The Year in Books
We read a lot. We are homeschoolers, so of course we spend a lot of time reading. I was at the pediatrician years ago with my oldest, an old man I didn’t know who didn’t know me… he complimented how articulate and well mannered my child was and then found out we homeschooled and immediately started lecturing me on the dangers of screen time and video games. I said, “Sir, we don’t even own a console.” He would not let up. He was convinced that being homeschooled meant we sat around and did nothing but watch TV and played video games. Funny thing is, now we don’t even own a TV. My teenager will tell you, we don’t have time for TV, because there are so many things to read. We play outside, we hang out with friends, we play musical instruments, we participate in clubs, she flies planes, and we read and read and read.
A lot of our books we read together, some (not not many) I read alone. This year (2025), we read:
- Writing to Learn by William Zinsser
- Napoleon’s Buttons by Le Couteur and Burreson
- Desiring God by John Piper
- The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (I actually read two different editions back to back with notes, as I was teaching it.)
- The Bringer of Fire by Oehler (I did not let my teen read this one)
- Why Read Moby Dick? by Philbrick
- Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
- The Peter Rabbit Library by Beatrix Potter (this is an ongoing favorite and I love having babies to re-read these to)
- Why? by Anne Graham Lotz
- Rapunzel (all the versions, every one we could get our hands on)
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (another one I enjoy teaching to more than my own kids)
- Purgatorio by Dante
- The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
- All the Arnold Lobel picture books, including a few new ones I had not owned when my oldest was small.
- Jane Austen by Peter J. Leithart
- Hank the Cowdog by John R. Erickson (my son is obsessed with the books and the podcast, I think we have them memorized now)
- New Essays on The Great Gatsby by Matthew J. Bruccoli
- The Los Angeles Diaries by James Brown
- I Know Many Songs… by Brian Kiteley
- The Parrot’s Lament by Eugene Linden
- On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior
- Common Arts Education by Chris Hall
- You’re Not Enough (and That’s Okay) by Allie Beth Stuckey
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas
- Everything we could get our hands on by Trina Schart Hyman because we love her.
- Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan
- The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (an annual Easter tradition at our house)
- Gatsby’s Girl by Caroline Preston
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
- The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson
- Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
- A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War by Joseph Loconte
- Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton
- The World of Pooh by A.A. Milne
- Lightfoot the Deer by Thornton W. Burgess
- The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
- The Geography Behind History by W. Gordon East
- String, Straight-Edge, and Shadow by Julia E. Diggins
- Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Hamlet by Shakespeare
- World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down by McEwen
- The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis
- Drake Hall by Christina Baehr
- Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery
- The Floating City by Pamela Ball
- Moth and Spark by Anne Leonard
- That Eye, The Sky by Tim Winton
- Socrates Cafe by Christopher Phillips
- The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday
- Beauty and the Word by Stratford Caldecott
- Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan
- The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
- Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Milton
- J.R.R. Tolkien’s Santifying Myth by Bradley J. Birzer
- Engaging the Christian Scriptures by Aterbury and more
- Journey Into Summer by Edwin Way Teale
- Kon Tiki by THor Heyerdahl
- Lethal White by Robert Galbraith
- Be Strong (Joshua) by Warren W. Wiersbe
- A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants by Jaed Coffin
- Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery
- Sightings by Sam Keen
- Maisie Dobbs by Winspear
- Local Girls by Hoffman
- Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Stoppard
- How to Teach Kids Theology by Luce and Williams
- Medea and Other Plays by Euripedes
- The Infinities by John Banville
- Climbing Parnassus by Tracy Lee Simmons
- How to Keep From Losing Your Mind by Hudson
- Sharing His Secrets by Vickey Banks
- Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
- Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
- The Last Rakosh by F. Paul Wilson (straight to the nope pile)
- A History of France by John Julius Norwich (he is one of my favorite historians)
- Book Trails for Baby Feet
- The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury
- Don’t Mom Alone by Heather MacFayden (a gift from my midwife after having baby number four)
- The Fall of the Year by Dallas Lore Sharp
- The Natural History of Selborne by Gilbert White
- Heaven by Jennifer Rothschild (donated this too)
- Cultural Literacy by E.D. Hirsch Jr.
