Mommy Brain

Egermeier’s Bible Story Book: A Complete Narration from Genesis to Revelation for Young and Old by Elsie E. Egermeier
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
The Dragon’s Eye: The Dragonology Chronicles, Volume 1 by Dugald A. Steer
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein

Dolphins at Daybreak by Mary Pope Osborne
Henry and Mudge and the Happy Cat by Cynthia Rylant
Henry and Mudge in Puddle Trouble by Cynthia Rylant
Ghost Town at Sundown by Mary Pope Osborne
Lions at Lunchtime by Mary Pope Osborne

Surprise Island by Gertrude Chandler Warner

The Witch Tree Symbol by Carolyn Keene
Nancy’s Mysterious Letter by Carolyn Keene

Actually, it hasn’t been that bad. Until tonight - when we took all six kids to the swimming pool. Andrew, the 3-year-old, gulped a whole bunch of water, and then proceeded to vomit all over the concrete at the pool’s edge. Thank goodness, most of it did not make it into the pool

Then, when we were all relaxing in the hot tub, I noticed that Andrew, who is supposed to be potty trained, had pooped in his swim diapers. I pulled him out of the hot tub and headed for the shower where… Well, let’s just say this evening exposed me to more bodily substances than I’ve had to deal with in a long, long time. We decided that Kevin will take the older kids swimming Friday and I will stay home with Andrew.

They’re all quiet and sleeping so peacefully right now. Deceptively innocent. I’d like to stay up really late and enjoy it, but then I’ll be too tired to keep up with them tomorrow!

I have had a little time to read - I’m halfway through The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards - and it is as fantastic as everyone says it is.

Kevin and I also watched a great movie - started it on Monday night, finished it tonight: Flyboys, about Americans who went to France to fly against the Germans before the US had even entered WWI. Long, but good. Kevin thought it was a little slow - he could’ve done without the love story element - but I enjoyed it. And knowing that it was a true story, telling about real men who flew these planes, made it truly amazing. Orville and Wilbur Wright flew their first successful flight in 1903. 13 years later - only 13! - these young men were flying in combat against the Germans.

~Minor spoiler warning~

At the end, they showed on the screen what the men in this group went on to do after the war - the ones that survived, that is. One of the men was an African American. He had come to France to be a boxer - and because he had heard that the French treated blacks better than the Americans did - which was mostly true. He flew in this group - successfully - helping to defend France from the Germans. When the Americans entered the war, he joined up with his countrymen - and was not allowed to fly. To know that this hateful discrimination was not only allowed - but was government policy for the US at this time - makes me sick to my stomach.

Anyway, I don’t know a whole lot about WWI (Kevin is a huge WWII buff, so we know tons about that conflict!) - but this movie made me want to read up on it - the causes, the men who fought. Any book suggestions?

Well, I’m going to turn in before it gets any later. I have a bunch of links I’ve been saving, so hopefully I’ll find time to post on Friday.

Our house is like a little testosterone factory this week. My sister Marni and her husband Hans flew out to St. Louis this morning to check out a seminary he will be possibly attending in the fall. They dropped their two boys off at our house last night, and they’re staying until Sunday morning.

So the official count is: Noah, 8; Jonathan, 7; Josiah, 5; Peter, 5; and Andrew, 3. Oh, and Natalie - she’s ten, and feeling slighty outnumbered.

They’re having fun, though. Pray for my sanity. The hardest part is that we’re stuck at home since I don’t have a car that will hold them all. No quick runs for a latte fix!

I’m back - thanks to Andrea and Ron, the wonderful people who run Homeschool Journal. They were faced with the immediate need to find a new server - right in the middle of moving to a new house. I’m amazed that they got things up and running as soon as they did! Of course, now I have all sorts of posts stored up in my head, so hopefully I’ll find some time to actually write them! Hope you’re all having a wonderful weekend.

”Ecological good sense will be opposed by all the most powerful economic entities of our time, because ecological good sense requires the reduction or replacement of those entities. If ecological good sense is to prevail, it can do so only through the work and the will of the people and of the local communities.

