The Sun is Out, the Weather is Warming Up...Are Things Starting to Get Better?

 

Power is back on. Water is back on. The sun has come out. The temperatures have soared into the 70s. 

Life is good again.

I finished only one fiction book, a brand-new middle-grade story, Amber & Clay, by Newbery-winning author Laura Amy Schlitz. The structure of this brilliant novel wowed me, with chapters set off with artifacts from ancient Greece, and text written in turn-counterturn, elegiac couplets, and hendecasyllables. It's not just structure that wowed me either; this story has great characters and a fascinating plot.

I read two recently published nonfiction books by authors I admire, The System by Robert B. Reich, and The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel. I hope to do a blog post about these books in the near future which I have tentatively titled What Happened to My America? Part Two. 

I wrapped up two Classics Club books, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, and The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. 

My friend Rae of Powerful Women Readers brought over her copy of Q's Legacy, the last book in the trilogy of books about 84, Charing Cross Road.

All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot (Book 3 in the Series)

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Chapter-a-Day Read-Along)

Yes, and...Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr (Daily Meditation Reading)

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiko Tanizaki (Japanese Literature Challenge)

Voices from the Past: Great Quotations for Every Day of the Year

A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter (1001 Children's Books)

I posted Books That Make Me Laugh Out Loud this week, which led me to NPR's 2019 list of Funny Books. We could use a few laughs right now, I think. If you have other suggestions, I'd love to see you include them on my Goodreads' Best Mood-Boosting Books list or share them in the comments.

I was delighted to get my first copy of a new magazine, Oh Reader, in the mail. Have you seen this one? What do you think?

Inprint Houston featured a visit with Lily King (Writers and Lovers) and Chang-rae Lee (My Year Abroad) interviewed by former Houston Chronicle books editor Maggie Galehouse last week. Look at the wonderful bookshelves of all three folks.

My Black History Month calendar for 2021, filled with wonderful picture books. 

Good Thing #1

It took me three episodes, but I am growing to like the characters in the new version of All Creatures Great and Small.

Good Thing #2

We watched Darkest Hour, a 2017 movie with Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill. Loved it.

Good Thing #3

We've now dared to visit in person with my dad and his wife plus my sister and brother-in-law. All of them have received both vaccinations, and we have received our first. We are starting to think about a visit to Chicago and a rock dig to Montana in late summer.

I'm happy you found your way to the Sunday Salon. Sunday Salon is a place for us to link up and to share what we have been doing during the week. It's a great way to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

Some of the things we often talk about at the Sunday Salon:

• What was your week like?
• Read any good books? Tell us about them.
• What other bookish things did you do? 
• What else is going on in your life?

Other places where you may like to link up over the weekend are below. Click on the picture to visit the site.

My linkup for Sunday Salon is below.

Socks in the Snow

(Very) unexpected snow may cause you to fail to notice important details. Taken 2009, but shared this week after near-record-breaking temperatures swept through Texas.

For more wordless photos, go to Wordless Wednesday.

Books That Made Me Laugh Out Loud

I don't know about you, but after a pandemic of almost a year and last week's power outages and freezing cold temperatures, I could use a few books that make me laugh out loud.

And what makes me laugh out loud? Some odd juxtaposition of jocularity, unexpectedness, and great truth.

Here are a few that worked for me...

Sci fi/Fantasy: Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic and Small Gods; Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Princess Bride.

Nonfiction: A.J. Jacobs' Drop Dead Healthy, It's All Relative, and The Year of Living Biblically; Dreyer's English; All Creatures Great and Small.

Light Fiction: Life According to Lubka; A Breath of French Air; The President's Hat; The Switch. 

Comics: Strange Planet and Stranger Planet.

Classics: Three Men in a Boat; Italo Calvino's The Cloven Viscount and The Nonexistent Knight; The Importance of Being Earnest; Don Quixote; Excellent Women; Gulliver's Travels; Candide; James Thurber's The Wonderful O and The 13 Clocks; Tom Sawyer; A Confederacy of Dunces.

