Category Archives: books

Little house, big woods

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Mabel is just at that point where some nights she’ll enjoy a chapter book, but other times she wants to stick to something old and familiar with lots of pictures. We read the first two Narnia books and got stuck on the third; we read Charlie but she got bored with the Great Glass Elevator . I follow her lead for bedtime reading. There’s plenty of time to get to the good stuff.

Last week in the thrift store I happened to briefly browse the books, wondering if I could pick up the first Harry Potter to have on the shelf for Dash, whenever we deem him ready or he decides to read it himself (I own them all, in hardback, of course, but it seems volumes 1-5 are in Dublin just now). I didn’t find it, but I did spot a copy of Little House in the Big Woods . I checked the inside to make sure it was the first of the series, and then I bought it.

I remember Little House on the Prairie very well. One of the strongest TV memories of my childhood is the way the little girls ran and rolled down the hill in the opening credits; I’m pretty sure I spent years scrutinizing them and deciding which one was the same size as I was at that particular moment. I remember Pa Ingalls with his fine head of hair, and the girls’ petticoats, and mean Nancy with her blue dress and her preposterous golden ringlets. (Those characters set the stage for my interpretation of the Anne books, I realise now, even though the landscape must have been vastly different. The clothes might have been roughly right.)

However, I’ve never read the books. They didn’t seem to be Irish staples the way they are here, though I know some, maybe many, people there will have read them. I don’t think they were on the bookshelves when I was spending my book tokens or browsing the library, because I’m sure I would have picked them up. Maybe they were under biography rather than fiction, where I would not have looked.

So Mabel and I are just about to finish this first of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, and I must say it’s been an education. Mabel likes it because the little girl is five, like her, and has a doll, like her. But she listens intently to the long descriptions of a life I can only begin to imagine, and examines the pictures, and takes it all in even as I’m trying hard to understand what particular part of pioneer life is being described now. We’ve learned about slaughtering pigs, and how to make sausages, and how to make straw hats, and that you have to kill a calf for the rennet to make cheese, and tonight we learned about the threshing machine that literally harnessed eight horses for the “horsepower.” At least, I learned that. I think Mabel may have dropped off before I got to that bit.

I almost feel as if reading this should have been a requirement of my naturalization ceremony. It’s given me an appreciation and understanding of life for the country’s earlier inhabitants that was a total blank slate for me before. And of course, this is a very happy memoir that barely scratches the surface of what things were really like; I know the books get harder and darker, and I don’t think we’ll be rushing headlong through the rest of the series as soon as we’re done with this one.

For one thing, I think I want to pre-screen them for myself.

Our copy of Little House in the Big Woods

Eager reader

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Yesterday we went to a bookstore (and not to Columbia Mall, where we might easily have thought of going, but that’s another blog post entirely) because B had finished reading the last of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books to Dash (with appropriate substitutions/omissions for the mildly rude bits) and needed something new for bedtime. New toys are a Christmas-and-birthday (and star chart and dentist) thing, but new books can happen just because, sometimes.

For his own reading, Dash has been working his way through the Magic Treehouse books, which seem to be just the right level and just exciting enough for his abilities and his tastes. (They’re all in the library.) He’s only on book 7 and with number 52 in the series due out in May I think they’ll keep him going for a long time; but on the other hand if something else were to pique his interest I was happy to buy that for him.

So we found two books of a series called The A to Z Mysteries that looked intriguing, and I got him a National Geographic Kids book about butterflies too. I bought Mabel a Frozen easy reader so she can look at pictures of her beloved Anna and Elsa to her heart’s delight, and maybe sound out some words, because she can do that now, a little. And we bought The Mysterious Benedict Society for bedtime reading. It’s nice and long and won prizes and I think I’ve heard of it, so I hope it turns out to be appropriate, since I know that’s a bit of a shot in the dark.

Then we went to have coffee and share a giant chocolate chip cookie. Dash and Mabel were comparing the pictures on their little cartons of vanilla/chocolate milk. I suggested that Dash read what it said on the back, because there was some kid-oriented information about cows, or milk, or something. He glanced at it, and gave up instantly.

“Mom,” he said, “I just got THREE BOOKS.” The implication being that if I was expecting him to read all those words at some future date, he certainly wasn’t going to exert himself by reading the back of a milk carton now.