For this task, our currently prevailing assumptions about knowledge, information, education, money, and political will are inadequate. All the institutions with which I am familiar have adopted the organizational patterns and the quantitative measures of the industrial corporations. Both sides of the ecological debate, perhaps as a consequence, are alarmingly abstract.

But abstraction, of course, is what is wrong. The evil of the industrial economy (capitalist or communist) is the abstractness inherent in its procecdures – its inability to distinguish one place or person or creature from another. William Blake saw this two hundred years ago. Anyone can see it now in the application of almost any of our common industrial tools and weapons.

Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of the industrial economies. Local life may be as much endangered by those who would “save the planet” as by those who would “conquer the world.” For “saving the planet” calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know – and thus will destroy – the integrity of local nature and local community.”

~p. 22-23, from the essay “Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse”

”If we think of ourselves as merely biological creatures, whose story is determined by genetics or environment or history or economics or technology, then, however pleasant or painful the part we play, it cannot matter much. Its significance is that of mere self-concern. “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,” as Macbeth says when he has “supp’d full with horrors” and is “aweary of the sun.”

If we think of ourselves as lofty souls trapped temporarily in lowly bodies in a dispirited, desperate, unlovable world that we must despise for Heaven’s sake, then what have we done for this question of significance? If we divide reality into two parts, spiritual and material, and hold (as the Bible does not hold) that only the spiritual is good and desirable, then our relation to the material Creation becomes arbitrary, having only the quantitative or mercenary value that we have, in fact and for this reason, assigned to it. Thus, we become the judges and inevitably the destroyers of a world we did not make and that we are bidden to understand as a divine gift. It is impossible to see how good work might be accomplished by people who think that our life in this world either signifies nothing or has only a negative significance.

If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God’s dust and God’s breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures – then all our acts have a supreme significance. If it is true that we are living souls and morally free, then all of us are artists. All of us are makers, within mortal terms and limits, of our lives, of one another’s lives, of things we need and use.

This, Ananda Coomaraswany wrote, is “the normal view,” which “assumes…not that the artist is a special kind of man, but that every man who is not a mere idler or parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist.” But since even mere idlers and parasites may be said to work inescapably, by proxy or influence, it might be better to say that everybody is an artist – either good or bad, responsible or irresponsible. Any lfie, by working or not working, by working well or poorly, inescapably changes other lives and so changes the world. This is why our division of the “fine arts” from “craftsmanship,” and “craftsmanship” from “labor,” is so arbitrary, meaningless, and destructive. As Walter Shewring rightly said, both “the plowman and the potter have a cosmic function.” And bad art in any trade dishonors and damages Creation.

If we think of ourselves as living souls, immortal creatures, living in the mdist of a Creation that is mostly mysterious, and if we see that everything we make or do cannot help but have an everlasting significance for ourselves, for others, and for the world, then we see why some religious teachers have understood work as a form of prayer….

In denying the holiness of the body and of the so-called physical reality of the world – and in denying support to the good economy, the good work, by which alone the Creation can receive due honor – modern Christianity generally has cut itself off from both nature and culture. It has no serious or competent interest in biology or ecology. And it is equally uninterested in the arts by which humankind connects itself to nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past. There is, for example, a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in England that most church members live and die without reading or hearing or hearing about. Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for the place; they embody no awareness that work can be worship. Most religious music now attests to the general assumption that religion is no more than a vaguely pious (and vaguely romantic) emotion.

~p. 110-114, from the essay “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”

”The conventional public opposition of “liberal” and “conservative” is, here as elsewhere, perfectly useless. The “conservatives” promote the family as a sort of public icon, but they will not promote the economic integrity of the household or the community, which are the mainstays of family life. Under the sponsorship of “conservative” presidencies, the economy of the modern household, which once required the father to work away from home – a development that was bad enough – now requires the mother to work away from home, as well. And this development has the wholehearted endorsement of “liberals,” who see the mother thus forced to spend her days away from her home and children as “liberated” – though nobody has yet seen the fathers thus forced away as “liberated.” Some feminists are thus in the curious position of opposing the mistreatment of women and yet advocating their participation in an economy in which everything is mistreated.