- Bringing Up Boys by James C. Dobson
- Ourselves by Charlotte Mason
- The Story of Holly and Ivy by Rumer Godden (we read this every Christmas)
- One Man’s Christmas by Leon Hale
- The Iliad by Homer (Fagles)
- Hallelujah by Cindy Rollins (another annual tradition)
- Quietly in Their Sleep by Donna Leon
- Easily 300-400 picture books because I have three children under five and that’s what we do for hours on end.
I purged a lot this year, as you can see there’s a lot of chaff in this list. But I found favorites I will re-read with every child as well. We’ve been purging a lot as our shelves are stuffed to the gills (about 22 seven foot units retired from Half Price Books) and then some. I decided I don’t actually need more books, I need to be more conscientious about curating the ones I have, so I’ve been donating hundreds of volumes I’m done with every year… but we still have a packed inventory, because we are homeschoolers and we are readers.
As for this year, I truly enjoyed the chemistry titles. I actually enjoyed teaching high school chemistry, especially with the literature bent, essay writing, and speech giving I required of the students. The kids had more fun with the labs, obviously, but Napoleon’s Buttons, Faraday’s papers, and The Disappearing Spoon are all keepers, for sure.
I got rid of most the contemporary fiction, and kept the classics. I loved The Scarlet Letter when I read it in high school and I loved it even more while teaching it. The book as a whole is so much richer right after reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. “The Custom House” introduction hits so much deeper as an adult.
What did you read this year? Were they re-reads or new reads? A mixture of both? What was your favorite? What will you read again every year?
Traditions! (Hallelujah!)
A few years ago we started the tradition of celebrating Advent using Cindy Rollins’ Hallelujah! study of Handel’s Messiah and I absolutely love it. Celebrating Advent has been a new and gradual practice for me. About eight years ago. the church I was attending was lighting weekly candles at the front of service, but not spending much time explaining it and it provoked me to start doing some research in conjunction with learning about liturgical practices in the home.
As we settle into using Hallelujah! to enrich our family life, we’re adding in some of the things from the appendix slowly. This was our first year doing St. Nick shortbread cookies and I was pretty excited. Despite a few hiccups, we were pleased with our efforts. My oldest has been learning to decorate cakes off and on for the last five years, and she made icing and turned the cookies into little Christmas wreaths for an event the following week as well. We didn’t celebrate St. Lucia’s Feast Day this year, but little by little we’re adding traditions to our holiday season that line up with the Christian calendar.
In order to do that, I’ve been having to learn about the Christian calendar in general. I was not raised in a church that followed it other than Christmas and Easter. I knew nothing of Advent or Lent. I still don’t fully understand Lent, but I used Living the Christian Year by Gross as a starting point. It didn’t answer the questions I had, which as usual are questions I’m not even sure how to articulate yet, so I donated it to our church library hoping it will help someone else. I hoped to find more clarity by adding The Sacred Sacrifice to our Lent and Easter season, I read it last year when it first came out and plan use it again with my children during our morning basket time again this year.
It’s interesting because despite my children all loving classical music, my son used to beg to listen to Mozart as a toddler, they are fairly indifferent about these family traditions surrounding the Christian holidays and classical pieces. I’m curious to see how they feel about it the older we get as it becomes nostalgic and part of their family memories. When we first added the tradition of getting a live Christmas tree at a family owned Christmas tree farm, my oldest was also indifferent. But now they all beg to go to the farm as soon as Thanksgiving passes. They love the petting zoo feature, there are sure to be baby goats and tortoises. They love the outdoors and the bees and hunting down the perfect tree. They love getting subpar hot cocoa in Styrofoam cups (my husband makes amazing hot cocoa from scratch at home) and pumping Christmas themed rubber ducks down the PVC pipe racing shoots… these things have come to mean the beginning of the Christmas season to them and I love that.
Another tradition we have added to our lives is listening to The Dark is Rising BBC World Service production: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvp7. The Dark is Rising book (and podcast) starts on the winter solstice, December 20th, and it’s fun to listen to the events of the story alongside the events of our own corresponding days.
What does your family do as a household tradition?
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Timothy and the Dragon Defenders, Part Two
A Short Story from the Archives of A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
The purple dragon roared fiercely. A river rushed behind it, the sun made the water glisten, peeking over what almost looked like pines. The sudden brightness pierced Timothy’s eyes and all his senses were overwhelmed at once. He was grateful for the warmth, but the sun beat down harshly on his skin.