I was a little disheartened. If it’s that hard to read the back of the milk, I thought, how hard must it be? How much of an effort must he be making every evening when he sits down to read his chapter? What’s it like to look at words and not just instantly understand what they say?

This morning he sat down with his current Magic Treehouse and polished off the last three chapters, just like that.

I should lay off worrying, I think.

Grandad’s bedtime stories

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My late father-in-law used to tell bedtime stories to his children. And rather than have to think up something new every time, he had some stock characters and some particular scenarios that would be told over and over again. And because he was that sort of person, at some point he typed them up.

Sadly, he died when his first grandchild was only a few months old, and before I had even met my husband. But the stories have persisted. About ten years ago my sisters-in-law put the stories together in several sets of photocopied pages illustrated by that same first grandchild and held them together with comb binding. It was a lovely thing to have and as my children have grown older they’ve loved their grandfather’s special stories.

But the typed pages were getting was so old that some of the words were practically illegible, and the binding was starting to fall apart. I decided it was time for a third iteration, and went looking for some technology to help me.

A little Googling brought me to Blurb.com , which will print hard- or soft-cover books for you, as many or as few as you want, with lots of photos or none at all. It’s a step up from making a photo book in Shutterfly (as I have done several times), and it seemed to be the only option out there for something that was mostly text, which was what I needed.

So I spent a few evenings in November typing out the thirteen stories, and several more frustrating nights trying to typeset it to my satisfaction. You download the Blurb program and work on your own computer rather than saving things online, but even so I had trouble with the application and lost my work many times, which was pretty frustrating. I can’t honestly give it a five-star review for this reason, but on the other hand I didn’t try calling the customer service, so maybe I shouldn’t blame them. There might have been a simple fix I didn’t know about.

Anyway, I wanted them to be done in time for Christmas, so I didn’t spend quite as much time as I should have making sure it was all perfect. I chose a colour for the cover, uploaded some photos, and sent the whole thing to Blurb with my order for one book for each branch of the family. And a couple of weeks later I was the happy recipient of five nicely made hardback books of stories that, in spite of a total lack of any design talent on my part, are immeasurably precious to my husband and his siblings.

I love that we can do this. Flying cars are all very well, but being able to make a book from the comfort of my sofa and send it to my family is really wonderful. I love that my children can read their grandfather’s words and continue to hand down this little piece of family history. Blurb ships to all over the world, so if you want to do something similar, it might be worth a shot.

This is not a review of Blurb, as such. I just thought it was such a nice thing, and I was so pleased with it (inevitable crazy-making typos notwithstanding), that I wanted to show you what I had made. I paid for my books just like everyone else.

Booking it

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I know the calendar says it’s seven days from Christmas to New Year’s, but it doesn’t feel that way. Those last few days of the year slip away in a blur of mince pies and gingerbread and brunch and late lunch and no-point-making-a-proper-dinner again today, and before you know it everyone’s posting reviews of the year about-to-be-ended and resolutions for the next and we’re all only raring to tear down the decorations and see the lovely white walls and feel clean and unsullied and eat a lot of broccoli; but first I’d better finish up these cookies and there’s all that cheesecake still to go and you may as well have a glass of wine while it’s here.

Last year, everyone annoyed me by listing the books they had read in 2012, and I was mostly annoyed because I had hardly read any, and had no record of them, and had never heard of all these books other people were reading. So, of course, I decided to keep my own list this year.

I didn’t keep it online on LibraryThing or GoodReads or even in a draft post or a Word document. I kept it in the notebook where I keep my lists, under the small notebook for shopping lists, on top of whatever other sheets of paper I happen to have shoved into that corner of the kitchen for “safekeeping.” And I kept it safe all year and even remembered to add to it as time went on.

Here it is, complete with Mabel-addendum at the bottom of the page. I read 23 books in 2013. It’s not many, but it may be more than I’ve read any year since 2006. (Dash is 7. You do the math.) Much as my in-theatre movie viewing dropped dramatically after April of that year, so did my book consumption. But there’s hope for both: I have been to the cinema three times this Christmas break. (Twice for Frozen and once for Catching Fire .)

