The Brain Station and little Italian Conductors
An Essay of the Mind
by: A.Z.K.R.
The “Train of Thought” is a very common expression, that I’ve discovered is (at least for me) very helpful in visualizing and understanding my AuDHD mind, as long as you remember, it’s a whole train station and not just one train.
“The Brain Station” first came to mind when I was trying to explain why (I think) I tend to repeat myself and have the same kind of conversations over and over.
I picture a topic like a train car. When several topics/stories/memories/thoughts or ideas are connected in a way, probably not by one grand picture, but like how Spot It cards all have one thing that they share with each other Spot It card, they get hitched together on the same train, and most likely stay on that train together for a while—or indefinitely—so that if something gets brought up that triggers a need for one of these cars, the little conductor just brings the whole train in and unloads the information accordingly.
This idea came back to me when I was getting stuck in logic puzzles and geometric proofs. My mom said that based off of how I described “The information just being there or not” (and how she observed me staring off into space until an answer came to me) it seemed that, as opposed to just being incredibly stupid (my conclusion) I was just so smart that I was used to having answers come to me and not using my thinking muscles. So when I actually needed to think, those thinking muscles had atrophied. Now I understood what she said, but it didn’t quite ‘click’ in the right way until a specific proof in my geometry book about parallel lines. I was able to articulate that I understood the proof just fine, but on my own, I would have never been able to come up with and break down the steps to explain why the given was true, because it just obviously was true based on the definitions on the previous page. (Now the reasons for the proof were all, ‘because of this definition’ but I wouldn’t have realized I was supposed to write that.) Mom connected this scenario to the proofs and logic puzzles I had been doing and I was able to understand my struggle, which I explained to myself first through how reading works, and from there, to train cars.
I realized that my problem was like learning to read. In the early stages you learn phonics and sounding out. But once you’ve learned to read proficiently, you don’t need to sound out every word anymore. So, in my case, if for some reason I needed to sound a word out now, it would be as if I have completely lost the information of how because I haven’t in so long. (I can sound out words, but not with a very high success rate. I can read at a college level… and spell like a fifth grader. I might be being generous with myself on the spelling part.) Now we bring in the Italian Conductor.
You’ve learned to read, or maybe you can come up with a more suitable example, but you no longer need the basic, rudimentary, information for your topic of choice.
It is tedious to the little conductor to have the “phonics” and “sounding out” train car on the train of information responsible for every time you read. There are probably several of these reading trains depending on how much you compartmentalize school subjects; so to be more accurate, it is tedious to the little conductor to move these cars back and forth from each needed train. There’s probably a more useful car he needs to put in that spot, like word definitions that keep getting lost. (Let’s face it, if the words are in a bin like a coal car, the new ones will fly off the top anyway.) So, he unhooks the “phonics,” and “sounding out” train cars, and leaves them in the “Graveyard of Information” to rust.
Then, inexplicably, one day, you need that information. But it isn’t on the train. The little conductor goes to the graveyard, but he cannot find the lone rusted train car among many similarly rusted train cars he had thought wouldn’t be need anymore. On top of that, they’ve accumulated even more things that he’s forgotten for you, as you were learning more things. So, it’s lost. He’s missplaced this outdated information. He scratches his head.
“Eet-a ees-a not-a here.” (This is why he’s Italian.) So he shrugs and moves on. He has better things to do than check the faded label of every rusted train car to find one among thousands.
But, “Eet-a ees-a not-a here” obviously isn’t enough for your parents, or teachers, or what have you.
(No, for real, it’s not enough. My mother made me look up the translation for “It’s not here” in Italian. So, my little Italian Conductor cartoon in my head should be saying: “Non è qui.” Thank you Google translate.)
“But we taught you this! It has to be there!”
And they’re right, of course, it is there. You just don’t know how to remember it. You can’t talk to the conductor as far as you know. His telegraph machine is probably broken.
The even more irksome part is that if the memory of actively learning the information is connected to the information itself, (who am I kidding? it absolutely is!) then when Mr. Italian Conductor unlatches ‘unnecessary’ information he probably left the memory of learning it in the first place, also in the “Graveyard of Information,” still hooked to “phonics” and “sounding out.” Which means that you might only remember the parts of learning that are actively connected to still-relevant information. Which could just be a funny story you like to tell, or a particular lesson you loved for any given reason, which leaves huge gaps in your memory that annoys everyone. Especially your mom.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has a quote he wrote for Sherlock Holmes, along the lines of this: Everyone’s brain is an attic that must be furnished with the necessary information of getting through life. He says that this attic does not have rubber walls and can’t be stretched to accommodate information you don’t need. Which is why, he argues to Watson, that as a detective, facts about the solar system are a clutter to him, and he doesn’t need to know who orbits what, or how many planets there are, in order to solve crimes.