The “convservatives” more or less attack homosexuality, abortion, and pornography, and the “liberals” more of less defend them. Neither party will oppose sexual promiscuity. The “liberals” will not oppose promiscuity because they do not wish to appear intolerant of “individual liberty.” The “conservatives” will not oppose promiscuity because sexual discipline would reduce the profits of corporations, which in their advertisements and entertainments encourage sexual self-indulgence as a way of selling merchandise.

The public discussion of sexual issues has thus degenerated into a poor attempt to equivocate between private lusts and public emergencies. Nowhere in public life (that is, in the public life that counts: the discussions of political and corporate leaders) is there an attempt to respond to community needs in the language of community interest.”

~p. 122-123, from the essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community”

”I know that for a century or so many artists and writers have felt it was their duty – a mark of their honesty and courage – to offend their audience. But if the artist has a duty to offend, does not the audience therefore have a duty to be offended? If the public has a duty to protect speech that is offensive to the community, does not the community have the duty to respond, to be offended, and so defend itself against the offense? A community, as a part of a public, has no right to silence publicly protected speech, but it certainly has a right not to listen and to refuse its patronage to speech that it finds offensive. It is remarkable, however, that many writers and artists appear to be unable to accept this obvious and necessary limitation on their public freedom; they seem to think that freedom entitles them not only to be offensive but also to be approved and subsidized by the people whom they have offended.

These people believe, moreover, that any community attempt to remove a book from a reading list in a public school is censorship and a violation of the freedom of speech. The situation here involves what may be a hopeless conflict of freedoms. A teacher in a public school ought to be free to exercise his or her freedom of speech in choosing what books to teach and in deciding what to say about them. (This, to my mind, would certainly include the right to teach that the Bible is the word of God and the right to teach that it is not.) But the families of a community surely must be allowed an equal freedom to determine the education of their children. How free are parents who have no choice but to turn their children over to the influence of whatever the public will prescribe or tolerate? They obviously are not free at all. The only solution is trust between a community and its teachers, who will therefore teach as members of the community – a trust that in a time of community disintegration is perhaps not possible. And so the public presses its invasion deeper and deeper into community life under the justification of a freedom far too simply understood. It is now altogether possible for a teacher who is forbidden to teach the Bible to teach some other book that is not morally acceptable to the community, perhaps in order to improve the community by shocking or offending it. It is therefore possible that the future of community life in this country may depend on private schools and home schooling.

Does my objection to the intention to offend and the idea of improvement by offense mean that I believe it is invariably wrong to offend or that I think community and public life do not need improving? Obviously not. I do not mean at all to slight the issues of honesty and of artistic integrity that are involved. But I would distinguish between the intention to offend and the willingness to risk offending. Honesty and artistic integrity do not require anyone to intend to give offense, though they certainly may cause offense. The intention to offend, it seems to me, identifies the would-be offender as a public person. I cannot imagine anyone who is a member of a community who would purposely or gladly or proudly offend it, though I know very well that honesty might require one to do so.”

~p. 156-157, from the essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community”

”Art was the rememberer. He knew what he knew and what had been known by a lot of dead kinfolks and neighbors. They lived on in his mind and spoke there, reminding him and us of things that needed to be remembered. Art had a compound mind, as a daisy has a compound flower, and his mind had something of the unwary comeliness of a daisy. Something that happened would remind him of something that he remembered, which would remind him of something that his grandfather remembered. It was not that he “lived in his mind.” He lived in the place, but the place was where the memories were, and he walked among them, tracing them out over the living ground. That was why we loved him.”

from the short story “Are You All Right?”, found in That Distant Land

Art Rowanberry is just one of the Port William characters I came to love while reading That Distant Land: The Collected Stories by Wendell Berry. Ptolemy Proudfoot, Wheeler Catlett, Elton Penn, Miss Minnie – the people in this book seem so real. I can only imagine that many of these stories are based on people for whom Wendell Berry is the rememberer. I am adding all of the Port William novels to my to-read list.