And this is the transcript, in chronological order:

Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth
Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants
Rumer Godden: The Greengage Summer
AM Homes: May We Be Forgiven
Emma McEvoy: The Inbetween People
Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass , The Subtle Knife , The Amber Spyglass
F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Dorothy L Sayers: Strong Poison , Have His Carcass , Gaudy Night , Busman’s Honeymoon
Connie Willis: Blackout , All Clear
Marian Keyes: The Mystery of Mercy Close
Dick Francis: Flying Finish , Break In
Marian Keyes: Anybody Out There
Eoin Colfer: Artemis Fowl
Melissa Ford: Life From Scratch , Measure of Love
Susan Cooper: The Boggart

To make this more interesting (for me), I expressed my thoughts on this reading in pie charts. Because pie improves everything.

Pie chart: 13 out of 23 were books I'd read before

The main thing to note is how many of these books were not new to my eyes. In fact, this is a pretty high percentage of first-time reads for me; normally I retreat into authors I know and love for much more of the year. I feel I branched out this year.

The branching out was in part due to last year’s Christmas presents – some of the early books in the year featured in the pile o’ books we brought back from Dublin last January -

Three of the books were by people I know

… and also because I am apparently at the age where people I actually know in real life have written books. I went to school with Emma McEvoy, and met Melissa Ford at BlogHer. (She writes a great blog too.)

Six of them would fall into the teen/junior fiction category

I like teen fiction, or even tween fiction. I’m looking for things Dash might enjoy soon, or in a while, so I picked up the first two Artemis Fowl books at a sale and have just started the second. I took The Boggart out of the library when I saw it was a new(ish) Susan Cooper.

I’m not counting books I read with the children, though I have recently gone through all of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian with Mabel, as well as some book about rescue princesses. ( Charlotte’s Web didn’t stick after the first few chapters.) We’re on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at the moment, and that’s going well. In general, I read to her at bedtime and B does Dash. I probably should have kept a record of their books this year too, because it included The Hobbit and all of Narnia , as well as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , quite a lot of Dahl, and two Swallows and Amazons books.

What’s the best book you read this year? I have to put the two Connie Willis volumes (which make one story) at the top. I devoured it and look forward to reading it again. Maybe next, actually …

Siblings Without Rivalry

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And here’s that post about the book.

I’m finally reading , after two people mentioned it to me in the space of a few days and I decided it was A Sign. I know I should have read it years ago, possibly as soon as we had Mabel, but there you go, I didn’t.

It was written by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, who wrote the laboriously titled but very helpful How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk . You may remember me raving about one of its techniques last year when Dash was stuck in the terrible six-and-a-halfs. Siblings Without Rivalry takes much of the same material, but applies it specifically to situations that come up between siblings. It’s really quite eye-opening.

On Saturday morning I was reading it at the breakfast table as Dash and Mabel fought their way around the house, disagreeing over what or how to play, bugging each other, pinching and hitting and screaming and then laughing again. I called them over and asked Dash to read the title of my book. He spelled it out. They remembered what “siblings” meant, but I had to explain “rivalry.”

“I’m reading this so that I can figure out how to stop you two fighting,” I said. They were impressed that I had to read a book to discover such a thing. Dash grabbed the book and sat down at the other end of the table, opening it at the first page and starting to read.

“I’m going to find out what it tells you, so we can not do it,” he said, with an evil grin.

I was delighted to see him reading, so I did the washing up and left him to it.

****************

Anyway, I thought I’d share my notes, since I have to bring the book back to the library soon. I recommend reading the whole thing to understand where the authors are coming from and see lots of examples of these techniques in action. The book also shows them in cartoon form, which makes it quick to read and easy to remember.

Siblings are essentially always in competition for their parents’ love/time/attention. As soon as you take sides in a dispute or punish one for hurting the other, you are building resentment and rivalry, and therefore making things worse.
When they complain about their sibs, you should verbalize how they’re feeling for them: “You sound furious.” “It makes you mad when he does that.” Acknowledge how they feel about each other.
Encourage them to express their feelings with words: “Tell him how you feel.” “Let him know how mad you are with words.”
Tell the other one why you’re listening to the one right now: e.g.,
- Mabel, interrupting: I have to tell you this thing.
- Me: I know you do, but right now I’m listening to Dash tell me about school. I know it’s important to him so I want to hear it. Then I can listen to what you need to tell me.