I think Sherlock is wrong on the part about not stretching our attic walls. We can, he’s just lazy. The answers come to him.
Maybe people have different consistencies of rubber, but I think you can stretch it. Like my mom said, it’s like a muscle. The part he is right about is clutter and furniture. While we work on stretching the rubber attic muscles, we still have a lot of crap to sort through and keep track of. That’s what the train station is for, to bring information in and out of the crowded attic, or across parts of it, you pick. Our problem? It’s this: The person in charge of maintaining and organizing the attic? He’s just as confused as your are, because he’s a just little cartoon Italian Train Conductor. And his English ees’a not’a too good.
(Mom is an Amazon affiliate, so she might earn something if you click through and buy that Spot It game.)
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?
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?
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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Hard Roads to Cultural Literacy
In May of 2019, I read a book called Hard Road West: History and Geology Along the Gold Rush Trail by Keith Heyer Meldahl. I remember it being riveting. When I logged it on Goodreads all I wrote was, “Excellent and fascinating.” I was dating my now husband at the time and I remember sharing with him sections I thought he would enjoy, as we both like geology and one of our dates was to the HMNS gemstone exhibit. At one point I laughed out loud at something clever Meldahl wrote (I don’t recall what it was) and my husband commented that it is a rare geology book that causes one to laugh in pleasure.
Naturally, I thought this would make excellent assigned reading for my homeschooled highschooler. But one chapter into it she was struggling. It wasn’t the reading level, she has a collegiate reading level and has had one for a few years now. I was certain it couldn’t be the science as she had been perusing geology books since childhood and had done a whole geology curriculum with a friend as part of their own little science club they created. Nerds. I went over the science with her and she kept reading. It became less of a struggle, but she is not laughing out loud with pleasure from her geology book.
Then I started reading Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch and things became clearer. In Cultural Literacy Hirsch talks about a study done on the results of seven year olds who took a reading assessment test. In the test the children were asked to read a story about a spider. The children who had more prior knowledge about spiders scored higher on the reading comprehension questions about the story (which did not require special knowledge about spiders) than those who did not know much about spiders.
I shared this with my oldest daughter, as we often study together while the younger kids are playing. We discussed it and determined that it makes sense to not get hung up on something being mentioned in passing because you already know a lot on a topic and can picture it in your mind with little effort, but to struggle to retain what something is about if it mentions a lot of things you’re trying to picture because you’re not as familiar with them. Perhaps it is easier to envision Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web if as a child you also have watched a real spider build its web, perhaps it is easier to remember the story if you’ve seen or read about how baby spiders hatch. Or, if you’ve had Charlotte’s Web read to you as a child, maybe a technical book on pig husbandry would be easier to retain as an adult. Hirsch includes an example of college students reading a paragraph about Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee and struggling because they had no prior knowledge of who they were and how they related to the Civil War (shocking because these were college students out of Virginia).
I was reminded about a public schooled girl I was working with who had failed her reading portion on her standardized tests. Her phonics were impeccable, but where she struggled was comprehension. When I worked with her, almost every time she struggled to read something it was because she had never heard the word. She didn’t have the vocabulary to support her phonics skills. I advised the family to listen to audiobooks, read stories together at night, talk to each other more, look words up in the dictionary. Children learn the meanings of words by hearing them, then when they see them on paper for the first time while sounding it out… they have a picture in their mind of what that word means, feels like, or how it can be used in different sentences. Kids should always have access to stories above their reading level, so that they can learn grammar structures and vocabulary words organically. Hirsch drives home the idea that you can know how to read and still be illiterate if you don’t know anything about what you’re reading.
I told my daughter how this was interesting to me because my husband had said he thought she didn’t know enough geology to read Hard Road West smoothly, even though I thought it was a very approachable book and that she had a strong foundation in geology. She and I laughed over the time a volunteer at the museum asked her what a specific rock smelled like and the big reveal fell flat when she answered, “Sulfur.” Poor guy deflated and said, “Yes, it’s Sulfur. You must be homeschooled.” Apparently the public school kids her age on field trips liked to shout “Farts!” She was about seven at the time and it is one of her favorite museum memories. (I’m not going to lie, even if I knew it was sulfur at seven, I’d probably have shouted “Farts!” too, but I went to public school.)