“Good thing the basement wasn’t a wardrobe and this place isn’t Narnia,” Timothy said to the dragon. “I’d be freezing and I’ve no time for tea with Mr. Tumnus, I have a test tomorrow.”
The dragon roared. And burped. Bits of Mrs. McCracken’s jelly still lingered on the corners of its mouth.
“So you are?” Timothy asked.
The dragon burped again.
“Ok, then. I’ll call you Burp.”
The dragon shook his head no.
“Belch?”
It shook its head again, then fluttered its wings. The right wing featured a brand, or tattoo, and when they came to rest against the beast’s back again, Timothy saw the name, “Galen” etched into the dragon’s flesh.
“Galen?”
The dragon danced, a bit like the McCracken’s golden retriever puppy when someone dropped bacon on the breakfast room floor.
“Like the Greek physician?”
The dragon danced again.
“So where are we, Galen?”
Galen belched another round, evicting all the glass from the crunched Mason jars into the river as he did.
“Ew.”
The dragon seemed to shrug and began walking away.
“Hey, wait!” Timothy followed. Pebbles from the riverside massaged his bare feet, not so unpleasantly. “Seriously, wait!”
He caught up to the bumbling dragon, “So where are we, anyway?”
Galen burped, then stopped abruptly, and Timothy bumped into a tree to avoid running into him.
[Come back next week to learn more about Galen’s world…]
The Camera My Mother Gave Me
I am buying my childhood home. My mother has passed and my father has remarried a wonderful woman for whom he bought a new place, a place for them to make their own. It is good for him to leave walls saturated with memories of my mother and her influence, but I didn’t want the house my parents built in 1986 gone forever. My dad packed the things that were most important to him and is leaving behind things that were just filler (I’m getting a new comfy couch from my Bonus Mom I’m super excited about). My mom had a lot of filler.
Since I’m the book lady, he left me most of their books as well. I already have well over 5,000 volumes in my house (I quit counting long ago and just focus on making sure they all have a place to live) and I have four children that I will be moving into a home built for a family of four total (it’s the same size as my current home, but actually has one more room, there was a lot of wasted space in these 1995 builds). So as I go through books, determining what to keep and what to purge, I’m stumbling through decades of reading–my mother’s reading, and my own.
The Christian prairie romances went first. I’ve never been interested in that genre, but it was my mother’s primary reading (I added some to the church library and sent some to be sold at Good Oil Days). I’ve gotten rid of most of the Christmas books, she loved anything Christmas. My church does a holiday market every year where they sell Christmas crafts, decor, and gifts to raise money for various things we cannot afford to do as a congregation. This last year we replaced the doors. The old building was desperate for functioning doors with no cracks or blemishes and the Christmas market afforded us beautiful, but simple, wooden doors to invite the public into our home away from home. My mother would be pleased that she contributed to that. I’m excited to keep the antiques, they aren’t valuable but they are titles we will read and share with our children. There’s a set of Mark Twain I remember well that I’ll “inherit.”
With all this sorting and purging going on at my Dad’s house (soon to be my house), I’m sorting and purging from my own home as well. Books I loved in my twenties just don’t mean the same to me now that I am a mother of four. When we first moved to this house my goal was to make sure there were never stacks of books anywhere (I failed), that every book had its own place on the shelf (I failed big time). I spent the last four years donating anything I read that I had no intention of reading again, mostly books I had acquired for free or cheap over the years that upon finally reading didn’t live up to my latest standards. But now, I’m getting rid of books I loved and just don’t need or want lying around for children to encounter.
So this week I donated The Camera My Mother Gave Me and Girl, Interrupted (and four bags of other things I can’t recall). I loved Girl, Interrupted when I first read it. I think I was nineteen at the time. Susanna Kaysen fascinated me with her angst, her institutionalization, her ambivalence, and finally her resolve… to not be crazy. I respected her final conclusion. At forty-one, I just don’t need that affirmation from her anymore… that we can be surrounded by insanity and decide to not allow ourselves to go insane (mental illness is real, but there are also some who drive themselves nuts out of selfishness and conceit, or giving in to their environment).
Later, when I was running the sociology section at Half Price Books, I stumbled across The Camera My Mother Gave Me. It is a bizarre memoir about Kaysen’s vagina. I was shocked, baffled, and completely riveted by the book. I remember being appalled that I couldn’t put it down. I probably would have kept it forever and maybe read it again years from now because I don’t remember much of it, but I don’t want my sons plucking it off the shelf as emerging readers. It would make an interesting story for a stand-up comedy routine–or their future therapist–so off to the Friends of the Library it went.
