More books: quick takes

I feel like I haven't been reading much the past few weeks, but I guess I have managed to finish these three; all somehow associated with the kids and their reading, though one of them is not an actual kid book.

Book 21: The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg: the story of 4 kids, their teacher, and their academic quiz bowl experience. As I think I mentioned earlier, the first few chapters were startling reminiscent of the plot of Slumdog Millionaire (or the other way around, I guess, since this book came first). The chapter intros describe part of the quiz bowl, ending with a particular question; then the rest of the chapter is a flashback, detailing some experience one of the four main characters had that explains why they know about the subject of the question. I found these first few chapters interesting and engaging--lots of neat little connections between the characters--but things got kind of...tedious as the book went on. So...it was enjoyable enough, I guess, overall, but it's no Basil E. Frankweiler. Oh, also: a major plot point involves one of kids saying that "posh" and "tip" entered the language as acronyms and then pushing the point until he's awarded credit after the judges initially tell him he's wrong. The problem is that posh and tip weren't ever acronyms; apocryphal stories, both (well, definitely posh; most likely tip). I remembered this vaguely when I read it, and looked it up to verify. This bothered me.

Book 22: The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien. We all know this one, right? A read aloud, with Ari and Milo. They LOVED it; I thought, "wow, this book seemed better when I was in high school!"

Book 23: No Passengers Beyond this Point by Gennifer Choldenko: I bought this for Ari for Easter, and I was so intrigued by the premise that I had to read it myself. A fun and thought-provoking little dystopian fantasy. India, Finn, and Mouse are siblings being sent off to live with their uncle after their house is foreclosed on, despite their widowed mother's best attempts to save it. She's a teacher and has to finish out the school year, so she can't join them until later (the youngest kid is six, and they barely know the uncle, so the premise requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, but you have to get the adults out of the picture somehow in this kind of book). When their plane lands, however, they're picked up by a driver with a feather covered taxi, and things get progressively odder from there. I can't say much more without giving away too much...it's a really interesting book, with a lot to recommend it, although the plot doesn't wrap up quite as tidily as one might like. The twist ending went over Ari's head a bit, leading to a big, "OH!" when I talked to him about it, but he liked it and tore through it really quickly.

Update-ish: the great writing experiment, et. al.

It's really starting to feel like the year is winding down, and this is making me happy.

Ari is doing an end of the year writing push, which was not his idea. We've had a lot of the "I'm a terrible writer!" "I hate writing!" "I CAN'T do it!" stuff going on again. Meanwhile the book he's writing on his own has just passed 60 pages (and he writes small). The writing he does do for me is adequate, but very cautious; he doesn't like to experiment with sentence structure or vocabulary or, you know, original thought when it comes to school assignments. If there is not a single right answer (that's he's at least 99.9% certain he knows), Ari would really rather throw himself on the floor and sob than give it a try. So. I've always pretty much thought the endless "journaling" that's popular in schools right now is fairly useless. My high minded ideal was all about quality over quantity. And it still is, generally speaking. But it finally occurred to me that some endless journaling might be exactly what we needed around here to get Ari past his perfectionism-induced writing block. So this past week I added in two half page journal entries on top of his usual SOTW summary and MCT assignment.

The first assignment (I just pulled up some prompts online with a quick google search) was to write about what his family does on the Fourth of July. Sounds like a pretty easy assignment for a kid who's writing a 60 page (and counting) novel in his spare time, right? That's not how he saw it. "I can't remember the Fourth of July!" he complained. "WHY do you want to me to do a whole bunch of terrible writing?!" he wailed. I was a wall; I did not waver in my cruelty. Finally, after a good 5 minutes of complaining followed by another 10 or 15 minutes of staring at a blank page, he wrote a perfectly lovely description of year before last's Fourth of July. He set it down in front of me with his usual disclaimer: "it's not any good." The next day the prompt was "I find a secret room in my house." Fun! He complained again and stared at the page again, then wrote a really cool story that was even longer than it was supposed to be! I asked, and he doesn't want me to put it here, so I won't. It involved a secret passageway under his bed that led to a room with a long-forgotten book of stories.

Ari's 4th of July assignment inspired Gus to write a poem about fireworks (specifically about watching the fireworks on Cape Cod, which we did last summer):

Fireworks high in the sky
Decorations
The fireworks are above the beach.
You can see the boats.

Math news:
Art of Problem Solving has a pre-algebra text coming out this summer! I'm thrilled about this, as it might just solve my "what are we going to do next for math!?" woes. Ari is already around a third of the way through Singapore 6A. He's loving it and not having any trouble. He is now officially better at the bar graph problems than I am (not that that's saying too much). AOPS describes the pre-algebra as being for students who enjoy math and have completed a math program through 5th grade. So he'll have finished through 6th grade, but I think that will actually be good, as I want him to be pretty confident going into it (see above for consequences of Ari lacking confidence).