“So, why, if you’ve read all the same geology books we read as children, is this geology book difficult? Because I genuinely don’t think it would have been difficult for me at fifteen.” That is when she confessed that the geology books we owned and had spent hours reading… she hadn’t actually been reading them: “I was looking at the pretty rocks. I could tell you the page numbers where all my favorite rocks are, all the prettiest ones, I didn’t read all the stuff…” We genuinely laughed together, two wildly different personalities approaching children’s geology books in wildly different ways. As Charlotte Mason said, “Children are born persons.” But for every moment, like this geology one where she struggles because maybe she didn’t pay as much attention to what was put before her in the past, she has so many where she shines. She catches every Shakespeare reference. Every time. (Hirsch writes a bit about how Shakespeare allusions used to be quite common in all kinds of writing, including business memos, but as of the publication of his book in 1987, that was no longer the case.)
Hirsch’s argument for cultural literacy was never meant to be for homeschool parents to refine the presentation of their educational feasts, his goal is educational reform in the public sector. There is extensive discussion in his book about the struggle to properly regulate education in that if you mandate that schools teach at least two Shakespeare plays there will always be arguments about which two should be selected and that no two districts will choose the same two, therefore knowing who Shakespeare is might be universal, but catching Shakespeare references will vary. (I vote for all the Shakespeare. Every play! All the sonnets!) But I did feel like Hirsch’s essay very much affirmed the education I am providing. Maybe my oldest gets a little bogged down in this particular geology book, but to be fair, it could easily be assigned in a college course, most high school students wouldn’t be reading it between their Homer and Geometry lessons. The paragraph that boggled the minds of the Virginian community college students in the 1980s didn’t phase her, and for that I have hope.
Additional affirmation came when I realized I had owned other books by Hirsch in the past. He’s the one that wrote the series Everything Your ___Grader Needs to Know. My first two years of formal homeschooling (first and second grade), I had read those books out loud the last month of the traditional school year to see if we were covering everything. What I learned was reading those books out loud was a waste of time because a classical Charlotte Mason education is thorough and she not only knew what she needed, but she knew richer versions than the sad paragraphs presented. That was the final nail in the coffin on us ever relying on textbooks. Cultural literacy can be gained from textbooks, but it’s boring and far less effective. The better road to true literacy, in my opinion, is living books. I donated Hirsch’s other books, but I’m keeping Cultural Literacy.
One whole day after finishing Cultural Literacy, I went to our local library to donate a bag of books I was purging from my collection. There on the shelf next to the library bookstore register was E. D. Hirsch’s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, a compilation of all the things the average American graduate should know, for $2. Of course I bought it.
“Also unrealistic is the pragmatist emphasis on individuality, at least as the idea has been institutionalized. The best teaching does accommodate itself to individual differences in temperament, but a child’s temperament does not come freighted with content. To learn a culture is natural to human beings. Children can express individuality only in relation to the traditions of their society, which they have to learn. The greatest human individuality is developed in response to a tradition, not in response to disorderly uncertain, and fragmented education. Americans in their teens and twenties who were brought up under individualistic theories are not less conventional than their predecessors, only less literate, less able to express their individuality.” – E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy, pg. 126.
All About a Face That Launched 1000 Ships
…And a Book That Launched 1000 Rabbit Trails…
Fall of 2025 has been the semester in which my 9th grader has been reading the complete and unabridged Iliad for the first time. We have read picture books, chapter books, and abridged works over the years (Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy, beautifully illustrated by Alan Lee, was probably my favorite), but now we’re nearly in the big leagues (the real big leagues would be reading it in Greek, maybe one day…).
I have maintained my habit of reading something new alongside teaching something old to me over the years, and while re-reading Homer’s Iliad (and listening to the Ascend podcast episodes with the kiddo) I decided to meander through Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore by Bettany Hughes. Meander is the most appropriate word because, like my blog, Hughes’s work frolics about joyfully and a little chaotically. It’s entertaining though repetitive, it’s amusing and long-winded.
Czarney Pies, a Goodreads user, reviewed:
“Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore” is a scatter-gun, scatter-brained work that is nonetheless highly entertaining. Reading it is something like inviting your friends from your undergraduate years over for dinner, plying them generously with alcohol and letting them rant on about whatever literary or artistic idea comes into their minds. History students will express themselves on Beethoven. English lit graduates will give you their opinions on Rabelais while philosophy students will tell you what they think the Federal Reserve Board should do about interest rates. The cacophony is as joyous as it is incoherent. As Hughes herself notes at one point that she may be presenting “a mangle of literary and social references (with a sprinkling of fanstasy [sic]) rather than historical fact.” (pp. 285- 286)
Quite frankly, that is the best description of Hughes’s work that could ever exist, in my opinion. I love this paragraph from Czarney Pies’s review so much I copied it –TWICE– into my commonplace journal. (I didn’t realize I was copying it for a second time until I was halfway through doing it and had a déjà vu moment.)