I have donated nearly 1,000 volumes every time I have moved. Often it’s a simple Marie Kondo moment, happily removing piles of things accumulated that I’m now happy to give away. This move hits different. Instead of just not wasting some box or storage space, I’m more focused on refining my library. I am actively curating a specific environment to nurture my children.
What books do you enjoy that you still choose not to keep?
Morning Times with a Morning Basket
I’m in a lot of homeschool mom groups on Facebook. Lately there have been a lot of questions regarding “morning baskets,” popularized, I think, by Pinterest and Teachers Pay Teachers accounts I think most people have baskets full of ice breaker style worksheets for their kids to grab and go when they are otherwise busy with stuff. But our Morning Baskets have been a little different, organically grown over the years as a Morning Time over breakfast where we, as a family, wake up together. It includes our Scripture Memory Box (an idea I got from a Sonja Shafer YouTube video about four or five years ago. Our “basket” includes a poetry recitation, a hymn study, Thomas Aquinas’s Student’s Prayer (thanks to Kate Alva of The Atrium). The point is not what it is in our basket, however, it’s about the journey we took to get there.
First, I read Habits of the Household by Earley, which I read in 2022. My second child was one year old and I did a re-dive into parenting and homeschooling research to make sure that I wasn’t bringing old bad habits to a new childhood and that I was creating the family culture I desired now that I had more than one kid and stable household. I found Earley’s book very affirming as I was already doing a lot of what he recommended, but I wanted to add more and really dive into the idea of liturgies. Earley’s book and listening to the Literary Life Podcast led me to Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love by Cindy Rollins.
What I learned from those books is that starting the day with scripture and a morning prayer isn’t just my ideal, my kids thrive with it. I learned that my sudoku and logic puzzle routine could be substituted with other things from their education, taking something off their afternoon plate, as the season requires: diagramming a sentence, balancing a chemical equation, factoring a trinomial. Balancing a chemical equation every morning together as a family when my oldest was between 6th and 7th grades set her up to do high school Chemistry in 8th grade (with a high school aged friend of hers) with a lot less tears than I expected. Warming up to difficult subjects in bite sized pieces over breakfast just seems to be the most efficient way to tackle the idea that we can, in fact, learn to do hard things.
Over the years, our morning times have included Plutarch, various nature readings (like Gilbert White and Sam Keen), and the Ambleside Online Hymns and Folksongs. It has included the United States citizenship test (as recommended by Cindy Rollins) in seasonal cycles. It has always included the Catechism from the Truth & Grace Memory Books (that I bought while visiting a church led by Voddie Baucham. We have always included Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but after following Cindy Rollins, I was encouraged to add The Faerie Queene, previously I had planned to assign it in the upper high school years–I’m glad I didn’t wait. We enjoyed Dante’s Divine Comedy, as an extended basket time, in car rides on the way to choir. As I have had more children it has become something that goes until we have an activity that requires us to leave the house or the youngest children depart to play outside as their attention spans drop off.
No matter what you include in your basket time, if you’re overwhelmed in your homeschool or your parenting this is a guaranteed way to simplify it. Bring back the cozy, bring back core truths and beauty to your mornings. Adding these bits into the start of your day truly do take things off your plate at the end of your day. (Or if your kids are in public school, adding these enrichment activities to your evenings can bring back the togetherness you long for in your family and supplement their life at school.)
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Timothy and the Dragon Defenders, Part One
A Short Story from the Archives of A.Z.K.R., author of Tales of Porcelain Thrones: Middle School Edition
Timothy McCracken was having a hard time. He was supposed to be sleeping, but instead of counting sheep, he was counting the taps he heard coming from the basement across the hall. Timothy’s bedroom was downstairs near the kitchen, apart from his siblings and parents who slept on the second story of the house. This suited him fine because it meant he didn’t share a room with his brother Dean, who snored like a freight train. It was also great when he wanted peanut butter sandwiches at midnight, but not so much when the dog whined at the rustling noises coming from the basement.
What was down there besides Mom’s canning jars and Christmas decorations? Did the house have mice? Were ghosts walking around in old shoes discarded in the donate bin? One could never tell after the sun went down and the moon cast shadows through the window.
