Okay! I finished reading two more books over break!
I read "Search for Bliss" and " Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" but I am way too exhausted from racking to write about either right now....
but I will soon!

Well, I finished reading "The Way of a Ship" by Derek Lundy. I don't think I can ever truly understand the adventure that rounding the Horn of South America in a wind-driven ship must have felt like, but this book did a pretty good job of taking me right into the action.

Based partly on his own experiences as a deep-water sailor, and family history and lore, Lundy researched the history and trends of wind-driven four-masted barques, bring the past and the present together in a well written read.

If you want to round the Horn without risk of limb or life, this book is a great read!

Oh Boy!
It is Educator Appreciation Week at Barnes and Noble! That means teachers get a 25% discount on all of their purchases...oh...wonderful!

I met up with my fave collection of co teachers for shopping and lunch (KVD, DM, and CH, plus my own two captive children...who are also on break). We had a blast, and were very supportive about our purchases, but we are so similar in how we approach books, we all like to own our own copy! So even if I had a copy to lend or give of a particular title, others in the group still wanted to buy their own! It was quite a scene, piles of books and the fast happy patter of readers in lust with titles and covers. I am pretty well read, so it was fun to chat about books that others might enjoy, and it made me remember how wonderful it was to read some of those titles, fave authors, genres, etc. Delightful!

Here is what I purchased today:

The Writer's Toolbox by Jamie Cat Callan. This little box contains all sorts of cards and devices designed to end writer's block. It is a delightful toolbox that I cannot wait to put into practice in my own classroom.

Teaching Writing That Matters: Tools and Projects That Motivate Adolescent Writers by Chris W. Gallagher and Amy Lee. Here is a book designed by teachers for teachers all about the teaching and study of the craft of writing. Not prompts t get the kids to write, but ideas and tools and tips to have kids become better writers, writers who understand the process of writing, not just the product.

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. KVD recommended this title to all of us today, and all three of us, CH, DM and me bought our "own copy", and have turned it into our April Break read. This novel has a subtitle of "One grump's search for the happiest places in the world." Sounds wonderful, silly, and truly profound.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A shocking murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective by Kate Summerscale. True crime just makes me shiver. I love to read about real people, and what they are capable of. This title refers to a brutal murder in 1860 in Victorian England. The Scotland Yard Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher is credited with being the creator of forensic science, and the character of Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins' novel The Moonstone, the first of the detective genre novels, was based on him. I love nothing better to escape into than a brutal crime scene...as the crime has already been committed, I feel safe!

The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Wisdom by His Holiness The Dalai Lama. I seek wisdom, comfort, reassurance in my chaotic and unbalanced life regularly. The Dalai Lama allows me a chance to reaffirm my feelings and faith, without committing to organised religious practice, something I am not interested in any longer. I am also attending his teaching seminar in NYC this May, so I don't want to enter into my learning space with a master, without having an understanding of his teachings. This is the second title of his that I have delved into in the last couple of months. I am building an understanding, one page at a time.

That's what has been added to the reading pile! I will report out on titles as I read them!
Keep reading!

Okay, I am going to focus this blog on what I always intended it to be: my thoughts on books, since reading has always been the most important skill that I have ever learned and embraced in my life. Reading is one of my main passions and it has has given me the life I have today, and I cannot envision a life without books.

Here is a list of what I have been reading recently:

The Monsters of Templeton by Laura Groff
Beautifully written with strong characters and strange plot twists, Templeton is based on the town of Cooperstown, NY. James Fenimore Cooper and baseball, as well as a Loch Ness monster all appear in this well crafted and enjoyable novel that combines truth with fiction.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink
This book was suggested to our staff at the high school during a teacher workshop presentation.
Dealing with skills that translate into success in the future, it is sold as a "business" book, but is easy to read and isn't focused on tips for the "bottom line", instead the premise is about how "right-brainers" , artistic and creative thinkers are truly the wave of the future. I found it wonderfully reassuring, as a right-brain thinker, to recognise that I bring a workable set of skills to my job that might not be instantly recognizable as skills.

The Way of a Ship by Derek Lundy
This fascinating book is a must read for any and all armchair sailors. Part family memoir, part nautical history, this book allows landlubber the chance to be part of a Square-Rigger crew in the sunset of wind-driven ships. Square-Riggers are four masted ships that hauled coal and other supplies around the world in the late 19th century, rounding the Horn and bringing much needed supplies from the Old World to the new.

So many books, so little time!

I am weirdly happy right now. I think it has a lot to do with seasonal change, Winter's back has finally been broken and Spring is right around the corner. The yard is filling up with chipmunks and squirrels sizing each other up, and the skunks have been digging holes in the lawn, looking for tasty grubs. The birds have rediscovered the birdseed mess under the feeders, which has been covered by snow. I heard raccoons thumping around the suet feeders last night, so bears are sure to follow.
I took the shrink-a-dink plastic off one set of sliders today, as the cats had already ripped a huge hole in it in January. I swept away a seasons worth of cat hair, and rearranged the floor plant jungle, and let the sun shine in. It felt great to just shift a few items and see a room differently.
I am trying to achieve balance in so many aspects of my life that I feel like I am slipping and sliding off a tin roof....rusted! If all it takes to set me on a happy path is a splot of sunshine and the promise of spring...bring it on!
Haven't seen the robins yet, but I am sure they will be here soon, perhaps this week!
Happy to all!

