Rebecca Reads

When I handed Pat the Bunny by Dorothy Kunhardt to my son after I read it to him in the library, he got a really big kid smile on his face and he held it close to him. It’s a small book, just right for little hands. But the pleasure comes from the interaction: my [...]

I know I’m insane to think about another challenge when I’m already feeling overwhelmed. But I love the concept and the reading list for the Martel-Harper Challenge.

When I heard the concept of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! by Laura Amy Schlitz (monologues given by  medieval children), I thought it would be horribly boring. Monologues? I thought. What is fun about monologues? I thought children would be bored by these “Voices from a Medieval Village.”
To my delight, I found Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! [...]

A few months ago, I read a version of Aesop’s Fables that I found online at Project Gutenberg, written and published in the early 1900s. I thought I’d read Aesop’s Fables.
I was interested, then, to read in chapter two (”Ingenuity and Authority”) of Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter [...]

In his first chapter (”Speak, Child”) of Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter, Seth Lerer discusses the “infancy” of children’s literature. Such a study requires a review of children’s education, as that is the basis for children’s literature. Lerer discusses the classics (the “really old classics,” as I’ve dubbed them on [...]

Chris at book-a-rama brought a most interesting article to my attention.
“The End: Have We Reached The End of Book Publishing As We Know It?” is a fascinating look at the publishing industry and struggles it is facing. While I don’t think publishing is going to ever end,  I thought the article had some great insights [...]

I was dressing my 10-month-old son on his bedroom floor the other evening when he started reaching up. I saw his fingers brush the edge of the orange cover of Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, which was on the edge of the second-lowest shelf. Once he was fully clothed in pajamas, I sat him [...]

The New Yorker has an interesting article this week about the development of literature for children and E.B. White’s writing of Stuart Little. Did you know that after it was published in 1945, Stuart Little was banned by many libraries? I haven’t read Stuart Little since I was a child, but I hadn’t realized that [...]

As I mentioned recently, I minored in “International Studies” in college. I took courses in political history, U.S. international relations, anthropology, and sociology. I also took one economics class, but I don’t recall a thing about it.  My minor was too broad, because I don’t remember very much, and it’s only been five years. I [...]

There is an interesting article in The Atlantic about reading and our changing reading habits, thanks to the Internet.
I think the author has some great points: internet has changed the way I read, and that’s why I’m feeling a need to really read deeply right now.
In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go [...]