Pies makes you want to go to that party, and Hughes takes you there. Whether she intended it or not, her Helen magnum opus would be served best over a bottle of wine and a group of chatty nerds. While reading I found myself looking up a lot of paintings I had never seen and re-reading plays I hadn’t touched in decades.
My first rabbit trail was a quote on the top of page eight from Euripides, and I immediately stopped and read Medea and Other Plays from the Oxford University Press World’s Classics series. Translated by James Morwood, the collection highlights the flaws and follies of Grecian women in mythology and includes the plays Medea, Hippolytus, Elektra, and of course, Helen. I had read Medea before and knew about the Lilith/Lamia fashioned child-killer, but Euripides’s depiction of Helen of Troy was new to me. In this version, the adulteress of Troy is presented as a more palatable character who was squirreled away in Egypt for an entire decade long war and was never with Paris at all. The Helen we see in Troy was a phantom Helen created by the gods, and is a victim of circumstance.
Hughes pulls out every myth, legend, play, painting, poem, and tapestry ever known throughout history and discusses them thoroughly. She talks about the things most culturally literate people know off hand and things that only die-hard ancient literature or history buffs have researched. Sometimes treating Helen like a real person, the book takes on a biographical form. Sometimes Hughes detours into fictional fandom and muses on possibilities with whimsy. At all times I can picture Pies’s fictional party spitballing ideas about Helen of Troy, gossiping like pick-a-little-ladies and debating like Mensa meeting attendees.
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A Life With Anne
When I was a child I adored the Anne of Green Gables series. I still do. But the height of me reading through the series was between the ages of 7 and 10, when I knew I could read all eight books in the 19 hour drive from Houston to Denver. I was an avid and precocious reader back then. Now I’m just avid. So color me surprised when I tried to introduce my oldest daughter to Anne during her elementary school years and the book fell flat for her. What we discovered, now that she is totally smitten with the series, is that she didn’t understand the appeal in a character who just sounded exactly like herself. For real, people have commented on how much my kid reminds them of Anne her whole life, but this year is the first year my darling girl has truly delighted in it.
I, apparently, had introduced my dear girl to Anne too soon which was mistake number one regarding my favorite auburn haired heroine (and my life for that matter, despite her being called my mini-me all the time, she is not–in fact–very much like me at all). Mistake number two was assuming everyone else I knew was thoroughly acquainted with her. So when we decided to choose Anne of Avonlea as our first San Salvatore Book Club pick, we were shocked to learn that these women we love and admire had actually never read Anne of Green Gables (some, not all, had watched the Megan Fellows series).
Naturally, I began to approach it as I do teaching. Having been raised on Anne’s beloved Miss Stacy being presented as the ideal teacher (which grew into a love of most things Charlotte Mason as I researched homeschool options), my notes always either begin or end with these questions: What did you notice? What did you wonder? What did you discover? What, if anything, did you find good, true, or beautiful about this book? Are there any other stories you’ve heard or know or read that are echoed in this story?
This post, specifically, is on the first two books and the things I noticed reading the Anne books as a woman in my forties instead of as a girl with a wild imagination.
I love how L. M. Montgomery begins both books with an exotic character. In the first, Anne is the exotic, and in the second Mr. Harrison is our foreign, otherworldly character. He is from elsewhere, new to the neighborhood, and comes with an unruly parrot named Ginger, who reminded me of my Uncle’s macaw, Chicken. Just as Anne asked to called Marilla her aunt in the first book, the opening sequences of Anne of Avonlea includes Mr. Harrison mistakenly calling Marilla Anne’s aunt. In Green Gables, Marilla shuts it down as a falsehood, and in Avonlea, Anne does the same. Harrison and Anne’s exchange regarding the cow invasion mirrors Anne’s first meeting with Rachel Lynde. In the first book, Anne is the outsider throwing a temper tantrum, in the second Anne is established as a true citizen of Avonlea as she suffers a newcomer’s temper tantrum. Montgomery’s alluding to her previous work is beautifully done.
As an adult, I also delighted in Harrison’s stab at Anne’s reading “yellow-jacket” novels. As a child I could visualize the novels perfectly because I grew up haunting antique stores and their book corners. Often, as a child, books were not worth my notice unless they were old, dusty, and had a faint smell of vanilla and moth balls (bonus points if there was a lingering odor of pipe tobacco). As a retired bookseller, this portion hit a bit differently and I laughed out loud. Yellow-jacket (“yellowback”) novels were “railway novels.” They were the equivalent of NY Times Bestselling thrillers or romances perched in a kiosk at an airport terminal (I’d say “today” but I really don’t fly much and I don’t know if people buy airport books these days). They were sensational fiction, much like dime novels, brightly colored (usually yellow) with ads on the back to cover the costs of the printing. Often they were simply cheaper reprints of already popular books. They were in direct competition with the “penny dreadfuls” G. K. Chesterton discusses in his essay A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls. Dracula was one such publication.