Treat them uniquely, not equally. They get the things they need when they need them; they don’t both get things at the same time just because. (I’m not sure that “because Mom went to Target and I was with her and I whined” counts as needing something, exactly.)
Don’t cast them into roles, and don’t let them do it to each other. Tell them how you want them to be:
“I know that Dash is generous, so I’m sure he’ll give you a turn when he’s done with it.”
Or, better, “I know you’re both smart, so you can work out a solution to this.”
Then leave the room so that they don’t act up for your benefit.

Never compare, even favourably. It reinforces perceived roles and encourages resentment between sibs. When one comes tattling about the other, say “I don’t want to hear about him right now. Tell me about you.”

Encourage teamwork rather than pitting them against one another. So “Let’s see if you can work together to tidy up before the timer goes off” rather than “Who can pick up all the toys first?” I am so guilty of saying this. You know why? Because it works! (But it’s bad. Bad Mommy.)
When they’re fighting and it’s escalating, state the problem and tell them you expect them to work it out. No tolerance for hurting. If one is in danger, separate them.
If they can’t work it out, sit down and make a list with both of them, the way we did for one with How to Talk so Kids Will Listen .

I think I need to print this list out and tape it to my fridge.

Sibling revelry

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Mabel had a tantrum over the little teddy bear beside the checkout in the supermarket that I wouldn’t buy for her. I was being wonderfully patient and gentle with all my “No’s” until finally I just had to wrestle her to the floor and pry it out of her hands. Perfect.

I’m reading Siblings Without Rivalry just now. I was trying to write up my notes to make a useful post for you lovely people (and for me to come back to, seeing as how it belongs to the library) but the children are thwarting me at every turn.

I tried to keep the TV turned off today when Dash came home from school, because TV time has been expanding exponentially lately and we need a moratorium. Pretty soon, he was complaining of boredom. I decided to use some of the techniques from the book:

“I know that you are a resourceful and smart person, Dash. You can think of something new to do.”
“How do you know I’m resourceful? Give me an example of a time when I was resourceful,” he countered.
What is this, a job interview? I don’t know. Probably some time when you got up to mischief and didn’t want me to know about it. Sheesh. I didn’t say any of that, but it was admittedly tricky enough to think of something. Evidently all the TV has been quashing his opportunities for resourcefulness.

I ignored him and Mabel some more.

Then there was some interval when they were both standing on the kitchen table, which hardly seemed safe, and the next time I looked into the room Mabel was throwing off all her clothes while Dash held her upside down by the legs.

I turned the TV on. Some days it’s the only thing that stands between us all and bodily harm.

The secret life of books

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I started reading Charlotte’s Web to Mabel last night. She’s heard bits of it before, when B was reading it to Dash about a year (or more) ago, and she was concerned that she wouldn’t like it. She asked me to promise before we started that the pig doesn’t die. I said he didn’t.

I didn’t mention the spider.

I love reading books I loved to my children; but more than that, I really love having the exact copies I read to pass on to them. There’s so much history there. Even if some of it isn’t even mine. Case in point, this edition.

I’m pretty sure I bought it at my local second-hand bookshop (the wonderful and sadly now defunct Exchange , in Dalkey). I couldn’t tell you when, but I might have been around ten. It probably cost about 25p. It’s a 1976 edition, and still has its original pricetag on the back:

Original price tag saying APCK Bookshop and 49 1/2 p.

I don’t know where or what the APCK bookshop was, but I love that it was 49 and a half pence. The halves mattered.

On the inside, the plot thickens, because there’s this:

Stamp on inside front page saying "Mount Anville Junior School Library"

This is a nuns’ book!

And further, this, written with one of those invisible-ink pens that didn’t show up until you rubbed the other end over where you’d written. I had one of those pens, but Thomas Galin (sp?) is not me.

Immature cursive writing: "Read by Thomas Galin"

For some reason, I never wrote my own name in, but I can guarantee that it has been sitting on my bookshelf for longer than it sat in the library of the junior school at Mount Anville or on the shelves of one Thomas Galin. And now it can sit on one of my children’s shelves, at least for a while.

******

I hope she doesn’t get upset about the spider.

Ancient history

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I like Connie Willis. If you’ve never heard of Connie Willis, well, you’re just like the guy in my local bookshop, except that you probably don’t work in a bookshop so the fact that she’s a really great and popular and quite prolific fantasy writer is not a travesty. But he , he was a travesty. I don’t know why Books-A-Million is still alive when all the Borders Books in the area have closed down.