I am returning to my "other life" tomorrow: my classroom, and all of my teenagers. I have been home sick for the last four school days (six days total) and I am now a full week behind in my teaching plans. I am not very happy about this, but it is the nature of the beast sometimes. I am still wondering if there is ever a day when I won't feel guilty about not being in the classroom for my students, but I doubt it!

My life at home has been a mixture of not being able to do anything but lay in bed and try not to cough too hard, and a healthy desire to clean the house and put the world in order. I have managed to keep up with the laundry piles, and have wiped down the kitchen and bathroom, but not much else. My teenage son has been home with the flu for the last couple of days, which leaves my husband and daughter fending for themselves...they have managed!

I guess that I wanted to create a blog that reflected my personal connection to books, and I wanted to write reviews of some of my fave titles. Like so many good ideas, it has taken more of my already fractured time than I was willing or able to commit to.

I have discovered that there is a simplicity in many of the blogs I have viewed, a bit of text here, a lovely photo there, and lots and lots of "stream-of-consciousness" blurbs. There is something freeing in writing openly, without the habit of revision, something I am interested in tapping into.

I have been on FB for a while now, and am used to writing short little blurbs to my friends etc, and posting my status frequently. I enjoy looking at what others in my life are up to, with a quick glance at the status feed...voyeuristic and impersonal but habit forming.
I have also enjoyed tweeting way on Twitter, learning how to express myself in 140 characters has been challenging but informing. Finding people to follow has been even more fun than FB...no need to ask permission, just click and follow. Right now my new best friends who tweet the most have been PDiddy (who knew), Perez Hilton, Scott Simon of NPR, Cooper Anderson, and Reduced Shakespeare!

I think that I am going to be able to blurb more if I just "let go" of my desire to produce well crafted writings...I just need to write, and I will! I plan on mentioning books a lot, but not always!

So..I have been housebound for the last four days with a horrible case of acute bronchitis. I have the energy of a fruit fly on its last two hours of flight, and find that I am quickly getting bored of my bed. I never want to eat a Club cracker or tub of Greek yogurt again (but I will)!
I have spent a lot time on line the last few days, and tweeted on Twitter, posted on Facebook and looked at many many blogs. I quickly began to understand that my idea of a blog devoted to my love of books was a great idea, but to really BE a blog...I gotta post more, and frequently!

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I cannot remember which came first for me, viewing the 1939 film or reading the book itself. I have always had a copy of this book, ever since I can remember. I still have that copy, a little worse for wear, but still filled with the magic and amazing details that the film does not even begin to explore.
My childhood copy is hardback, bound in white with glorious color reproductions of Denslow's illustrations. Huge poppy flowers hover over Dorothy, as if they were ready to engulf her, Toto skips blissfully beside her. Dorothy does not look like Judy Garland at all, she is short and stout with enormous braids framing her Gibson girl face. She is doll like in her appearance, clearly just a young girl, "fresh from the farm". On the back cover, the Cowardly Lion is brushing tears away from his eyes with his tail, a huge poppy poised to engulf him also.
The book is filled with distinct details about Oz that the movie never even tries to explain. Glinda the Good Witch is not drowning a pink spun sugar gown, giggling away, rather, she is a stern but kind madonna, tall, stately, and empowered by her true love for her country and people. Oz isn't simply a place with a yellow brick road leading to a glorious city, it is a complex world divided into quadrants, all answerable to the emerald city and the ruling wizard, but each its own county with laws and leaders and rules to be followed (or ignored at your own peril). Glinda was in charge of the red quadrant, Quadling land. The Munchkins, or Munchkin land was blue, and ruled by the Wicked Witch of the East (crushed by Dorothy's house) and mourned by the Wicked Witch of the West. Glinda was more powerful than either of these evil sisters...but she really steps into being in other Oz books.
The ruby slippers were never ruby in the books. They became ruby for the technicolor film, but in the book they were always silver. I always found it annoying that the shoes in the story were not the beautiful and sparkly ruby red, but a dull pewter silver. The most important aspect of the shoes were that they took Dorothy home to Kansas, when she was ready to return. They protected her feet as she ran over the burning sands of the desert that surrounded the Land of Oz, and kept the rest of us out. The slippers slipped off her feet as she reached the deserts end...she never got to return to Kansas with anything from Oz, other than her memories.
Dorothy did have to discover herself and her friends while walking the yellow brick road to Oz. In some sections of the narrative, the road disappeared or faded into the county she was walking in, but she doggedly followed it to the Emerald City, looking for her return ticket.
I read the book frequently, as the story always enthralled me, but I was blessed to have my own collection of the other Oz books, that not everybody was aware existed. My great aunts and grandfather had read the books as children, and my great grandmother kept the volumes upstairs in "the girl's room" even though the girls were ancient by the time I was reading! I read every single copy of the 13 other tales, even when the books began to fall apart in my hands from wear. I loved them all, as they expanded and delighted my personal vision of Oz, introducing me to more and more fantastic and outrageous characters.
Dorothy morphed from a simple, dumpy, braided country girl to a snappy bobbed flapper child in a white sailor suit, with such snap and spunk that I truly wanted to be her for a while, just to have the freedom to explore that she embodied.
I am eternally grateful that someone named Frank L. Baum felt that American readers needed fairy tales of their own, and wrote 14 books filled with his imaginative stories.
There is no place like home, except for Oz...and I wanna go to Oz!