I also noticed, diving into the series as an adult, how much the Anne series had saturated the corners of my brain. In my late twenties I wrote two books in what is called The Bookshop Hotel series (book three was written just after I turned thirty, books four and five are still sitting unpublished on my computer). I wrote them under duress and my brain was completely fried, grasping at straws. One of my character’s names is Maud Montgomery. A few years ago I was asked by a reader if I had done that on purpose. I can firmly say, no, I did not. But reading now, I see how my mind had pulled something from a dark corner, something it had known and forgotten, and ran with it. L. M. Montgomery (Lucy Maud), called Maud by her friends, was a deeply religious person who functioned as a caretaker for her mentally ill husband. I can see in hindsight why my mind pulled this name out of the abyss during that time, as I thought I was the caretaker to a mentally unstable alcoholic husband myself. (Turns out, I was wrong, I was actually just a narcissist’s favorite toy. Thank God, that part of my life has passed.) The thread that holds so many of these episodic adventures in Avonlea is often the nuggets of wisdom and religious belief that seep through the pages, the empathy and compassion, the search for the divine, the delight in creation and whimsy.
Another strange moment for me was when I read in Anne of Avonlea:
“I think an old, deserted house is such a sad sight,” said Anne dreamily. “It always seems to me to be thinking about its past and mourning for its old-time joys.”
Leave it to my exhausted brain to also personify a house in my Bookshop series. What we read in childhood truly shapes the way we think.
I was amused to discover how much my parenting seemed to mimic Marilla’s and startled to get to know Miss Stacy as an adult reader. I have been homeschooling my children from the beginning. Public school was never going to be an option for us for many reasons, but as I was reading about Anne’s favorite teacher, whom I had read about hundreds of times in second and third grades, I realized that she embodies all my favorite elements of classical British educators during the turn of the century. More specifically, she has so many qualities Charlotte Mason hailed as correct.
Charlotte Mason lived from 1842-1923 and was known as a turn of the century educational reformer. She established the House of Education in Ambleside in the late 1800’s, which focused on teaching classically but with the added emphasis that “children are born persons.” She wrote a Home Education series I have read several times. When I was using Classical Conversations as a co-op opportunity for my oldest, people often told me I was too “Charlotte Mason.” (Classical Conversations is a nationwide neo-classical homeschool organization based out of North Carolina. There are things I love about their curriculum and things I could do without.) When we tried to connect with Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, die-hard AmblesideOnline families, we were often told we were “too neo-classical.” I now see the truth: we were never Classical Conversations people, nor were we Charlotte Mason followers… my aim has always been Miss Stacy. We are Miss Stacy homeschoolers! We do nature studies, literature based learning, Euclidean geometry. I still use McGuffey’s Readers and Susan Wise Bauer material, while adhering to a lot of AmblesideOnline’s schedules. We have always narrated, as advised by Cindy Rollins and Karen Glass. But in all these details, what I chose to use and what I have discarded, I have shaped my entire homeschool culture off a picture in my mind of the perfect educator–Miss Stacy!– and I wasn’t even aware I was doing it.
My daughter and I read Anne of the Island together, and we will resume the rest of the series soon, but took a break to focus on Homer’s Iliad. I am looking forward to seeing how Anne of Windy Poplars measures up to my memories of it being the best in the whole series, and what other things I notice and wonder, as someone who has been noticing and wondering for a much longer time than when I read it last. I’m excited to see what my real life Anne-girl thinks of her literary counterpart as she reads each book hereafter for the first time as well.
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One More Year of Reading
It has been a year since I last wrote a blog post. The choir girl in me starts humming “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” as soon as I think the words “a year.”
I don’t measure my years in daylights or sunsets or cups of coffee, although I observe, draw, and inhale many of them. This last year was measured in inches grown by my thirteen-year-old, new words spoken by my two-year-old, and the birth of a new baby… and, as always, a lot of books.
After my last post, I re-read the Hunger Games series. I still like it. I hated the prequel fourth book. Naturally, after spending a lot of time discussing totalitarian governments with my middle schooler, I read Larry Correia’s In Defense of the Second Amendment. Everyone should give that one a go. Correia is great.