Anyway. This is a very long lead-in to what will probably turn out to no longer be a remotely funny anecdote when I finally get around to it. And I’m not there yet, you’ll have to wait.

I don’t get in a lot of reading these days, and when I do it goes in fits and starts. It’s usually an author I know and love, because I don’t have the patience right now to try out books that might be anything less than great. I’ll happily re-read old favourites rather than attempt something new – hence the total revisiting of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey’s relationship earlier this year. But I discovered that Connie Willis had written a new* book – in fact, two – and put them on my birthday list. B gave me Blackout for my birthday, and I saved it to read on the way to BlogHer. I finished it last week and discovered that it’s not so much the first in a series of two, as half a story, the other half of which is another whole (even fatter) book called All Clear . So of course I had to get my hands on All Clear ASAP, without even waiting for Amazon.

This is why we ended up visiting two bookshops in two days, and why Dash ended up getting two new books in two days, even though there’s a perfectly lovely library with plenty of reading matter right there in our town. (Mabel also got one new book.) The first bookshop didn’t have any Connie Willis at all (see above), but Dash still had to get something, and he chose a National Geographic Kids book on tigers. The next day in a much better-stocked Barnes & Noble, he picked up a National Geographic Kids book on Martin Luther King and was all excited, so who was I to deny my son the reluctant reader such an educational item?

[Here, just to keep up the thrilling suspense (ahem), let me mention how great those National Geographic Kids books are. Dash is a bright, curious kid with a great vocabulary, but his reading level is not high. So trying to keep him engaged with a book that's easy enough for him not to stumble over every word is often a struggle, because so many of the first readers are insultingly simple. He likes the "I Can Read" superhero books, and they are at a good (easy) level for him, but he also has a selection of the National Geographic ones, and those are what he looks for now in the bookstore.

]

Oh God, now I’ve built it up so much that I’m afraid to tell my piddly little story.

Anyway.

Schoolkids in America know all about Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement is heavily featured in kindergarten, if not before. Even the nursery-school attendees know about him, thanks to Martin Luther King day in January every year. As an Irish schoolchild, I did not have Martin Luther King anywhere on my radar, but I must have heard his name somewhere along the line.

So at the start of secondary school (seventh grade) our history teacher began by looking at the pictures on the front cover of our textbook, Renaissance and Reformation, I think it was called, and asking if anyone knew what was depicted. Looking at a drawing of an oldy-timey man with long hair hammering a scroll to a wooden door, something I had seen or read elsewhere came back to me, and I tentatively raised my hand.

“Yes, Maud?”
I was diffident but smug: “Is it Martin Luther… King?”

As I said the first two words, it had occurred to me that there was often another one appended. Adding the “King” was an afterthought, really. I thought it would make me sound even cleverer.

Sadly, one word makes all the difference. My teacher went from admiration to amusement in the space of that single syllable. (Though really, she should have been doubly impressed: I knew two historical people, after all, even if I didn’t realise it myself.)

This morning I was recounting the story to B, who somehow had never heard it before. Dash wanted to know as well. “You knew about Martin Luther King too ?” he asked, incredulous.

Whereupon B had to get all smartypants: “Martin Luther King TWO? There’s a sequel? ‘He’s back and he’s mad .’”

*New as in three years ago, apparently.

Curiosity

Required reading

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You might wonder why our suitcases coming back were so heavy, especially considering the biggest new/reclaimed items we returned with were unwieldy but comparatively lightweight: one foot-high stuffed reindeer, one ukelele, and an extra doll.

But then, there was this little haul:

Yes, we picked up a couple of books along the way.

You’ll note that many of these do not look new. In fact, some are positively antique. That’s because I have this little habit of raiding the bookshelves in “my” bedroom at my parents’ house when I’m back and removing some of the most meaningful items in case some day everything gets somehow disbursed to a charity shop before I can reclaim it. Additionally, in a fit of nostalgia, B rescued a stack of his old beloved Asterix and Tin-Tin comics from his nephew, on whom he’d bestowed them in 1999 when he emigrated. He was always concerned that said nephew did not fully appreciate them, but in fact his mistrust was misplaced – nephew had enjoyed the stories and kept them through a house move – but now was happy to give them back to someone with safer hoarding tendencies.