Kid books: Hank the Cowdog; Sideways Stories from Wayside School; The BFG: Winnie-the-Pooh; The Wind in the Willows; The Adventures of Treehorn; Where the Sidewalk Ends; Anne of Green Gables.

Picture books: Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus; The Monster at the End of This Book; Diary of a Worm; I Want My Hat Back; Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes; A Kiss for Little Bear; King Bidgood's in the Bathtub.

And don't forget my favorite joke book, A Pretty Good Joke Book.

Thank you to Claire @ Book Lovers Pizza for this week's prompt.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each Tuesday That Artsy Reader Girl assigns a topic and then post her top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join her and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.

A Blast of Arctic Cold Knocks Us Off Our Feet

 

I hope you will forgive my disheveled appearance today. I haven't had a haircut in twelve months because of the pandemic, you know, and now many of us have experienced a long week of extended power outages, no water, no phone, no Internet, treacherously icy roads, and ridiculously cold temperatures (it dived down to 14 degrees F---madness!---and it stayed below freezing for almost 48 hours). And I don't even have a winter coat. Folks, I'm a wreck.

Snow and ice did give me lots of time to read. I finished a reread of three books, and all three were five-star reads: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (book club); Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (Classics Club); and All Things Bright and Beautiful by James Herriot (#2 in the series). I also read a book of essays connecting some of the wonders of nature with human life in World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot (Book 3 in the Series)

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Chapter-a-Day Read-Along)

Yes, and...Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr (Daily Meditation Reading)

The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson (Naturalist Book Club)

The Makioka Sisters by Junichiko Tanizaki (Japanese Literature Challenge)

The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Classics Club)

My Black History Month calendar of picture books is almost full. One more week. I'm completely enjoying this month of reading.

All Creatures Great and Small (original series)...finished all seven seasons! 🖤

Good Thing #1: The Great Backyard Bird Count

Four days of counting birds.

I was happy to see a new-to-me bird, this rose-breasted nuthatch.

Good Thing #2: 

Good Thing #3:

I'm happy you found your way to the Sunday Salon. Sunday Salon is a place for us to link up and to share what we have been doing during the week. It's a great way to visit other blogs and join in the conversations going on there. 

Some of the things we often talk about at the Sunday Salon:

• What was your week like?
• Read any good books? Tell us about them.
• What other bookish things did you do? 
• What else is going on in your life?

Other places where you may like to link up over the weekend are below. Click on the picture to visit the site.

My linkup for Sunday Salon is below.

Can We Talk About...Diversity in Books?

Some of the books I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s.

When I was a child, I looked for myself in stories. I read books set in New York City. What? People live in apartments? I asked myself as I read. Some stories were set out on a farm. That, too, was outside my experience. Most stories were of big, jolly families with five or six or seven children. Where were families like mine? I wondered. Where were stories with a divorced dad and a half-brother living far away in another state? Where were stories of small-town life? It wasn't until I discovered the Beverly Cleary books that I felt like I was able to read stories about people like me. 

And I am from what has come to be seen as a privileged white childhood. I can't imagine what it must have been like for black children or Hispanic children or Asian children. I can't imagine the difficulty of poor children trying to find connections in stories. Those stories did not exist when I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s.

When I became a librarian, I was told of the idea of books as mirrors and windows. This idea was first shared by an educator named Emily Style in 1988. Style says that books that reflect the student's own life are mirrors and books that show the larger world are windows. We need both, Style tells us. 

Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop has spent her career expounding upon the idea of mirrors and windows. Her central idea is this: all young readers need books with a wide range of characters, characters of all ethnicities and backgrounds, characters who have had a wide array of experiences. Bishop goes on to say that not only do black children need to see black children in their stories and Ojibwe children need to see Ojibwe children in their stories, but also black children need to see Ojibwe children and vice versa. In addition, white children need to see all of these, too.

