple of days ago, Dave and I were both starting to grudgingly admit that getting back onto a schedule might do us all good. Still, I wasn't looking forward to this morning.

I spent some time yesterday drawing up a new (loose) schedule, since we're adding in a few things (Greek Code Cracker, Ari's Galore Park Spanish, and, as soon as it's available, Peace Hill Press' new Bible curriculum). I had us starting at 8:30 on the schedule. Dave left at 7:45 this morning, and I told him to wake me up as he was leaving. But then the kids were still sleeping, so I wound up staying in bed until 8:30 instead. Oops. We wound up getting started at 9:15, and we just finished up at 3:30 (with an hour and a half break for lunch/playing). I feel like we were relatively efficient, so I think it just sort of...takes that long to get everything done. So I don't know what we're going to do when soccer starts up again. I mean, we did start later than I planned, but we also aren't doing the Bible stuff yet. Of course, we don't do much except outside classes on Wednesdays, and we finish early on Fridays so we can go to the park, so that's a lot of it. Bleh. I don't know.

We didn't do much of Greek Code Cracker yet, but everyone seemed to enjoy it. And I guess I shouldn't even say anything about Galore Park yet, but I do like the look of it. Oh--and we didn't even do nearly as much history as I was planning because I have a lingering cold, and I can't read out loud for very long before I start hacking uncontrollably, even with the help of an endless string of cough drops. But Ari started reading his Definitive Visual Guide today, and he'll start Growing Up Heroic tomorrow or Wednesday. I'm not sure how to schedule it yet...I want him to work on it Wednesdays while his brothers are in Spanish, but it will probably require more time than that. And we don't have any time!

So there it is--first day! The kids play outside much more willingly when they're doing school, for some reason...all the sitting around, I guess. They just came inside, and now they're playing Epic Mickey on the Wii. Dave will be home soon, and I told them we can go to Chick-fil-A for a first day back celebration dinner later.