|
|  |
|
This post is from from my other blog here  The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope.
Is there anything more promising than a novel that opens with a young person traveling to a mysterious ancestral home for the first time? The Secret Garden, The Children of Green Knowe, The Little White Horse; even, if you stretch it a little, Emily of New Moon. Delicious books with perfectly delicious beginnings.
The Sherwood Ring is a book of this sort, and it’s one of the deliciousest. The very moment Jane finished reading it, she was imploring me to begin, and I’m glad I heeded her plea. What a fabulous book: mystery, romance, humor, ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here  The answer to another of our bookquotes: Daisy Thinks She’s a Baby by Lisa Kopper.
Is this book still in print? Shoot, I just looked it up and it isn’t. Gahhh! This always happens. We love this book to pieces—almost literally; after thirteen years of heavy use by five children (so far—Huck isn’t quite there yet), our copy of this absolute peach of a book is looking a bit loveworn—and I go to rave about it on the blog and then I find out it isn’t in print anymore and used copies are selling for almost thirty bucks on Amazon.
Sigh.
Okay, libraries ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Most of our book quotes were identified by readers in the comments. Only three stumped everyone, I think! I’ll save those for last.
“Reshpeckabiggle!”
Beth correctly recognized that as one of good old Puddleglum’s besotted mutterings during his brief unfortunate lapse in The Silver Chair. Scott does the best Puddleglum voice: sounds a bit like the narrator from Our Town. Ayup. Puddleglum is trying to defend his honor as a respectable marshwiggle. Nothing is ever “respectable” around here: it’s always reshpeckabiggle. (I’ve often thought it would make a perfect blog name.)
“George Washington’s hogs, on the other hand, were a genteel and amiable ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Some of the books I saw kids reading this week:
Doom Patrol (Showcase Presents comics collection)
By the Shores of Silver Lake
Little Town on the Prairie
Fairest by Gail Carson Levine
Dear Mr. Blueberry
Happy Little Family by Rebecca Caudill
Ramona’s World
Dr. Jenner and the Speckled Monster
Betsy and the Emperor
The Arrow Over the Door
Karen by Marie Killilea
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Jane asks eagerly how far I am in The Sherwood Ring.
“At the part where Barbara __________” (What, you think I’d give it away? Fie upon spoilers!)
I groan to indicate my state of suspense. This is a really gripping part of the book. All parts of this book have been gripping, but this is the grippingest so far.
“Oh, Mom!” cries Jane in sympathy.
And offers to babysit the little ones this morning so I can finish the book.
That’s my girl.
Answers to yesterday’s book quotes coming later. A lot of them have been guessed correctly already. And check out the comments for a ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here “I have no more run in me.” —That’s Good, That’s Bad by Joan M. Lexau, illustrated by Aliki
“Koala Lou, I DO love you!”—Koala Lou by Mem Fox
“Bub.”—from the book of the same title by Natalie Babbit
“Never tease a weasel, not even once or twice…”
“Pish, posh, said Heironymus Bosch.”—quote and title by Nancy Willard. Also:
“‘Forever and ever, my nibble, my nosh,
Till death do us part,’ said Heironymus Bosch.”
—and readers of Scott’s blog will recognize his sometimes-tagline taken from the same much-loved book:
“Let the crickets rejoice and the mantises pray.”
Here’s some for you to guess:
“Reshpeckabiggle!”
“Though she be but little, she is fierce.” ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here 
Grape soda lupines (lupinus excubitus). These grow wild on the roadsides here, intermingled with the wild mustard (Father Serra was also here). Just gorgeous. They’re supposed to smell like their name, but we couldn’t catch the faintest whiff of grape.
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Sorry about that rogue Twitterlog that cluttered up your Reader this afternoon. The auto-post went AWOL for two weeks, so I did it manually yesterday. And then today it shows up out of the blue. All righty, then.
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here 
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here  So, so, so excited am I. So will you be, too, when you hear the news. Gregory K. Pincus, the inventor of the Fib, has put together a wonderful bloggity adventure for National Poetry Month: he’ll be posting a previously unpublished poem by a well known writer every day in April. The poets include: Arnold Adoff, Jon Sciezka, Jane Yolen, Jack Prelutzsky, April Halprin Wayland, and so many more. 26 more, to be precise. Hop over to Greg’s blog and find out all about it.