Robin Hood and Little John and Friar Tuck

My next book of distinction would be "Robin Hood". The copy I read I still have, but it is rapidly returning to dust. The paper used for this edition has the thickest texture ever, the wood pulp used for must not have been ground down as finely as it could have been, it is chunky in your hands. As a result, this was not a good text to "dog ear" pages in, as the "ear" would snap off in your fingers. My book is riddled with missing upper page corners!

Robin Hood, Robin of Locksley, was a larger than life hero to me, especially since he was based on a real person! I clearly recall wanting to join Robin and his Merry Men, as they lived freely in Sherwood Forest , thumbing their noses at Prince John, and stealing from the rich to feed the poor. It always bothered me that there were no women romping in the woods with the boys, only Marion seemed to be granted that privilege...and I wanted to be her, badly.

Reading the book was only one aspect of enjoying this classic tale, acting it out became the next natural step in my Sherwood Forest devotion. Enter: Walt Disney and his magical animation studios. Disney produced a cartoon/animated version of Robin Hood in the middle '70's, and it is this film version that allowed my love affair to blossom. I was not alone in dramatic reinterpretation of Robin Hood, my best summer friend of all times, meg, was deep in the thick of our recreations too. It was her soundtrack vinyl record of Robin Hood, that came with read along stills from the film that became our "bible" for a summer.

We spent hours, at her house and at mine, reenacting key moments from the film. Never mind that Disney had "cutified" the entire story line, and made all of the characters into animals...we loved that film and recording. We mimicked every characters voice, tone, and cadence word for word, we didn't just say our lines, we became our lines. I have no idea how our mothers survived that summer, for Robin and Little John were alive and well in the woods of New Hampshire...constantly reminding the mothers hat we needed to steal that box of ring-ding snack cakes from the rich (them) for the poor (us). It didn't work very often, but we must have tried an awful lot, for Meg's mother, to this very day, still calls me "Jennifrair Tuck"...and I love it!

Post note: I lived on "Sherwood Drive" in NY, and Meg lived on "King Richards Drive"in NH and as a result, we felt that that it was in the cards to be Robin and Little John forever. Meg gave me the DVD version with Errol Flynn for Christmas one year, and I watch it at least once a year or so.

All for one, one for all

When I was in third grade, I read the entire unabridged novel, The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas. I had found the book during one of the many book sales that my mother frequented, where she would buy books by the armful for practically nothing, and she always let me find a few gems of my own. The book sale had table after table of cast off books, dogeared, water damaged, brand new, musty, dusty and waiting to be loved books of all kind; beckoning and waiting for me to pet them and take them home.

This particular edition of the tale had a few illustrations in it, but it was a hefty, large tome, that felt right at home in my hands when I first opened it. I am not sure if my mother thought that I really would read the novel, but being an avid reader herself, I don't think she would have said no to me for wanting a 25 cent book as badly as I wanted this one. When we returned home, I opened up a new world that I have never forgotten, the world of France at war with England, of men who swore to protect their king, not matter what, with swords and wit, and of women who loved, left and longed for the swashbuckling hero who had just left their beds...I had no idea why so many people kept having "sleepovers" in the same bed, but it was pretty clear to me that Athos, Porthos, Aremis and d'Artagen liked their lives, and had a great deal of fun to boot!

I am sure that I didn't understand all of what was happening in the novel, but I spent an entire summer reading the story, and asking my mother a million questions about the action taking place, the history being told, the words I couldn't (still cannot) pronounce. My mother answered all of my inquires (she probably read the novel while I was sleeping) as best she could. She was my personal version of Wiipedia or Google back then! I had no idea how impressed she and my father were with my reading ability until a year or two later, when I overheard her talking to one of her friends about my voracious appetite to reading, and how she couldn't get enough books in my hands fast enough.

Soon enough, a new movie version appeared in the theaters, with Michael York and Rachel Welch potraying d'Artangen and Constance. Faye Dunaway as Milady, Christopher Lee and Cardinal Richelou...the movie was fun, campy, and not true to the true, but I loved it! My mother made sure I went to see the film, even though it was designed for an older audience (it was the early 1970's...way before PG 13!)

My love of reading, and for understanding history, has never gone away. I plan on posting all kinds of observations about my life, through what I have read, and am currrently reading. Join me on my adventure....through the pages I have turned, earmarked, and held onto.