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Nm

Well, no. I don't enjoy bad writing. It bores and annoys me. [edited]

We take scheduled breaks from Thanksgiving to New Year, and June to mid-July. It fits dh's work schedule, gives me time for planning, and keeps the stress levels down.

But this encapsulates my concerns. I don't think there's a tension between "good literature" and "fun books." I do think the broad mass of published works for children are written poorly, and I believe that a child accustomed to prose that ranges from the competent to the extraordinary will find more enjoyment and satisfaction in a well-written book. I suppose the deeper question here is, what do we mean by "good literature"? If we mean "good" like eating our vegetables, we'll be smuggling in the connotations of "not fun, difficult, necessary but not what I really enjoy." To the contrary, I want poorly and quickly written, churned-out mass-market books to be something my children aren't accustomed to and eventually find not fun but boring and distasteful.

I know, right? Usually queasiness makes it impossible. And since we're between semesters, dh and Great Girl are free and taking care of all the household and Christmas stuff and bringing me hot tea. I think I might malinger.

A certain kind of Texan is permitted - possibly required - to have children named Junior, Sissy, and Bubba. None of them live in this county, though.

Sick today with the Perfect Flu: genuinely too sick to get out of bed, and yet able to read between naps. So I'm finishing off some books I'd started. Just finished St. Cyprian, The Lapsed/ The Unity of the Catholic Church, with lots of helpful annotations to get one through the occasional thicket of third-century thinking. http://www.amazon.com/Lapsed-Catholic-Ancient-Christian-Writers/dp/0809102609 The first section, De Lapsis, is especially interesting. What do you say as bishop of a diocese that's just gotten out from under a persecution, and you've got people who rushed right away to apostatize, people who apostatized after varying degrees of torture or threat thereof, people who didn't apostatize but got forged certificates saying they did, and people who held firm? Everyone wants to come back to the church, and everyone has different views on what should be done, ranging from They Can Never Come Back, to All Is Pardoned. The kind of book that reminds you that ancient history involved real people.

44. Leonardo Sciascia, The Wine-Dark Sea 45. André Gide, The Immoralist ------------------------ Every day we went for a drive, first in a carriage, and later on, when the snow had fallen, in a sledge, wrapped up to our eyes in fur. I came in with glowing cheeks, hungry and then sleepy. I had not, however, given up all idea of work, and every day I found an hour or so in which to meditate on the things I thought it my duty to say. There was no question of history now; I had long since ceased to take any interest in historical studies except as a means of psychological investigation. I have told you how I had been attracted afresh to the past when I thought I could see in it a disquieting resemblance to the present; I had actually dared to think that by questioning the dead I should be able to extort from them some secret information about life ... But now if the youthful Athalaric himslef had risen from the grave to speak to me, I should not have listened to him. How could the ancient past have answered my present question? ... What can man do more? That is what seemed to me important to know. Is what man has hitherto said all that he could say? Is there nothing in himself he has overlooked? Can he do nothing but repeat himself? ... And every day there grew stronger in me a confused consciousness of untouched treasures somewhere lying covered up, hidden, smothered by culture and decency and morality. -The Immoralist ----------------- The Wine-Dark Sea is a collection of Sciascia's short stories, which are excellent.

Yes, I think much of it really is a difference in local libraries. Our system made the policy decision years ago that holdings would be primarily guided by majority patron preference. Thus we have a computer game console in the children's section, but no Baum or Freddy. On the other hand, the university library, which we can access, has a massive juvenile collection with two centuries worth of literature, and nearly everything that ever won an award. That's where we go.

No! Much better to have an exciting discussion with someone who loves books and has strong opinions than a feeble talk with someone who just doesn't care. :) So - I disagree with you here. I think good prose writing is uncommon in books intended for an adult audience, and rarer still in books for a juvenile audience. On the other hand, the great ocean of children's literature means that "rare" still leaves theoretical shelves full of good quality books. Libraries lean toward stocking the popular over the worthy - which is why Middle Girl could find plenty of Captain Underpants in our neighborhood branch last time we went, but not the Tennyson she wanted. Popular and recent are poor proxies for well-written, and so one should expect the children's shelves to be packed with the new, the serial, and the manga/graphic novel format. Like ours is. No compunction about insulting children's novelists. If writers are offended by negative reviews of poorly written work, they got into the wrong business.

Yes, but who could be against a holiday that lets you strap burning candles to your head?