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here  3/9
• Beanie and Rilla march into the room hand in hand. “We’re going on a long and perilous journey to seek a nice monster who’ll growl at us.”
3/10
• Today’s readaloud interrupted by 1 leaky diaper, 2 bouts of spit-up, 2 toddler squabbles, 1 desperate need for snack, 1 agonizing tiny bruise.
• Beanie: “Mom, when you read to us while we’re eating, it makes this cheese taste better.”
• Wow is my house looking lived in today.
• My preschoolers are fighting over which one of them owns the living-room rug.
• When I was cleaning up the other day, it was a really ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here In Virginia, we always used to plant our peas around St. Patrick’s Day. Here in San Diego, we’re harvesting them. My mother helped the girls put in a small vegetable garden during her visit in January: lettuce, tomatoes, basil, beans, peas, cucumbers, carrots. Which, now that I see the list written out, doesn’t sound small at all.
The peas—they planted just a few starts—are ready now, affording the children the singular delight of picking and eating them warm in the sun, impossibly sweet, crisp, perfect. Or so I’m told. I wouldn’t have dreamed of depriving Rilla of one single magical pea; ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Beanie:
Legion of Super Heroes (Showcase Presents)
Your Big Backyard (magazine)
Rowan and Ice Creepers
Rowan and the Travelers
Rowan and the Zeebak
Rowan and the Keeper of the Crystal (Emily Rodda’s Rowan books are perpetual favorites around here)
Only Opal
The House in the Night
Rose: (she’s been on a picture book kick)
The Day Leo Said I Hate You
Cookies
Chrysanthemum
Tales of Trotter Street
So You Want to Be an Inventor
Miss Suzy
Marshmallow
So You Want to Be President
The Plain Princess
The House in the Night
Jane:
Harry Potter (rereading the whole series yet again)
The Sherwood Ring (“You’ve GOT to read this, Mom!”)
Muse magazine
Interweave Crochet magazine
Sense & Sensibility (in progress)
The Broken Blade
The Kidnapped ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here My current TBR stack. Stacks, rather, collected from around the house for one brief precarious moment.
A mix of review copies, library books, kid requests (“You’ve GOT to read this, Mom!”), and titles gleaned from favorite bookish blogs like Semicolon and Mental Multivitamin.
Doesn’t it make your heart go pitty-pat? Such a comfy feeling, knowing there’s plenty to choose from the next time I sit down to nurse the baby…
(And how about my super-classy bedside table? Yes, that’s the top of a bar stool you’re seeing. This is what happens when you spend your money on books instead of furniture.)
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Thursday 3/12
—Not much reading time today. Shakespeare Club in the afternoon and somehow the morning just went to different activities. Did squeeze in time for about half a chapter of Lucky Girl. Love how she’s retelling the history of her birth parents, her adoptive parents, even the nun who facilitated the adoption.
—Beanie was glued to Usborne’s Living Long Ago all morning long. Wants to make fish pasties (the name made me LOL) and meat pie. Explained to me how to make a fake beauty mark. Showed me pictures of hoopskirts and farthingales, right before the Shakespeare kids arrived & “farthingale” ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here I’m in a little online quilting bee, and this month’s designer sent us a gorgeous batik vine print and the suggestion that our blocks should fit a nature study theme: things you might see on a nature hike. Too fun!
I saw this freezer-paper foundation piecing tutorial at Twiddletails and knew I had to give it a try. The tree shapes in the tutorial are perfect for Theresa’s theme. I am a total novice at this, but I gave it a try yesterday and I was tickled by the results, imperfect though they be. (I recklessly made alterations in the tutorial’s ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here I had just read these lines at Toddled Dredge, where Veronica so often makes me grin:
During my hiatus, I read Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. Apparently it is a requirement of being a thirty-something housewife (it’s on the list right between “make ironic references to eighties pop” and “own yoga pants”).
