We just read Pinkalicious by sisters Victoria Kann & Elizabeth Kann. We enjoyed Goldilicious so much that we wanted to read this one, which was actually published first. Now, we’ll just have to get our hands on Purplicious, and our “licious” life will be complete.
I just finished reading Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber. What a great mystery and thriller! I read her book Crescent (enjoyed it very much), which had a completely different feel to it. Abu-Jaber is a wonderful writer. I love her descriptions.
Did you know there’s a Little House on the Prairie Cookbook? It’s called The Little House Cookbook: Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories by Barbara M. Walker and illustrated by Garth Williams. This would be a great addition to our Little House library.
Anne-Marie Nichols wrote about it at her blog, This Mama Cooks! She has lots of great information, recipes and lists of other books and activities to celebrate reading in March.
So I’m on page 13 of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, thoroughly enjoying myself and the way she writes, thinking, “Hey, I really like this author.” Can anyone tell me why I’ve never read her before? Ah well. At least now I know what I was missing.
I just finished reading Salt Dancers by Ursula Hegi. It’s the story of Julia, who revisits dark family issues when she travels from one coast to the other to return home after more than 20 years away. She wants to understand what went wrong with her family so she can avoid that with the child she’s expecting. It’s haunting and painful, yet it’s also hopeful. And, oh, so familiar.
Magpie Musing makes me think. She also makes me happy. She’s inspired me (again), this time to think about what makes me happy. Here’s a list.
“Nothing is more human than a book.” ~ Marilynne Robinson, The Paris Review, Issue 186, Fall 2008.
Our next Read a Million Minutes book was Pancakes, Pancakes! by Eric Carle. This is one of my son’s favorite authors.
Our next Read a Million Minutes selection was Snow Day! by Patricia Lakin. Fun read and appropriate for our winter.
Our next Read a Million Minutes book was Dewey: There’s a Cat in the Library! by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter, illustrated by Steve James. This was a SHE WRITES book. It’s also the children’s version of Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World.
I just finished reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Wow. Could it be any more different than Gilead? I don’t think so. Gilead was about a dying man writing to his son, yet each page was filled with joy and hope. Housekeeping was about two sisters growing up together, and each page was filled with abandonment, separation, growing apart and dark, dark, dark things. It was SO sad and depressing.
No matter what the topic, though, Robinson is a master at putting words together. Just a few quotes that stood out for me.
It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, ‘Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.’ Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hit in its shadows.
Then there is the matter of my mother’s abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
I’m reading her book Home right now.