Are you sure that wasn't my Chaucer professor? He firmly believed undergraduates didn't understand Middle English because they didn't hear it read properly. So for the first chunk of every class, right after lunch in a hot, stuffy classroom built a hundred years previously, we had to force ourselves awake through his droning of an endless section of the Canterbury Tales .... and certes if it nere to long to heere, I wolde have toold yow fully the manere, how wonnen was the ... zzzzzzzzzzz....

My littles were introduced to jaffa cakes and tea last summer in Scotland. They were expecting the usual post-mass 8th Sacrament of doughnuts and coffee, and bit dubiously into those dry-looking cookies, then got this look of wonderment and bliss. The amused priest kept giving them more, assuring them it was perfectly fine and wouldn't ruin their supper. If people want to talk about proselytizing to kids, surely stuffing them full of jaffa cakes with the Church's implied blessing counts as that. Probably more effective than billboards anyway.

I agree. But I was working off of the bare opening question at the time, and it did remind me of my own situation with an instructor.

Southern French; close enough? :)

If you can access the internet, the Kirkus Review site I find to be quite reliable for children's books.

Then any chronic lateness is a problem with not rendering the services paid for.

Quarter past the theoretical start time, if it's the foreign language instructor who runs on European time. (And it works out, because the other family in the tutorial is also from a country where punctuality isn't considered a virtue.) If the instructor is worth it - ours is - just learn to go with the flow. If they stay for the full time you're paying for, who cares if the start/finish times are a little offset?

No harm in a fiver for the guys to split. OTOH, I didn't tip the Lowes guys who brought my new stove. It was a 5 minute delivery of a very small stove; since they couldn't hook up the gas (state law), they didn't slide it into the cut-out; and they left the assembly of the racks for me to do. By the time I finished setting it up, I kind of felt they should have tipped me.

Many of us don't read several books a week, of course; I've always understood the heart of the 52 Books Challenge to be setting our own reading goals, holding ourselves accountable (sometimes I'll be watching my Columbo reruns and thinking guiltily, "What would Jane and Stacia think?"), and sharing our book journeys with other moms who like to read. My personal goal is 26 books a year, because that's what I can do and still deal with life.

Shoot, I started with a bedside pile and now a whole new full bookshelf has appeared beside the bed.

Finally finally finally finished The Arabian Nights, at 931 pages. And it wasn't even the unabridged original. There are definitely some eyebrow-raising differences from the children's versions, besides all the abating of maidenheads. Who knew Sinbad was a coldblooded serial killer at one point in his narrative? Who knew Shahrazad had three babies during those thousand-and-one nights? Burton's faux-archaic diction gets a little annoying sometimes, especially when he feels compelled to reach into the Anglo-Saxon for words like "eme" and "yode." And I feel a little like I need to go re-read Said's "Orientalism" to detox. But I'm glad I took the time to move Burton off my bucket list. That brings me up to 43 for the year. I might be able to squeeze two more in before the end. I'm near the end of some Sciascia short stories.

The general rule with 'if' is that a counterfactual takes the subjunctive. If the man was home, then he was watching tv. (indicative) If the man were home, he would have been struck by lightning. (subjunctive) With a plural subject, however, there's no difference in the form: If the gargoyles were late, then they were punished justly. (indicative) If the gargoyles were late, they would be cast into the volcano. (subjunctive) Now your sentence is clearly setting up a counterfactual (here, I'll finish it for you): If the couple was/were to walk into their home, they would meet Rasputin face to face. By the traditional rules, then, it should be "were," because of both the plural subject and the counterfactual. But there's a little extra confusion here because in American English, "the couple" can be regarded as a singular or plural subject. You've used 'their' later in the sentence, but it's common in colloquial English to treat an ambiguously numbered subject as singular in one place and plural in another. Further, the subjunctive, much as I love it, is fast disappearing from English. So it's quite defensible to use the indicative wherever the grammar police might insist on the subjunctive. Putting these last two points together, there's nothing at all wrong with "If the couple was to walk into their home, they would meet Rasputin face to face." And I doubt even the most fastidious grammar puritan here would actually notice the "was" in normal conversation. ETA: Points to ThatHomeschoolDad for wolverines.

I wanted Great Girl to have long, braidable hair. She cried and cried when it was brushed or combed, and begged for it to be cut short. And when she got older, dealing with even short hair under a sweaty fencing mask or bike helmet drove her nuts, so she had it cut ultra-short. She loves her pixie cut. She rather wishes she could just have a buzz cut, but I convinced her it wouldn't be flattering.