And I thought:
Hey, that’s three strikes for me—I haven’t read Twilight, I don’t own yoga pants, and when I make references to eighties pop I am nearly always completely sincere. (Oh Adam Ant, how I miss you.) (Sincerely.) Huh, guess I’m not a typical thirty-something housewife. OH WAIT I’M NOT A THIRTY-SOMETHING ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Sometimes I tell Alice—jokingly, or wistfully, depending on what the day’s been like—that I really miss Jane’s mother.
You know, Jane’s mother: that endlessly patient young woman, so full of energy and high ideals, the woman who would willingly spend hours playing farm animals on the living-room carpet, or who would wait calmly in a hot parking lot while little Jane climbed all over the car, fiddling with knobs and buttons, because she wasn’t ready to get into her carseat yet.
Jane’s mother always let Jane help make dinner, tiny hands shredding lettuce leaves or helping stir the big pot, even though ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Trying something new here…instead of straight-up book reviewing, I’m going to blog my reading notes once or twice a week. I’ve always been an unfaithful journaler of my reading because one-way dialogue (monologue I guess) isn’t terribly appealing to me. And yet, as I’m reading, there’s always so much I want to make note of, remark upon, explore, remember, question, hash out with someone else. I’m thinking the blog may lend itself nicely to that purpose. So please feel free to jump in.
Monday 3/9
—Am finding I really miss having Little Brother to turn to on the iPod. Despite its bumps ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here  I have a lot of cooked chicken left over from last night. Ordinarily we’d have fajitas tonight with the leftovers, but the baby gets a diaper rash every time I eat anything acidic, including (sob) salsa. So what are your favorite ways to use cooked chicken?
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Originally posted in June, 2006
 Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl , adapted by Jane Boulton, illustrated by Barbara Cooney.
I put this book on hold at the library after reading a review of it—somewhere. I couldn’t remember where. After I read it to my girls, I had to Google it because I needed to know a) whom to thank for steering me toward it and b) if other mothers were writing about the thing that pierced my heart about this book.
When the blogsearch landed on Karen Edmisten I thought: Well, of COURSE.
This heartbreakingly ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Beanie: “Mom, apart from the fact that she likes coffee and you don’t, I think there’s really no difference between you and Suzanne Vega.”
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here I added another thought to the end of my post about Stolen—I said, “I think Jane will enjoy this one, and maybe Rose, though there’s a plot point I anticipate will trouble her somewhat and will generate a big discussion. I can’t say more without giving away the book’s secrets, but maybe later I can do another post with big spoiler alerts plastered all over it.”
This is where I always run into trouble when I write about books. There’s no way to discuss a book in the depth I’d like to without giving away its secrets. Even with a spoiler ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here  Last fall a publisher sent me a review copy of Stolen, a middle-grade novel by Vivian Vande Velde. I would probably have picked up the book sooner but for the cover: the spooky-scary black-and-white image of wickedly clawed witch’s hands looked like something out of The Blair Witch Project and gave me the impression this was a creepy horror novel. It isn’t. It’s actually a kind of cross between fairy tale and mystery, and I enjoyed it a great deal once I finally stopped judging it by its cover.
The novel opens with a bang: a group of villagers are burning ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Author Kelly Fineman has a fun post up this morning featuring quotes by writers on writing. I particularly enjoyed this passage from an essay by Marie Phillips, author of Gods Behaving Badly, about how important thinking time is to her writing process.
I’m not a comfortable thinker, however. What am I supposed to look at while I’m thinking? What should I do with my hands? Research is my favorite way to think, as it gives me something tangible to do. I like spending the entire day reading, and then sounding like a harassed intellectual to friends in the pub (”God, I’ve ...
Click here to read the entire blog post
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Favorite twittered moment this week: “I have just been informed that Rilla is ‘Daddy’s dust mote and Beanie’s polka dot.’ “
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here I enjoyed this post (three years old now) by Andrew Wheeler of the Hornswaggler blog: How to Read a Book a Day. I don’t read anywhere near as many books as Andrew does—but then again I don’t have a subway ride to and from work. I consider it a major accomplishment if I manage to read a book a week. (Not counting picture books and read-alouds.) Sure, I’ve been on a bit of a reading jag lately, but I’ve had dry spells in the past few years during which it seemed like I could barely get through a book a ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here You know who you are. 