He pulled his feet from under under his flannel sheets, his yellow gym shorts reflected neon stripes from the moonlight. As soon as his feet hit the cool, wooden floors, he heard a crash from below. Instinctively, he rushed to the sound, accustomed to rescuing younger siblings from their messes and broken things. The crashing of his mother’s preserve jars rang in his ears as he crossed the hall to the basement and took the stairs two at a time. He stopped abruptly at the last step, worried his bare feet might catch glass.
Curling his toes around the edge of the landing, he paused a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. As he stood there, the scent of cinnamon and peaches wafted against his nose, goosebumps pimpled his arms from the cold, but a breath of hot air pressed against his forehead.
“What?”
Slowly, his pupils caught up to the rest of his body and revealed large nostrils flaring in front of him. Purple scales pulsed as the warmth puffed against Timothy’s face. The beast turned and scurried behind the shelves of Mrs. McCracken’s jars, tongue lapping three of them in one gulp, glass and all. TImothy heard a belch and caught a whiff of strawberry currant jam.
“You like Mom’s jam?” he asked the beast, stepping closer. Surely it was safe to follow it, this must be a dream. After all, dragons aren’t real.
In a flash of light, the creature was nearly gone, a tail slithering out a door Timothy had never seen before. The door was heavy and wooden, thicker and shorter than any other in the house. The knob was made of tarnished silver. A bit of light glowed from behind the door–enough so Timothy could see that the knob was spherical and engraved to look like a globe, but with land masses he did not recognize.
As he reached for the knob, heat radiated from behind the threshold and in an instant, Timothy was no longer in his Mom’s basement.
[Come back next week to see where Timothy has found himself!]
Colonel Shaw
I’ve been spying these daily writing prompts in the corner of my dashboard the last few days, wondering if they were something I would ever care to utilize. This evening as I was considering what to post for tomorrow, I saw “Have you ever performed on a stage?” and immediately had a flashback to 1995 and my performance as Colonel Shaw in the play Glory. I’m assuming it was severely abridged for fifth graders. I do know it was shortly after we had read the book Shades of Gray by Carolyn Reeder. I remember my costume smelled funny. I do not recall where that costume was acquired or where it went when I was done wearing it. I think it was meant to teach us an important part of history, but I was not thinking about Lincoln’s War Between the States when I was barking out my Colonel Shaw lines, I was thinking about how I was the shortest girl in the class playing a man in charge of stuff. For the record, I’m a terrible actress and I have no idea how or why I was awarded this role in whatever fifth grade extravaganza was occurring.
Fifth grade was an awkward time when the man I thought would be my favorite teacher ever got deported–to Canada–for an expired Visa, and in return we got the “new” lady. She hated me, got in arguments with my mom, and I still (in my 40s) think she was a moron. Time did not grant me more grace for her, although I do credit her for having Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in her classroom library. Both of which I loved. She’s also the teacher who read Bridge to Terabithia out loud every afternoon until she had her entire class bawling. So, she was either awesome for introducing us to a great book, or a little sadistic for emotionally traumatizing us all. Who knows?
My track record with teachers wasn’t great. In sixth grade I got an amazing GT language arts teacher I will adore forever and we got her again for seventh grade GT, and then she died. Once again, our class got the “new” lady. A fresh out of college gal the boys tormented by just calling her Wendy. She looked like Wendy from Peter Pan, her name was Wendy for real, I still don’t remember her last name because no one ever respected her enough to use it. She lived in my neighborhood with her parents, talked about her boyfriend (who couldn’t spell) a lot, and in hindsight I wonder how any twenty-two year olds enter their classrooms for their first year without having a panic attack. I think that was the year I played a dead girl in theatre and laughed through the entire play. My theatre teacher told me she loved me, but she didn’t want me on her stage again. We laughed. We hugged. When I was in Oklahoma! in high school, I was a chorus girl who happily sat in the barn close to the shotgun mic. I’m not a great dancer either, but I love to sing. Too bad Colonel Shaw didn’t have any singing lines. I’d definitely watch Glory as a Broadway musical, they could still use Matthew Broderick and everything.
