My son is getting better at sitting still for board books! This month, he took control of turning the pages of a few of them, wanting to turn them over and over again. It fun to watch him try to read: I tell him the book is upside down and turn it over for him.
While I didn’t like Hemingway’s short stories when I read them, I did enjoy Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. While it has an element of sadness, there is also a beauty and majesty around its short plot.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn has the apt subtitle “A Novel in Letters.” Through a series of epistles between friends and family members, we learn of the tragedy most recently befalling (literally) the fictional small island-country of Nollop. The tragedy is this: Slowly but surely, the letters are falling off of the national memorial:
In The Planets by Dava Sobel, one learns of the trivia and facts associated with each planet, as well as the moon and sun, in poetic terms. Scientist Dava Sobel, a New York Times bestselling author, shows that science can be beautiful and lyrical, not technical. Among other things, she tells of the mythology of
While Mo Willems hasn’t been awarded the Caldecott Medal for his children’s picture books, he has been nominated a number of times. Do multiple Honors equal a Medal? I doubt he’d think so. Nevertheless, I think his simple illustrations are award-worthy and therefore worthy of my review. Here’s a rundown of some of Willems’ books,
In his stories, Vladimir Nabokov so perfectly captures a character, or a setting, or an emotion, that I feel that the character is real, the setting surrounds me, and the emotion is my own. His writing in these stories is so well done that I, a very amateur writer, feel the urge to try my
Reading The Iliad (trans. by Robert Fagles) isn’t like reading a modern-day novel: I think it did take a level of concentration I’m not accustomed to. But that just proved to me that the “difficult pleasure” of reading is highly worth experiencing. The Robert Fagles translation was poetic and rhythmic. Once I became accustomed to
I thought reading The Iliad by Homer (translated by Robert Fagles) would be a chore. Even after I reviewed four different translations and chose one I felt was “best,” I told myself I would have to read at least one chapter a day, just to get through it before it was due at the library.
When I decided to read The Iliad, I knew essentially nothing about it. All I knew was that it was Greek, it was written by Homer, and that it was somehow a precursor to The Odyssey (which I read in high school). Having read The Iliad, I can say now that while it certainly is
Last week I reread Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public as a part of the Martel-Harper Challenge. While I was well aware that Jonathan Swift’s short essay is classic satire,
My son is musical. As a newborn, his body would instantly start to relax if I started to sing to him. Now, at 13 months old, he doesn’t calm so easily. But if he hears music, he dances. He laughs when he hears any rhythm. His favorite toys make music. He likes to touch the
Time for Bed by Mem Fox and illustrated by Jane Dyer, is a relaxing bedtime book. The go-to-bed phrases have a wonderful rhythm just right for rocking a child to sleep. It’s time for bed, little mouse, little mouse,Darkness is falling all over the house. The richly realistic paintings of animal mothers and babies evoke
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