Milo keeps surprising me with math lately. I will not say too much yet, but I'm hoping we're about to get a big leap in math ability like we did last year around this time with reading ability. Especially because he's starting to notice (with Ari's help. sigh) what level he's working at. He's still in 2A, and he told me the other day that he needed to finish all of 2 before he turned 8 (next month). I explained that he'd done two different 1st grade programs (owing to our Right Start diversion) and that the great thing about homeschooling is that we don't have to worry about grade levels; he can work "ahead" in stuff like reading and science, and he can spend more time on math if he needs to. He seemed satisfied with this for now, but I do worry that it might become more of an issue as he gets older if his relative (to his brothers) difficulty with math continues.

Hmm...my post turned out to be kind of filled with tales of my kids' emotional fragility. Despite the lack of anecdotes, Gus is plenty fragile, too. More on that another time, I'm sure!

Book 20: The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

The premise of The Illumination is intriguing and full of possibility: one night, for no reason that anyone can ever figure out, everyone on earth's pain suddenly becomes visible; they glow from the site of the sickness or injury. As if this weren't enough clever plot device for one novel, we also have a journal of love notes that becomes the common thread tying our characters together. Jason left a note on the refrigerator every morning for his wife, telling her something new that he loved about her. His wife, in turn, faithfully transcribes each note into a journal. But when his wife is killed the night the Illumination begins, the journal starts making the rounds of a series of sad, lonely, desperate characters. The writing is lovely and skillful here, and the central idea--of suffering as light, of pain as beauty--is tantalizing. I wanted to love it, but....I just couldn't. I couldn't quite connect with the beautiful suffering, and I couldn't connect with any of the characters, either. Which is a bit ironic, since the characters are crying out for connection and constantly, painfully, failing to find it. I was kind of waiting for it like the characters were; I kept thinking it would circle back around and the discrete plots would finally come together in some meaningful way...but it never happened. I guess that's the point--how fleeting and tenuous our connections to each other are, even as they're the most important things in life--but it just wasn't satisfying to me here. I can't put my finger on it, and I still wonder if I'll change my mind after I sit on it for awhile, but that's where I am right now. I was anxious for it be over as I was reading it. The love notes, which at first were endearing, started to seem tiresome and a bit gimmicky.

Homeschooling? Why yes, we're still doing that.

I know it's been pretty much all book reviews all the time around here lately. I haven't been able to work up the motivation to do a weekly report in awhile...I kind of feel like we're in that homestretchy, more of the same, trying to finish stuff up part of the year. We're actually not doing school this week, as it's Dave's spring break and so ours too. But I will say a few things about schoolish stuff:

*I have a big poetry post planned in honor of National Poetry Month. Unfortunately, it requires taking pictures, which means it's taking me awhile to sit down and do it. It might involve an adorable video of Gus reciting The Jabberwocky, though, so it's worth waiting for

*All three kids are reading different Narnia books right now (or being read to, in Gus' case).

*Ari and I are both reading The View from Saturday, and I was surprised to find that the plot somewhat resembles that of Slumdog Millionaire

*Ari is finished with Singapore 5, as of a couple of days ago. I was trying to come up with a rest of the year plan and entertaining all sorts of possibilities, when Ari said, "why don't I just start the next one?" Ahh, yes. That could work. So that's what he's going to do.

Now I have to go check on dinner.

Book 19: Endgame by Frank Brady

I'm not sure any biographer has ever had a less sympathetic subject than Frank Brady has in Bobby Fischer. And I'm including Hitler, because at least one can feel bad about his crappy childhood. It seems that Bobby Fischer was born an insufferable brat and only got worse from there. He spends the first half of the book crying when he loses chess games, and the second half engaged in bizarre, self-destructive behavior with frequent anti-Semitic rants. Then he moves to Iceland and dies. I think I have a particular impatience with men of Fischer's type--men who need to be saved, I call them. They always seem to be geniuses and Pisces. Like Townes Van Zandt and Kurt Cobain (okay, Kurt Cobain's on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, but the self-destructive streak is totally a Pisces thing). Perhaps I should avoid astrology in my book reviews, lest I seem stupid. But Brady mentions it himself: Bobby Fischer liked to swim, he tells us, like a true Pisces. But what Townes Van Zandt and Kurt Cobain had going for them is that they weren't assholes. Or if they were, they mostly kept it to themselves and didn't make frequent radio broadcasts advertising it. Also, Townes Van Zandt had a dog named Geraldine.

To keep up my "all Pisces men are just alike" theme: I remember watching a documentary about Townes Van Zandt and thinking, "how the hell can all these women stand him?" Even after they leave him, all the ex-wives speak fondly of him. Because apparently there is some sort of appeal that I cannot see in men who need to be saved. I kept wondering the same thing as I read Endgame: why do people put up with him? Why do they keep trying to get him to play chess for them? Brady recounts one experience, sitting in a restaurant with Fischer, listening to him talk about chess, and weeping because he realized he was in the presence of genius. There's a lot of talk like that; Brady is constantly comparing chess to music or to literature, and his intentions in doing so are clear: he wants the reader to think of chess as art and to think of Fischer as a Leni Riefenstahl or Ezra Pound. Personally, I found both Triumph of the Will and this book more tedious than anything else, though. I don't blame Brady; he did what he could to make the reader appreciate Fischer's genius without forgiving his actions...I just didn't find it particularly compelling.