Beauty in the Math
As a homeschool mom, I’ve been teaching math every day since 2017 when my oldest officially started first grade. We did Math-U-See Alpha through Pre-Algebra with steady diligence. When we finished the curriculum for the school year, we often used another to review. For years we had colorful, used copies of Singapore (1A-6B) to ensure there were no gaps in our learning. It wasn’t necessary, we just liked it. My oldest also loved reading Life of Fred books for fun until about a year ago when she grew as impatient with them as I have always been. We feel they make great supplements if your kid is into them, but they aren’t really a complete curriculum. (My husband and I honestly don’t understand how anyone learns anything from them at all.) With all this math drilling, I have always passionately felt like I needed to have books that kept that spark–the love of the beauty of math–alive in our home. It’s easy to get lost in crunching numbers and forget that it’s fun to play with numbers, to entertain ideas, and to marvel at the patterns.
Books that have helped me maintain that in the younger years were things like Swirl by Swirl, Blockhead, the Sir Cumference series, The Lion’s Share, and many more. I collect math picture books and biographies of mathematicians for kids like Michael Phelps collects Olympic medals. I love them and I love reading them to my kids. We enjoy Penrose the Cat and Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late. I have a more MathStart picture books than I can count. Not really, Anno taught us to count pretty high. But as my oldest got older, I realized I needed to have more than just picture books to keep that love for math alive.
We started in middle school with books on fractals. She had already read Mysterious Patterns: Finding Fractals in Nature by Sarah C. Campbell, but we needed more. A friend recommended Lisle’s Fractals: The Secret Code of Creation and we ate that up. It’s so beautiful. I even bought and read Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature from the 70’s, for my own personal amusement.
Then I became even more devoted to being purposeful in adding math books to our history and science reading. Zero: the Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife was a fun one, and I recommend it for 7th and 8th graders tackling Algebra I for the first time. Learning about the beginnings of things, when the world wasn’t quite sure what to make of a concept, is always exciting. Adding living books to a student’s math studies is what I think is greatly missing from the public school system’s approach to math education in the upper grades. As a society we’re helping elementary students get excited with great picture books like The Boy Who Loved Math and then we leave them hanging once they hit Algebra. Books like Derbyshire’s Unknown Quantity aren’t being touched until college, if at all.
Just this week we finished A History of Pi. Beckmann’s writing isn’t as thrilling as Siefe’s, and he often goes on tangents about governments he doesn’t like, showing some interesting biases that made my 9th grader roll her eyes, but I’ll still take his passionate sometimes wrong hot takes over a boring textbook that never mentions the history of 3.14 and how it came to be what it is today.
Once you dive into the world of living math books, it’s actually more difficult to find someone dispassionate about their topic. Francis Su in Mathematics for Human Flourishing also has several political asides while arguing for math bringing virtue to those who study it. While it wasn’t my favorite of the math books I’ve read and I won’t be assigning it, it helped me identify and articulate some of my goals as a math teacher.
What math or math history books have you read that have inspired you as a teacher or student? Books that made the beauty of math shine for you?
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The Mad Women of the Moors
Re-experiencing The Brontë Sisters, Part One
In 2024 I read Brontë’s Agnes Grey alongside the Literary Life Podcast. I hadn’t read a Brontë novel in years, more than a decade I believe. Though I greatly appreciate the Brontës, I’ve always been more of a Jane Austen girl. It’s a rare reader who loves both equally, I find. The Brontës wrote Gothic revival tales with a flare for romanticism (romanticism the movement, not romanticism featuring a meet-cute and happily ever after), whereas Jane Austen wrote satire. The Brontës make me sad and despair for humanity while Jane Austen makes me laugh at society’s nonsense. All four women had much to say about the world around them, they just said it very differently.
Agnes Grey, written by the youngest Brontë, Anne, is not the most riveting of classic works and I suspect it wouldn’t still be in print if Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre weren’t currently so popular. I love to pair reading experiences, rabbit trail from one book to another, an exercise of associative reading, so I plucked a book I already had on my shelf and read it as well.
The book was The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell, a contemporary literary mystery with the meet-cute kind of romance thrown in. The book follows fictional character Samantha Whipple through Oxford as the author fan-girls over Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In a season when I am aggressively purging subpar books from my collection (we have over 5,000 volumes–I stopped counting long ago–and have legitimately run out of space) The Madwoman Upstairs is one I have chosen to keep, for now. I think my oldest might enjoy it after studying a Brontë book or two, it’s an easy breezy weekend novel.