Berry loves the land - and he loves the people who love the land, work the land - are the land. I have been on a Berry binge lately - his poetry, his essays, and now his short stories. I plan to read everything of his that I can get my hands on.

5 out of 5 stars

Well, I had eight books to give away and nine people entered - so I pulled one more book of my bookshelves. All nine of you should expect a book sometime in the next couple of weeks!

I drew Woman’s name first. Since she told me to pick one for her, she will be receiving In The Beginning…There Were No Diapers: Laughing and Learning In The First Years Of Fatherhood by Tim Bete. I laughed out loud many times while reading this, Woman - I know you’ll enjoy it!

Carol came next, and she get’s her first choice: Writers on Writing, Volume II: More Collected Essays from The New York Times. You’ll find lots of great authors to add to your “to-read” list in this one!

Next, I drew Lawanda’s name - so she also gets her first choice: Connecting With Your Kids by Timothy Smith. Since you’re all about being a good mama to those girls of yours, this book is a perfect fit.

Next came Sanjay. Her first choice was Good Grief by Lolly Winston. This is a heartbreaking and funny book - have Kleenex handy!

Gem was next, and so I closed my eyes and grabbed one from the pile: At the Scent of Water by Linda Nichols. Ooo, another tearjerker, but in a good way.

Laura’s name came next. Her first two choices were gone, so she gets Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler. I don’t remember a lot about this book, but I do know I enjoyed it. Some of Tyler’s titles have kind of merged in my mind. Hey, I just opened it for clues about the plot and found a reminder for a dentist appointment for Natalie in November of 2005. Wonder if we made it?

Debs name was drawn next, and she asked me to pick for her, so I’m sending My Own Two Feet: A Memoir by Beverly Cleary. Since Debs hails from “across the pond” - this will give her a taste of college life in America during the WW II years. (Now, Debs, I have no idea what it costs to mail a book to England, so if it costs an arm and a leg, I hope you’ll forgive me if I go back on my offer! )

I drew your name next, Karen, and all three of your choices were gone. So this is where running downstairs and picking something off the bookshelf came in. I chose The List by Robert Whitlow. It’s a great Christian thriller - it’ll keep you turning the pages.

Randi’s name was the last one in the bowl, and she will receive her second choice, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs. It reads like a very entertaining blog, and you’ll pick up all sorts of useful (and useless) information.

Well, that’s it! Keep visiting - and maybe I’ll have another giveaway when the counter hits 100,000!

Another week come and gone - time does fly! We are wrapping up our school year - books are being finished left and right. Our outside classes end in two weeks. We’re making plans for a weekly park outing and Vacation Bible School. I must admit, I love VBS season. I figure all the public school parents get a break when their kids are in school - I take mine when the kids are at VBS.

My house is ready for summer break, too - all the deep cleaning waits all year round and gets done while we’re not doing school. Hopefully it will be better this year. Remember, last year I scrubbed my stove from top to bottom, inside and out, only to have it quit working the next day?! All that work wasted - we had to go buy a new stove, and my old, but very shiny and clean one, went to the dump.

We have a busy weekend planned - the kids have a Tae Kwon Do promotion tomorrow. Noah and Jonathan will be testing for their yellow belts; Natalie, who started later than the boys, will be testing for her yellow stripe. After the promotion we’re going to try a new restaurant in town that we’ve been hearing rave reviews about. (In a rural town, a new restaurant opening is a really big deal!) It will be kind of a late Mother’s Day celebration and (hopefully) a celebration of the kids’ new belt levels.

This morning I will talk to my sister Andrea on the phone while I fold laundry and then clean the kitchen before Michelle and her boys come over for a play date this afternoon. It’s supposed to be hot again, so I’ll set up the sprinkler. The freezer is stocked with popsicles - we’re all set.

On to some links:

~Don’t forget to leave a comment to enter my book giveaway.

~Karen posted a hilarious video about age-related memory loss.