I read a lot of crap while I was pregnant, at least in the barfing phase. I started purging my shelves of things that I had accumulated for free or cheap over the years but never read. If you haven’t been in the mood to read it in a decade, four moves, and as many 1,000 volume plus purges… you probably don’t want to read the book. I’ve been reading a lot of those books, and giving them away. I’ve donated about a box of books per month this last year, and I plan to keep going. We have exactly the number of bookshelves we will ever have in this house and they are beyond full. Now I curate. I replace the chaff with the gold. I have a lot of “gold” already, I have already decided I do not have the time, patience, or meanness left to write all the bad reviews I have floating in my head. This is not the season of cotton candy fiction, and it shows in my star ratings. This is a season of meat, the books I never want to let go. Still, I’m alternating between reading things I might want to let go with things I know I never will, and organizing my overcrowded shelves of chaos as I do.
In July, two months before I had my third baby, I discovered The Literary Life Podcast. I also discovered that the majority of the books they cover I had either already read before or already owned. I started listening to the podcast voraciously. Around the third trimester of all my pregnancies, my mind begins to “itch,” I start studying anything and everything. My mind can’t be still. I have to learn when there is a baby on the way. The truth is, I’m perpetually desperate for a book club or to go back to school and earn a few useless degrees, and the Lit Life group is the next best thing.
I loved Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers. It was not one of the Lord Peter Wimsey’s that I had read before the podcast, so that was a real treat. I started re-reading all my G. K. Chesterton titles because they talk about him quite a bit. I was teaching Saint Francis of Assisi, so I read Chesterton’s biography. Surprised by Oxford by Weber came up, so I had to read that one as well. I still haven’t seen the movie, but I would like to. I moved all my Inklings-related titles to my bedroom, so they’d be closer to me when I was nursing. I’ve now listened to over a hundred podcast episodes.
The baby came nearly a month before she was due. She’s perfect. She’s an infant wrapped in a blanket of E. M. Forster stories, C. S. Lewis essays, and Shakespeare plays. My oldest helps set the tone of our homeschool as we study together, and the two-year-old interrupts to have us read to him as well. We are a house of books, and it is my dream come true. I’ve been reading something by Madeleine L’Engle at all times and decided to do it until I’ve read all her work.
I bought Cindy Rollins’s Morning Time book, and have implemented a more consistent and orderly way of doing ours. Her thoughtful reminders and lists have been a blessing. That led to us also using her Hallelujah book for advent. It’s truly lovely and I have enjoyed incorporating fine arts into our worship this way, as I always thought they should go hand in hand.
I will try to write more than once a year. As it is, this post is hardly about anything at all, other than I noticed it was February 15th and that I hadn’t written one since last February 15th. I will try to write something thoughtful about the books I have read another day, but I will admit it isn’t my priority these days. I keep this blog because I have always kept it, but my children are in my care for only so long and I am a homeschool mom. We have reading to do. When I remember, I will share it with you.
Anthropology of Reading
Anthropology
[an-thruh-pol-uh-jee]
noun
1. the science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind.
2. the study of human beings’ similarity to and divergence from other animals.
3. the science of humans and their works.
4. Also called philosophical anthropology. the study of the nature and essence of humankind.
Origin:
1585–95; anthropo- + -logy
Reading
[ree-ding]
noun
1. the action or practice of a person who reads.
2. Speech. the oral interpretation of written language.
3. the interpretation given in the performance of a dramatic part, musical composition, etc.: an interesting reading of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.
4. the extent to which a person has read; literary knowledge: a man of wide reading.
5. matter read or for reading: a novel that makes good reading.
This is a challenging post, in that I could talk for days and days, possibly write a whole website dedicated to the topic, so I’m going to do my best to remain concise and not chase too many rabbits.
The blogger of So Many Books wrote a post about the Anthropology of Read, which I reblogged (click the link and it will take you there). Follow that post even further and the blogger wrote another on Auden’s Eden Meme. Combining these two posts into one thought, this is my anthropological response concerning my reading habits.
“Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures that we enjoy, it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s. All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes. So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dreams of Eden are his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments.” – from Auden’s “Reading”
So following Auden’s checklist, here is my Eden:
Landscape
Mountains that butt up against a beach, with open fields in between. I like oceans that beat against cliffs, good soil to plant, large trees to climb, and somehow still manage to lay in the sand whenever I want. Take about 10 acres of the Rocky Mountains and stick them in the Florida Keys. If you manage to surround it all with Texas landscape that would be even better. Clearly, it’s a dream world.
Climate
70 year round, I’ll take an occasional hot summer in the 90’s to 100’s. After all, I’m a born and raised Texan.