Shall I catalogue the whole bunch for you? Oh, okay then…

Left-hand column, from the bottom:

sundry Asterix es
sundry Tin-Tin s
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth
AM Homes, May We Be Forgiven
Exploring English 1
Roald Dahl, The BFG
Two Mr Men books
Roald Dahl, James and the Giant Peach

The two novels are a present from my sister-in-law, who is knowledgeable about books. She was delighted to hear I hadn’t read them, but it’s not really that much of a surprise since the only books I read last year were probably a few tried and trusted Dick Francises .

Exploring English was the Inter-Cert short-story collection – that is, B and I and every other 15-year-old in Ireland studied many of its stories. It’s a really great selection of Irish and other fiction, and now holds pride of place beside our copy of Soundings (the original, scribbled full of notes; not the recent reprint).

I bought the Dahls because Dash is really getting into this chapter book thing, and several items from his cousin’s bookshelf were eagerly consumed (via reading out loud by someone else, I mean) over the break. I produced James and the Giant Peach at the airport yesterday morning, and this happened:

And this,

And also this

All that got him triumphantly to the end of the first paragraph, and he hadn’t actually retained any of the information, but it’s a good bit above his reading level, and anyway, it’s the intention that delights me. We did read some of it to him as well.

Anyway. The right-hand stack, bottom to top, goes as follows:

Deb Perelman, The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook
Marian Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close
JRR Tolkein, The Hobbit
Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons
Noel Streatfield, Ballet Shoes
Antonia Forrest: Autumn Term , End of Term , Cricket Term , Attic Term
Rumer Godden: The Peacock Spring and The Greengage Summer

I am totally delighted with the cookbook, which has been on my Christmas list ever since Deb announced it would be happening, back in the Spring. I only opened it this morning for the first time, I’m halfway through the first chapter, and I can categorically state that the woman is a genius. As if we didn’t know that already.

The Keyes is the last in the series of sister-books that began way back with Watermelon in 1998. She’s a delight and a wonder and I and started it yesterday and despite children on airplanes I’m halfway through. It’s immensely comforting to have such an entertaining piece of south county Dublin sitting on my bookshelf for whenever I need it.

And the others, well, they’re special, obviously. My copy of The Hobbit was given to me by my aunt on my 11th birthday (this fact is recorded in my wobbly cursive on the title page), the Swallows and Amazons series was one my Dad (the hobbyist yacht-builder and lover of messing-about-in-boats) and I read together, and I look forward to seeing just how well or badly it has aged when I share it with Dash in a year or three. Noel Streatfield was my tween author of choice – more sophisticated than Enid Blyton but before I’d got to LM Montgomery, perhaps. So very British, so very pre-wartime, so very full of optimism that every little girl had inside her an actress, a ballerina, or perhaps an engineer.

The Antonia Forrest books were just a little more up-to-date – though it’s hard to pinpoint since the first was published initially in 1948, the second 10 years later, and the last two in the 70s – but they all take place within about two years of each other. They’re your standard sisters-at-English-boarding-school stories, but with a side of maturity, boyfriends, and comparative religion never seen in Blyton. (Mabel’s real name comes from one of the characters, who always struck me as the coolest, nicest, strongest girl-you’d-want-to-be ever.)

Then, the Goddens. I picked up the first half of her fascinating memoir, A Time to Dance, No Time to Cry at the Labor Day book sale (local institution) and loved reading about the life behind the woman whose books had held me so as a teenager. I always consider The Greengage Summer to be the first “grown-up” book I read – not that the protagonists are older than teenagers, but because the narrative is non-linear and flits from afterwards to before to during without warning. It at first confused, and then elated me to pick out the strings of this story, steeped in heady, sensual, through-adolescent-eyes France, and fit them together myself. The Indian Summer is not quite so good, but smells and colours of India come through so vividly that it was no surprise to find out from Godden’s memoir that she lived there for much of her life.

So I should manage to keep my new year’s resolution of reading more quite easily. I didn’t say I’d be reading new books, did I?

Awfully Chipper

Optimists think they have more fun

Category Archives: books

Little house, big woods

Eager reader

Grandad’s bedtime stories

Booking it

Siblings Without Rivalry

Sibling revelry

The secret life of books

Ancient history

Curiosity

Required reading