~ABC has announced plans for Lost - three more seasons, each season running 16 episodes with no repeats. We’ll have to wait until January for new episodes after next week’s finale, but I prefer that to one or two new episodes followed by a bunch of repeats. The creators/writers have answered a bunch of questions about the ending date and plans for the future.

~I can’t remember where I saw this linked, but the churches in these photos are amazing.

~Jana at The Review Revolution has posted some interesting theories about Harry Potter 7.

That’s all I have for this week - have a great weekend!

Well, I missed it. I’ve been eagerly anticipating the 50,000 visitor to my blog for the past few weeks - I knew it was coming soon. And then it went and happened over the weekend and I completely missed it. So, I have no idea who it was. But that’s okay.

I have decided to celebrate 50,000 visitors to my blog by holding a book giveaway! Yep, I’m actually giving some books away. (My husband will be passed out on the floor when he reads this.) I started blogging as a way to express myself and get my thoughts down in writing, and have kept blogging because of the wonderful community I discovered.

To my regular commenters (you know who you are): I know you! I’ve never met you in person, but I know you! When I read a book, I find myself thinking - Oh, so-and-so would love this - and I can’t wait to tell you all about it! Thank you so much for the encouragement and prayers and laughs you have given me. You make my blogging day!

To my lurkers (you know who you are, too): Would it kill ya to comment? Just kidding. I know you’re out there, and I’m glad you keep coming back.

So, on to the giveaway. These books all fall in the “books I really enjoyed, but probably won’t read again because my to-read list just keeps getting longer and longer, and if I do decide to read them again, I can borrow them from the library or a friend, and I’ve already loaned them to everyone I know and they’re too good to just be sitting on my shelf” category. Whew.

Good Grief by Lolly Winston (my review)

My Own Two Feet: A Memoir by Beverly Cleary (wonderful sequel to A Girl from Yamhill)

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

Writers on Writing, Volume II: More Collected Essays from The New York Times (my review)

Connecting With Your Kids by Timothy Smith (my review)

In The Beginning…There Were No Diapers: Laughing and Learning In The First Years Of Fatherhood by Tim Bete (my review)

The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs (related post)

At the Scent of Water by Linda Nichols (Nichols is one of the best Christian authors out there - she ranks right up there with Lisa Samson and Angela Hunt in my mind.)

I want to spread the love, so I’m not going to give all the books to one winner. What I want you to do is leave a comment with your first choice, second choice, and third choice. The contest will end Saturday at midnight. I’ll draw names from a bowl, and if I draw your name, you win a book. If no one’s taken your first choice, you get that one; if that one’s taken, you get your second choice, and so on. Is that clear as mud? Well, then, let the comments fly!

(Arthur and the Invisibles was provided to me by Special Ops Media for the purpose of review.)

Arthur and the Invisibles has a terrific voice cast: Robert De Niro, Emilio Estevez, Madonna, Jimmy Fallon, Chazz Palminteri, Jason Batemen, Madonna, David Bowie and Snoop Dogg. It has a great cast in the live-action portion: Mia Farrow and Freddie Highmore (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). It has a unique plot - a young boy must find the family’s treasure by becoming small and entering the world of the Minimoys. While there, he must defeat the evil M. Along the way, he demonstrates bravery in the face of danger and a desire to do the right thing even when it’s scary. And even with all this going for it, I didn’t like the movie.

First of all, I hated Madonna’s character’s penchant for saying, “Oh my god!” every five minutes. I didn’t like the fact that instead of keeping the story a straight fantasy, they threw in nods to pop American culture - especially in the Snoop Dogg scene. I wanted to like this movie, but I just didn’t.

That isn’t to say, though, that kids won’t enjoy it. My kids loved it. When I asked them to rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 - Noah gave it a 5, Natalie gave it a 3 1/2, Jonathan gave it a million, and Josiah gave it 251. Me - I give it a 2. But that’s just me.

(Because I Said So was provided to me by Special Ops Media for the purpose of review.)