I misplaced your new-address card and your old email is bouncing, so that’s why you haven’t heard from me since you moved! The baby clothes were absolutely swoony. Thank you so much. I’m dying to hear all about the new digs. How are the boys liking Ohio? I miss knowing you’re right up the road in the O.C. even if I never actually managed to make it up there.
:::mwah::::
(We now return this blog to its regularly scheduled blathering.)
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here The signs are subtler here than on the East Coast; we’re still, after two and a half years here, learning to see. I never loved the snow except as a pretty picture outside my window, and the slush and bone-chill of a long Virginia February used to make me crazy. But oh how I loved that first glimpse of spring: the soft tips of crocuses pushing through soggy mulch, the yellow haze over a bare forsythia bush the day before it bursts into golden bloom. The return of robins. A feeling in the air, it was, that always quickened my ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Like many people, I’m still reeling from the bizarre, ill-considered piece of legislation that recently went into effect which (among other things) makes it illegal for Americans to buy, sell, or barter children’s books published before 1985.
I graduated from high school in 1986. That means all the books I read growing up, all the precious copies my sisters and I absconded with when we left home and all the ones waiting for our kids in our old bedroom closets, could now be considered, according to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), a form of hazardous waste. It is against ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here 
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Washington Square by Henry James. Library book. Another read prompted by Reading Lolita in Tehran (blogged about last month). This was my first time for Washington Square and I loved it. Loved Catherine, the unconventionally plain and stubborn heroine.
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The short story that inspired the movie, though I hear the movie diverges from the book quite a lot. I was poking around at DailyLit and saw this talked up as their Big Read selection, and I read the first excerpt and then wound up sitting there clicking “send next installment now” ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Washington Square by Henry James. Library book. Another read prompted by Reading Lolita in Tehran (blogged about last month). This was my first time for Washington Square and I loved it. Loved Catherine, the unconventionally plain and stubborn heroine.
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The short story that inspired the movie, though I hear the movie diverges from the book quite a lot. I was poking around at DailyLit and saw this talked up as their Big Read selection, and I read the first excerpt and then wound up sitting there clicking “send next installment now” ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here I was updating my contact page just now and found myself writing “for the fastest response, try Twitter.” I wondered why that would be the case—why am I more likely to reply immediately to a tweet or DM, but it can take me weeks, months even, to respond to my email?
(I know: weeks, months, that’s ridiculous. But if you’ve written me, you know it’s true. Oftentimes, the more important the email—the more attention I’d like to give to the reply—the longer the delay.)
Then I realized: it’s Twitter’s 140-character limit that spurs me to the immediate response. It’s short and sweet, ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here I was updating my contact page just now and found myself writing “for the fastest response, try Twitter.” I wondered why that would be the case—why am I more likely to reply immediately to a tweet or DM, but it can take me weeks, months even, to respond to my email?
(I know: weeks, months, that’s ridiculous. But if you’ve written me, you know it’s true. Oftentimes, the more important the email—the more attention I’d like to give to the reply—the longer the delay.)
Then I realized: it’s Twitter’s 140-character limit that spurs me to the immediate response. It’s short and sweet, ...
Click here to read the entire blog post |
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Too funny—after this tweet log posted, I thought, Yikes, I need to change the setting so it doesn’t post the @replies. But so far all the comments on this post have been about @reply tweets!
The log is too long, though. Since my primary aim in autoposting these is to preserve tweets for my own records, I’m going to publish the posts with a “more” link. Twitterlog is after the jump.
|
| |
|
This post is from from my other blog here Too funny—after this tweet log posted, I thought, Yikes, I need to change the setting so it doesn’t post the @replies. But so far all the comments on this post have been about @reply tweets!
The log is too long, though. Since my primary aim in autoposting these is to preserve tweets for my own records, I’m going to publish the posts with a “more” link. Twitterlog is after the jump.
|
Archives
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
|
Member » 
11:22
0 Visits
and 
by Stephanie Spinner.
by David Gilmour.
by Vivian Vande Velde. 
by Mike Costa and Fiona Staples.
by Neil Gaiman. 
by Cynthia Lord. 
by Phyllis McGinley.
by Nick Hornby.
Hmm, almost all fiction this month, except for Film Club and the Hornby book. I knew it ...