That time might be coming soon as the trailers for this new Wuthering Heights movie blasts across the internet, appalling most readers I know. Teaching Wuthering Heights just moved up my to-do list as I counter parent pop culture, so that when my teen encounters the story for the first time it is not at the hands of the debaucherous movie industry who is advertising what looks like a Fifty-Shades version of what they are calling the “greatest love story ever told.” I thought it was a cautionary tale of what happens to humanity when we give into the monster of sin instead of slaying it. On a supernatural level, Wuthering Heights brings me back to Beowulf (I might be broken, because everything brings me back to Beowulf, it’s a favorite) and the torment of the wild (sin nature and Satan… Heathcliff has that whole Esau archetype going for him that reminds me of Grendel). On a psychological level, Cathy and Heathcliff remind me that sin nature is to be quashed lest we wander the moors ever after as lost souls unable to reach heaven. Apparently, that is not the popular reading, and Hollywood has turned it into some steamy lip biting panty dropper. Gross. But, I haven’t read the book in a coon’s age, and it’s possible I read it poorly and just saw the message I wanted to see.
Alice Hoffman said, “Read Wuthering Heights when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.” When I was in my teens, I definitely read him as a tempting monster. I know I read Jane Eyre and Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my twenties, but I cannot recall if I re-read Emily’s work when I first read her sisters’ and stumbled across Gaskell’s biography. I’m 41 now and I’m curious to know how I read Heathcliff today.
English author Jeanette Winterson wrote on her website in 2011:
I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed, Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched by Cathy’s death-wish (Why did you betray your own heart?). Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house. Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost. Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right. Therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (and that is part of her plan but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Much later when her daughter marries Heathcliff’s horrible son Linton he gleefully claims that all her property is now his – and when he usefully dies, all that was hers passes to Heathcliff. Heathcliff himself starts with nothing—and so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin. What’s love got to do with it? (All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story).
As I begin my journey of rediscovery, I find I agree that it is a story of loss. I also think it is a story of revenge, and possibly a story of ghosts… I’ll get back to you in Part Two of this blog series.
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Burgess, Beatrix, and Our Favorite Bear
One thing I didn’t expect to be doing in my forties was re-reading all the books of early childhood. I was a mom of only one for nearly eleven years and thought surely I wouldn’t revisit Thornton Burgess, Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh until I was a grandmother. But then I had three more babies.
I started reading Thornton Burgess out loud to my oldest and two of my niblings when there was a family crisis and I absorbed a niece and a nephew into my household for two months while my second child was two months old. Thornton Burgess always brings calm to an afternoon when you need it. He’s gentle, like Mr. Rogers, and tells you all about the animals the way Bob Ross tells you all about painting. During this season of chaos, we read The Big Book of Burgess, the pale green front board and back board matched my bedroom walls and put us all in a soothing nap-like mood. We usually read over elevenses or afternoon tea, the sunlight from my east facing living room windows often cascading over my shoulders while the baby kicked in the bouncer and the older kids settled in to watch the oak tree’s leaves dance across the area rug and faux hardwood flooring. What I learned then while the fifth graders sat restfully (the only time of day they were restful) and listened, is that I would never stop reading Burgess ever again. Never. Now, we always have a Burgess book going. I read bits of the Adventures of… series to my toddler, Lightfoot the Deer and Bowser the Hound when I had a teenager, a preschooler, and a toddler, and even now with a highschooler, preschooler, toddler, and newborn, we are reading Blacky the Crow. Burgess writes delightful little chapter books every age can enjoy, but…
Beatrix Potter’s work are picture books. I definitely didn’t expect to be reading The Tales of Peter Rabbit nearly every day for another decade. Even more, I didn’t expect to not get tired of them. Jeremy Fisher doesn’t stop being exciting, if anything I think he’s more exciting now that I have a little boy obsessed with fishing. Two Bad Mice is especially amusing with two precocious little human partners in crime scurrying about my home.
Last, I’ll never forget the first time I picked up the Winnie-the-Pooh collection to read to my second born. He was pudgy and snuggly and the lamplight was low and my voice fell into the patterns that my oldest calls my Winnie-the-Pooh voice and I thought, “Oh I get to do this again. How lovely.” The book smells like vanilla and baby powder, the spine reassuring in my palm. Winnie-the-Pooh of the Hundred Acre Wood, floating up to steal honey like a rain cloud really never gets old. It might be my favorite bedtime book.
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Anakalian Whims 