To Daphne Wilder, mother of three girls, love equals control. Her favorite phrase is “Because I Said So” - and her three daughters are all afraid to go against her wishes. Older daughters Maggie and Mae are married off - and now Daphne sets her sights on her youngest daughter, Milly.

Milly (Mandy Moore) is insecure and slightly goofy with a habit of running off at the mouth and laughing until she snorts when she’s nervous. Daphne is convinced Milly will never find Mr. Right, so she puts an ad in the personals: Mother seeks life partner for her daughter.

Milly “accidentally” meets the man Mom has chosen for her, but also meets Johnny, a single-father / musician. Of course, he’s perfect for her - but her mom is pressuring her to go for the other guy, a controlling, wealthy businessman.

I watched this movie Friday night with Michelle, and we were both laughing so hard at one point that her son came downstairs and said, “Can you guys still breathe?”

The movie is perfectly cast, with Diane Keaton as mom Daphne, and Lauren Graham and Piper Perabo as the two oldest daughters. Mandy Moore is sweet and endearing as Milly. Gabriel Macht plays Johnny, and I bet we’ll be seeing him a lot in the future.

Because I Said So has a sweet love story and lots of comic moments. I will issue this warning, however: it pushes the edge of its PG-13 rating. The mom and daughters have some very, very frank discussions about sex, and Milly is sleeping with both of her suitors. There are no graphic sex scenes - just kissing and implied sex, but the fact that she is physically involved with both of them bugged me.

I enjoyed this movie, but please take the above warning into account when deciding whether or not to see it.

As a confessed bookaholic, I love books. Actually, I adore, obsess over, and devour books. That includes books about books. When I find an author who feels the same way I do about books, it’s like finding a long-lost friend I just haven’t met yet. The last time I felt like that, I had just finished How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman will go on the shelf right next to Quindlen’s book, because they are both odes to the joy of books. The writing styles are different, but the subject matter the same: books, the reading of books, the buying of books, the loving of books.

Not only did this book feed my love of books, it made me laugh. Hard - and often. Fadiman has a dry sense of humor, and the chapter Marrying Libraries is evidence. After being married several years, Anne and her husband decided to take the next step. No, not have a child - they’d already done that. They decided to - ~gasp~ - mingle their libraries.

After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we werer ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation. It was unclear, however, how we were to find a meeting point between his English-garden approach and my French-garden one. At least in the short run, I prevailed, on the theory that he could find his books if they were arranged like mine but I could never find mine if they were arranged like his. We agreed to sort by topic - History, Psychology, Nature, Travel, and so on. Literature would be subdivided by nationality. (If George found this plan excessively finicky, at least he granted that it was a damn sight better than the system some friends of ours had told us about. Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.)

So much for the ground rules. We ran into trouble, however, when I announced my plan to arrange English literature chronologically but American literature alphabetically by author. My defense went like this: Our English collection spanned six centuries, and to shelve it chronologically would allow us to watch the broad sweep of literature unfold before our very eyes. The Victorians belonged together; separating them would be like breaking up a family. Besides, Susan Sontag arranged her books choronologically. She had told The New York Times that it would set her teeth on edge to put Pynchon next to Plato. So there. Our American collection, on the other hand, was mostly twentieth-century, much of it so recent that chronological distinctions would require Talmudic hairsplitting. Ergo, alphabetization. George eventually caved in, but more for the sake of marital harmony than because of a true conversion. A particularly bad moment occurred while he was in the process of transferring my Shakespeare collection from one bookcase to another and I called out, “Be sure to keep the plays in chronological order!”

“You mean we’re going to be chronological within each author?,” he gasped. “But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!”

“Well,” I blustered, “we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I’d like to see that reflected on our shelves.”

George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce.

Further chapters detail her family’s obsession with proof-reading everything under the sun - including menus, the fact that there is nothing new written under the sun (read this chapter for the footnotes alone; they’re a hoot!), and The Joy of Sesquipedalians. Her vocabulary demonstrates clearly her love of big words. Here are just a few I learned while reading this book:

soi-disant: self-proclaimed