Ethnic Origin of Inhabitants
I’m a big fan of melting pots.
Language
“English will be the official language but all languages are encouraged (even Elvish and Klingon) and everyone should know more than one.” That’s a direct quote from the So Many Books response to Auden. I see no need to alter that statement in any way.
Weights and Measures
I’m not concerned with this. I’ll let someone who cares decide.
Religion
I’m a Christian hippie. I’ll take Jesus with a side of dirt & trees.
Size of Capital
Small indeed. Close, personal friends. If I want a break from this closeness, I’ll take a vacation out of Eden.
Form of Government
In very small governments, I’m ok with elected monarchies with limited terms. I like to call a spade a spade, and in my research I never see true democracy at work, it’s always bastardized into an oligarchy or some other nonsense.
Sources of Natural Power
Wind, water, solar… the idea that anything was ever anything but amazes me. Wind turbines, watermills, solar panels, this makes sense to me.
Economic Activities
Farming, arts and humanities. Science would remain of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang variety. I think science is cool, but a lack of tech would be such a nice reprieve from the rest of the world.
Means of Transport
Bicycles, boats, hiking and swimming. Of course, from the mountains to the beach and over some landscape… that requires at least one community zipline. Also, I love horses and would definitely encourage horseback riding.
Architecture
Self-sustained, energy efficient estates. Design – To each their own. Although, I see a lot of bungalows, Victorian estates, farmhouses, and hobbit holes.
Domestic Furniture and Equipment
Again, to each their own, but made by hand is a marvelous thing. In the kitchen, all I need is an oven, a French press, and a coffee bean grinder. If someone slipped me a bread machine, though, I wouldn’t complain.
Formal Dress
Simplicity makes me happy. But again, to each their own. If someone likes frills, I have no desire to stop them. There would probably be an abundance of denim and cotton in my Eden though.
Sources of Public Information
Newspapers, journals, and gatherings over food at a meeting house. My population is quite small, remember?
Public Statues
This would be up to the people. I see gnomes and literary-like shrines in public gardens.
Public Entertainment
Choirs, street theatre, and public readings of important books. Book clubs and bands… I come from a Baptist background, so weekly potlucks are sort of a must.
If this is my Eden… If this is end result of my reading… if 30 years of a life devouring books has brought me to this, where did I begin? How did I evolve?
Anthropology… archeology… the two go a bit hand in hand to me. I would like to go back to school and get a Baccalaureate in Anthropology & Archeology. I love that niche of history and science. I always thought the Indiana Joneses of the world were the most amazing. Amelia Peabody… As a child I was riveted by adventures, but was still very much a typical girl – no, correction, a typical tomboy with girlish tendencies.
I read an awful lot of Nancy Drew. I liked historical things like Little Women and Gentle Annie. Jo March, of course, my favorite of the sisters; Gentle Annie was a civil war nurse running out into the battlefield in the face of danger. I was, and still am, fascinated by doers.
Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra intrigue me, but I have a literary foundation in all things Jane Austen – the fierce butting heads with the feminine.
My reading is much like my real life – a black belt, with hair usually down to her butt, who loves to get her toes done. I look for brave warriors who want to bask in the sun with some flowers. I desire the intelligence to drive to take care of people, protect them both in battle and emotionally by serving them foodstuffs and coffee. Because this is who I am, this is what I look for in my reading – in fiction, in history, in science, in all of it. I try to find people in all the thousands of years of literature, who are (as Anne Shirley would say) kindred spirits.
Reading List 2013
Every end of December I post the list of what I have read that year. Most titles have corresponding reviews here on my blog. Some do not.
Obviously I read a lot of books out loud to my child. The ones I have included on the list are the chapter books. Our daily dose of picture books are left unlisted because that would just get ridiculous, although they take up a huge chunk of my day. (Note: The Magic Tree House & Reading Guide listings are two separate MTH books that correspond in subject. Because they are such short children’s books, I make them share a number. It takes me about four hours to read each pair out loud.)