I remember a story from when I was training to be a librarian. A group of us were sent into an all-black school in a very poor, inner-city Houston neighborhood. The library in this school had been closed for ten years. (That's right. No librarian. No library. For ten years. In Houston ISD, the money allocated to each school is completely subject to the whims of the principal.) We library students were asked to help the newly hired black librarian discard old books for the reopening of the library that was to happen at the beginning of the next school year. We began to create a huge pile of books that easily met the criteria for needing to be discarded (obsolete; worn out; sexist content; racist content). The librarian ordered us to stop, and she drew us all together to speak to us. "If you find a book that has a black face in it, that book will stay in this library," she commanded us. "I don't care what the words say. I don't care what condition the book is in. I don't care if the book is out-of-date. I want my children in this school to see some black faces in books."  That's how badly this new librarian wanted some mirrors for her students.

I remember the first time I read Newbery-award winning book, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. In the very first chapter of the story, we are introduced to a hardworking black mom and dad who have put together enough money to buy their own farm in the South in the 1930s. They have several children, including a little boy who is just starting school for the first time and who is extremely concerned with being clean and neat. The boy and his sister walk to their black school (it's miles to school from their home) and a driver on a school bus from the white school (note that these children have a bus to get to school) sees the group of children walking to the black school, and he purposefully hits a mud puddle and splashes the children with mud. The little boy is horrified. And when he gets to school and is able to get cleaned up a little, the boy is delighted to receive his very first textbooks. But then he opens the book to see all the accumulated grime and dirt of many years over the textbook's pages. Inside is a label put on by the state, noting the years of use and condition of each book. The early years show Excellent condition and White school. The middle years show Good condition and White school. The last years show Poor condition and Black school. At some point, as I was reading along, I realized that the characters in this story lived in a town thirty miles from where my dad grew up, and that this little boy in the story was born the same year as my dad, and that the family was, in its economic frugality and attention to high values, exactly like my dad's family. Except that the characters in the story were black and my dad was not. Windows for me. Big windows into a world that was so close but a world I'd never seen.

So, windows and mirrors for all children. And, maybe, just maybe, for adults, too.

Wondrous Words: Kaika and Ikigai

  

While I was browsing the New Words list I keep in my journal, I discovered an odd thing: Out of the eleven new words I've added so far in 2021, seven of them are Japanese words.

I've already shared two wondrous words from Japanese with you this year.

I feel compelled to share two more.

Even when I was in first grade, it was apparent to everyone that my happy place was in a library, with a book.

My kaika had already begun to take root and bloom. I'm the child sitting in the chair.

kaika. 開化. (kuh eye ee kuh). A moment when something begins to bloom within us, setting aside other people's demands to make room for our passion, allowing the reason we feel we were put on earth to begin to blossom. 

Ready for my first day as Queen of the Library. I knew I'd found my ikigai.

ikigai. 生き甲斐. (itchy guy ee). Discovering something we become passionate about and which also comes easy to us and which gives us purpose for living. 

Wow. Imagine if every person could experience a moment of kaika and find his/her ikigai. What a different world we would have.

Wondrous Words Wednesday is a weekly meme where you can share new words that you’ve encountered, or spotlight words you love.  Feel free to get creative! It was first created by Kathy over at Bermuda Onion and is now hosted at Elza Reads.

Great Books Set in New Orleans

Since 2020's New Orleans Mardi Gras celebration is believed to have spawned up to 50,000 Covid cases, there will be no in-person celebration this year.

How about celebrating with a good book? How about with a good book set in New Orleans? Here are a few I suggest.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins (novel)

The Awakening by Kate Chopin (novel)

Trombone Shorty by Troy Andrews (picture book)

A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (play)

The Client by John Grisham (mystery)

Petite Rouge: A Cajun Red Riding Hood (picture book)

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (memoir)

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (novel)

My favorite, the book that epitomizes New Orleans for me, is A Confederacy of Dunces. 

No one who loves New Orleans should miss this one.

Have you read any of these?

If not, do any of these sound intriguing?

Do you have any other suggestions for me?

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each Tuesday That Artsy Reader Girl assigns a topic and then post her top ten list that fits that topic. You’re more than welcome to join her and create your own top ten (or 2, 5, 20, etc.) list as well. Feel free to put a unique spin on the topic to make it work for you! Please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own post so that others know where to find more information.