Mommy Brain

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket
The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket

In the Kitchen (Andrew Lost #3) by J. C. Greenburg
Penny Star (Phonics Comics) by Brent Sudduth & Stu Harrison
Twisted Tales (Phonics Comics) by Kitty Richards and Fernando Juarez
Smart Boys (Phonics Comics) by Brent Sudduth & Geo Parkin

Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville

Frog and Toad All Year by Arnold Lobel
Dan of the Den (Veritas Phonics Museum) by Emily Fischer
Mig the Pig by Jacqui and Colin Hawkins
Pan and the Mad Man (Veritas Phonics Museum) by Laurie Detweiler and Ned Bustard
Pepin the Not-Big (Veritas Phonics Museum) by Ty and Emily Fischer
Ben and His Pen (Veritas Phonics Museum) by Emily Fischer
The Dog, the Hog, the Rat, the Ram, the Hen, and the Big, Big Din (Veritas Phonics Museum) by Emily Fischer
The Rim of the Map (Veritas Phonics Museum) by Eric Vanderhoof
Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel

Heaven for Kids by Randy Alcorn and Linda Washington
Eldest by Christopher Paolini (to Noah)
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maude Montgomery (to Natalie)
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
The Seeing Stone (The Spiderwick Chronicles, Book 2) by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi
Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
Lucinda’s Secret (Spiderwick Chronicles #3) by Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi
The Ironwood Tree (The Spiderwick Chronicles, Book 4) by Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi
The Wrath of Mulgarath (Spiderwick Chronicles, Book 5) by Holly Black & Tony DiTerlizzi
Rocks in His Head by Carol Otis Hurst
Dry Bones and Other Fossils by Gary Parker
Coraline by Neil Gaiman

The two items mentioned in the title may seem completely unrelated, but they’re not.

Our dryer went kaput last night. It had been stumbling along, half-drying clothes for a few days, during which I alternated between telling myself, “There’s something wrong with the dryer; it’s gonna quit any day” and complete denial: “It’s just your imagination. That was a really big load – it’s completely normal to have to re-start the dryer four times to get the seams in your jeans to dry completely.”

Then, last night, when I sent Natalie downstairs with a load of damp laundry to ask Kevin to put them back in, he came up and told me that the dryer would no longer turn on. Shoot.

I called the repairman this morning, expecting to hear that I would have to wait until Monday, but he actually showed up before noon! He followed Kevin downstairs and took the dryer away from the wall and then proceeded to pull a sippy cup out of the dryer vent that leads out of the house. A sippy cup with a little Precious Moments girl on it – the kind we haven’t used since we first moved into the house in 2000. Because our eleven-year-old daughter was then four and still used sippy cups. And obviously she also liked stuffing them down the dryer vent from it’s little opening next to the back porch.

The sippy cup didn’t kill our dryer, however, though it might have sped up it’s demise. I am still not sure what it was that the guy replaced, but it took him all of about ten minutes and cost a whopping $93.75.

I’m pretty sure I was introduced to Nick Hornby by Staci at Writing and Living. I read A Long Way Down last year, and so when I saw How to Be Good sitting on the shelf at Barnes and Noble, I had to pick it up.

How to Be Good is the story of Katie Carr, a doctor in England. She’s an unhappily married mother of two and isn’t sure she wants to be married anymore. She’s always considered herself a good person – after all, she is a doctor – and she doesn’t want to be responsible for damaging her children. Her husband isn’t very easy to live with, though. He writes a column called “The Angriest Man in Town” – and the title fits. She can’t stand him, and doesn’t want to live with him anymore.

Then her husband undergoes a spiritual transformation, and decides to start living as if he actually believes all the things that liberals (and Katie, herself) like to talk about: the need to do something about the homeless, that their lifestyle is too materialistic, etc. He stops being nasty and starts being good, and now Katie wants the angry man back.

Hornby is extremely funny – I laughed out loud several times while reading this – but he also makes you think. I wasn’t quite thrilled with the ending (hence the 4 stars instead of 5), but I still recommend this.

I’ve always liked watching Inside the Actor’s Studio hosted by James Lipton, and the best part is the questions he asks each guest at the end of the interview. Someone has turned those questions into a meme, which I saw at Books on the Brain.

1. What is your favorite word? susurrus, scrumptious, vivid

2. What is your least favorite word? “Like” when used in place of said. “I was like, ‘Duh!’ You know?” Ugh. Or the word “just” thrown into a prayer. “Lord, we’re asking that you would “just” be with us…”

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally? Books and music.

4. What turns you off? Whining. Being only half-listened to.

5. What is your favorite curse word? I try not to curse, but I’ve been known to say “crap” every once in a while. My typing teacher used to say “sh-aving cream” – drawing the “sh” sound out for a long time, of course.

6. What sound or noise do you love? Rain. Josh Groban’s voice. Silence.

7. What sound or noise do you hate? The fake crying sound my kids make when they’re mad at each other and trying to get my attention. Teeth scraping on a fork.

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Writer, bookstore owner.

9. What profession would you not like to do? Anything in the medical profession. I’m much too squeamish, and I wouldn’t want to be that responsible for other people’s health.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? After “Well done, good and faithful servant” – I suppose, “Here’s the library!”

Let me know if you play along!

One of the really cool things about my weekend away was that I had a lot of time to read. I finished one book (Winter Haven) and started and finished two more: How to Be Good by Nick Hornby (review coming soon) and Songs of Innocence and Experience (related post here.)