1. The Prominence League – C. David Cannon (January)
2. If These Walls Had Ears – James Morgan (January)
3. March – Geraldine Brooks (January)
4. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Dinosaurs – Osborne (January)
5. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Knights – Osborne (January)
6. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Mummies – Osborne (January)
7. The Small Room – May Sarton (February)
8. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Pirates – Osborne (February)
9. Lords of Finance – Liaquat Ahamed (March)
10. The Secret of Lost Things – Sheridan Hay (March)
11. God’s Love – Calvert Tynes (March)
12. Eden’s Outcasts – John Matteson (March)
13. Inheritance – Louisa May Alcott (March)
14. The Wild Girls – Pat Murphy (March)
15. Fizz & Peppers – M.G. King (March)
16. On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan (April)
17. Magic Tree House: Ninjas & MTH: Rainforests – Osborne (April)
18. Lunch in Paris – Elizabeth Bard (April)
19. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Sabertooths – Osborne (April)
20. The History of the Ancient World – Bauer (April)
21. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Moon & Space – Osborne (April)
22. Lessons Learned – Andrea Schwartz (April)
23. Bitch Factor – Chris Rogers (April)
24. Teres – Gershom Wetzel (April)
25. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers (May)
26. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Dolphins & Sharks – Osborne (May)
27. The Hunger Games – Collins (May)
28. Catching Fire – Collins (May)
29. Mockingjay – Collins (May)
30. Don’t Die By Your Own Hands – Holmes (May)
31. Slice of Life – Chris Rogers (May)
32. Magic Tree Houses: Ghost Towns/ Lions – Osborne (May)
33. The Princess Bride – Goldman (June)
34. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Polar Bears – Osborne (June)
35. Born to Run – Christopher McDougall (June)
36. Storybound – Marissa Burt (June)
37. The Prominence League II – Canon (June)
38. The Distant Hours – Kate Morton (June)
39. John Adams – John McCullough (July)
40. Magic Tree House & Reading Guide: Pompeii & Rome – Osborne (July)
& Magic School Bus: Volcanoes
41. Spindown – George Padgett (July)
42. The Cry of the Icemark – Stuart Hill (July)
43. The Color Purple – Alice Walker (July)
Magic Tree House: Day of the Dragon King – Osborne (July)
44. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster (August)
45. Letters to the Granddaughter – Schubert (August)
46. Over Sea, Under Stone – Cooper (August)
47. The Gospel According to Starbucks – Sweet (August)
48. Aphrodesia – John Oehler (August)
49. The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan (August)
50. My Antonia – Willa Cather (September)
51. Magic Tree House & Reading Guides – Osborne (September)
52. Surprised by Joy – C.S. Lewis (September)
53. Love is a Choice – Minirth (September)
54. Thomas Jefferson: Art of Power – Meacham (October)
55. Going Native: Biodiversity (October)
56. Just One Evil Act – Elizabeth George (October)
57. The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion (October)
58. The Evolution of Jane – Cathleen Schine (October)
59. The Immortal Class – T.H. Culley (October)
60. Aspects of the Novel – E. M. Forster (October)
61. Death Without Cause – Pamela Triolo (November)
62. Player Piano – Vonnegut (November)
63. Seed Savers: Heirloom – S. Smith (November)
64. The Bookshop Hotel – A.K. Klemm [yes, I re-read my own book as I’m currently writing the sequel] (November)
65. The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell (December)
66. Harbinger of Evil – Meb Bryant (December)
67. Confessions – Saint Augustine (All Year)
68. Been There, Done That, Really! – Paulette Camnetar Meeks (December)
69. The Secret Keeper – Kate Morton (December)
“Can’t believe I didn’t hit 70 this year. I’ve been slacking!” I lamented. Then, when I went to grab the next Magic Tree House selection, I realized I never documented The Titanic Unit.
70. MTH #17 & Research Guide: Titanic – Osborne (some time in the Fall 2013)
– Books Piled Around My House Unfinished –
I am notorious for starting books and leaving them willy nilly somewhere until the mood strikes me to pick it up again. So where it is not uncommon for me to read a book in one sitting, it is also not uncommon for a book I like to take months or even years for me to finish reading because I’m waiting for that right moment to dive in. Like a real-life vacation, sometimes you want to be in a cabin in the mountains and sometimes you want to be on the beach in Fiji. It doesn’t mean you don’t like mountains and it doesn’t mean the beach is awful, it just means that: if you’re in the mood for mountains why would you go to the beach? Because I have reached that point in my life as a reader that if I hate it, I won’t bother setting it aside… I’ll just get rid of it.
My goal for the New Year is to polish off more of these before starting (and temporarily abandoning) too many others. Because these are books I actually really like, I’m just waiting for those magical moments when I know I’ll enjoy them best to return. What’s ridiculous about the books on this list is that I am about halfway through all of these books.
* If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino
* Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Clarke
* Freddy and Fredericka – Helprin
* The Path Between the Seas – David McCullough
* Storyteller – Sturrock (this one is actually amazing! I started reading it in November and I’m still picking my way through it)
* The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (still reading this aloud to the kiddo every night before bed)
* The Lacuna – Kingsolver (reading this for the January Half Price Books Humble Book Club meeting, should be done by the end of the week)
Anakalian Whims 