Now that the kids are older I’m finding that podcasts work really well at hitting that sweet spot for listening to while I cook or on a short drive. Here are some of our current favorites. Do you listen to podcasts with your kids? I’d love to learn about your favorites. Many of my readers […]
Archive | books
On the Day I Called for Help
(An off the cuff reflection on Sunday’s Readings.) “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great… that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out.” “Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered […]
Quarantine and Cultural Memory
Today I’m thinking about quarantine and cultural memory. On our road trip to Pennsylvania we listened to Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome. In the novel the children we met in Swallows and Amazons, the Walkers and the Blacketts, are enjoying a post-Christmas winter holiday in the Lake District before heading back to their boarding schools. […]
Reading Great Novels for Pleasure or Profit
“There’s this rich old man with lots of enemies, and it turns out that someone has bashed his head in. The police have to figure out which of his three sons is responsible for the murder, and so they arrest the oldest son (who’s at a drunken party with his mistress), because he clearly needed […]
Children’s Books in Parallax
Simcha Fisher posted an interesting essay about the novels of E.B White, specifically about several moments of friction in Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan. I’ve become more and more interested in this notion of friction: the idea that there are sometimes elements in a work of art (or even the whole work […]
Picture Books for Ancient History
This is still incomplete, but I have been meaning to publish it for ages (it’s been sitting in my drafts folder for over a year) and I keep getting distracted and not finishing it. So, here it is with most of the Roman books still needing to be added. I was compiling a list for […]
Reading Notes May 2019
Finished Can You Forgive Her? by Trollope I read this with an online book group, a one-time Facebook group created by a friend of mine for the sole purpose of reading this novel together. I’ve really liked this idea of a one-off book club. You aren’t committing to reading a whole bunch of books with […]
Reading Notes April 2019
Books Finished I finished Brothers Karamazov!!! I must say, this experience was very different from the first time through, in 2011, during the Lent that followed Anthony’s birth. At that time I knew I hadn’t read well. I noted: ” don’t know that I got very much out of my solitary read. I really need […]
Aunt Beast and the Icon of the Nurturing Mother
“On Uriel there had been the magnificent creatures. On Camazotz the inhabitants had at least resembled people. What were these three strange things approaching? They were the same dull gray color as the flowers. If they hadn’t walked upright they would have seemed like animals. They moved directly toward the three human beings. […]
Reading Notes March 2019
Mostly I’m continuing to read Brothers Karamazov and Can You Forgive Her. The Brothers Karamazov I first read in Lent of 2011. Anthony had just been born and I finished the whole book that Lent, as I recall. And that’s about all I recall (and I needed help from my blog post at the […]