When I started Athol Dickson’s Winter Haven, I was a little worried that I wasn’t going to love it as much as I did The Cure and River Rising. Isn’t that always a concern when you’re reading an author you love? That you might be disappointed? Well, I wasn’t.

Winter Haven is the story of Vera Gamble. Single and in her 20s, Vera is working in Texas when she receives a phone call that will change her life. The sheriff of the town Winter Haven, Maine – a small island off the coast – is calling to tell her that her brother’s body has washed up on shore. Siggy, an autistic teenager, had disappeared 13 years previously, and had never been found or heard from again. The fact that he has been found after all these years is only Vera’s first surprise.

When Vera arrives in Winter Haven to identify her brother, she discovers that he has not aged a day since the last time she saw him – thirteen years ago. And that’s only the first mystery. The island’s inhabitants are less than receptive to Vera’s attempts to look into her brother’s death, and she stumbles onto some of the island’s secrets: a lost colony of Pilgrims, a lost band of Vikings, a witch, and a ceremonial stone circle at the heart of the island. And the visions that Vera herself is experiencing: are they a sign from God, or from…somewhere else?

I don’t want to give a thing away, but I will say I loved this book. Reading Athol Dickson reminds me of watching a movie made by M. Night Shyalaman (Signs, The Sixth Sense, The Village). Just when you think you have a handle on where the plot is going, you’re thrown for a loop and you’re left guessing again. The other thing I love about Dickson’s writing is his sense of setting. Whether it is the deep south like River Rising, or the coast of Maine, like in this book, Dickson puts you right into the setting. His descriptions allow you to experience the book as if you are really there.

4 out of 5 stars – only because this book took a little longer to grab me than The Cure or River Rising.

As my reading horizons have expanded, I am finding more connections in my reading. Mrs. Mental Multivitamin calls this synchronicity – that little zing you get when something you’re reading is connected to something else you’ve just read or are working on or were just watching… I love it when that happens!

A few weeks ago, I listened to (and thoroughly enjoyed) an audiobook version of Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier. Burning Bright is the story of two young teens – one Dorset boy and one Londoner girl – who meet and form a friendship with the poet and printer William Blake. The book describes Blake’s painstaking method for producing his books. Blake believed that to separate his poems from the drawings that accompanied them was to lose some of the truth – and so he developed his own method of handpainting plates and making each copy of his books by hand. His most famous was Songs of Innocence and Experience, which includes the familiar Tyger, tyger, burning bright… and others I am certain you would recognize. In Chevalier’s novel, the poem London, which expresses Blake’s sorrow over the social and political inequities in his town, is quoted often:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

(The above contains Blake’s original spelling and punctuation.)

I’ve been curious about Blake and his book ever since I finished Ms. Chevalier’s novel. When I was browsing the poetry shelf at Barnes & Noble on Thursday, I found this treasure:

Songs of Innocence and Experience

This is a slim paperback Oxford University Press edition – it didn’t look like much sitting on the shelf. When I took it off the shelf, however, I found that it includes color reproductions of every one of Blake’s original plates. This is a beautiful book. I read it over the weekend, drooling over the illustrations, and I will be reading it again.

Two other books I picked up at B&N:

I opened the Conrad and read his Author’s Note. (I did not, however, read the introduction. I love the B&N Classics, but I very rarely read the introduction by the literary “expert” until after I read the book itself – they have a tendency to give every plot point away. The person who wrote the endnotes even gave away the ending of the story in a note that could have very easily explained coal ships without ruining the story for me. Bah.) I then read the first story, “Youth.” It is a good sea yarn, and kept me enthralled with descriptions like this one:

“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister. A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously; mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph. The masts fell just before daybreak, and for a moment there was a burst and turmoil of sparks that seemed to fill with flying fire the night patient and watchful, the vast night lying silent upon the sea. At daylight she was only a charred shell, floating still under a cloud of smoke and bearing a glowing mass of coal within.”

~from “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad

I then opened The Best American Short Stories 2007, and read the Introduction by guest editor Stephen King, who had the task of choosing the twenty stories (out of hundreds) to be included in this volume. In the intro, Mr. King lamented the fact that the journals and periodicals that publish short fiction have been relegated to the bottom shelf of the magazine rack (if you can find them at all) and speculated about what that is doing to the art of short fiction:

“Instead, let us consider what the bottom shelf does to creative writers – especially the young ones, who are well represented in this volume – who still care, sometimes passionately, about the short story. What happens to a writer when he or she realizes that his or her audience is shrinking almost daily? Well, if the writer is worth his or her salt, he or she continues on nevertheless – because it’s what God or genetics (possibly they are the same) has decreed, or out of sheer stubbornness, or maybe because it’s such a kick to spin tales. Possibly a combination. And all that’s good.

What’s not so good is that writers – even those who claim to spurn Shakespeare’s bubble reputation – write for whatever audience is left. In too many cases, that audience happens to consist of other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines (and The New Yorker, of course; the holy grail of the young fiction writer) not to be entertained but to get an idea of what sells there. And this kind of reading isn’t real reading, the kind where you just can’t wait to find out what happens next (think “Youth,” by Joseph Conrad, or “Big Blonde,” by Dorothy Parker).”

Zing! A connection. And now I’m excited to read the stories that King chose out of hundreds and hundreds to include in this book, because if he loved “Youth,” by Conrad, and I loved “Youth,” by Conrad, chances are I’m going to love some of the stories in this book.

Connections. Aren’t they fun?