something I meant to mention a lot earlier

My very long time friend and her sister happened to write and illustrate a lovely book recently called Olive's Balloon Adventure. Marigold received this book from St. Nicholas before Christmas and I would say that she and Gladys and I would highly recommend it for any little person who intends to do everything herself without help or interference from any living person of any kind. I meant to say this very thing here before Christmas on the off chance that any of you were casting about for just such a book. But now it's only a week before Valentine's Day and perhaps you know a little someone who longs to look at beautiful pictures and read about Olive meeting so many interesting creatures. As for me, I am so impressed to know someone cool enough to have written any book at all let alone a charming and lovely one.
Pip pip

Alouicious has discovered Calvin and Hobbes. He keeps coming and showing me the gross snowmen Calvin makes and chuckling to himself. In fact, the other day, he came to explain it to me in case I had never read it before.
"I know," I said, "And, when you're done with that one, we have all of them."
Honestly, its the FIRST thing he's reading without being able to put it down. So, even though I was rather hoping that first thing would be, you know, like, The Bible or Ivanhoe or something, I'm not really complaining. If you know and love Calvin and Hobbes, your life will probably turn out all right in the end.

Which brings me to my submission for the 2013 Lander Motto (gleaned from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel which, as a movie was ok but not amazing). Ready?

It will all come out all right in the end. And if it isn't alright, then it isn't the end.

Past Lander Mottoes have been:

This too shall pass.
Let me be your morning cup of coffee.
Where are we going and why are we in this hand basket?
Cheer Up, Things could be worse. So I cheered up and sure enough, Things Got Worse.

I'm sure I've forgotten some. 
Pip pip!

children's books with an edge

Tired of the soupy sweet repetitiveness of Children's Books? Longing for something with a little bite? Here are two of my favorites.

Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear!
by N.M. Bodecker
illus. Erik Blegvad
If you don't mind a little nasty feminism, this is a lovely book. Mary has so many things to do to get ready for winter--bringing in the harvest, winterizing the house, mending warm things, and finally (spoiler alert) placing a pot of tea over the head of her husband who hasn't lifted a finger to come to her assistance. While you're telling your sons not to marry a floozy, you can put a word in the ear of your girl child not to marry a man who might order her around. Worth the horrified snickers of children who know in their immortal souls that its very bad to pour tea on other people.

Cinder Edna
by Ellen Jackson
illus. Kevin O'Malley
Who among us hasn't wanted to trip Cinderella as she ascends the steps of the Palace to be swept into the arms of her Prince Charming?  Ellen Jackson provides a charming outlet for those of us who live on the darker side of Disney. While Cinder Ella sits in the Cinders and whines, her neighbor, Cinder Edna, after catering to her evil Step Mother and Step Sisters every chance whim, doesn't want the hassle of constantly washing ash out of her clothes. Edna rolls up her sleeves and cheerfully adds to her collection of jokes, perfects her repertoire of Tuna Casseroles, and earns money mowing lawns and cleaning bird cages. Her true love turns out to be a man who loves hard work and kittens. On the whole, this book offers a cheerful and friendly alternative to the nauseating idiocy of Disney Love.

a veritable hotbed

Been rereading Screwtape. Found this to be really delightful.

I think I warned you before that if your patient can't be kept out of the Church, he ought at least to be violently attached to some party within it. I don't mean on really doctrinal issues; about those, the more lukewarm he is the better. And it isn't the doctrines on which we chiefly depend for producing malice. The real fun is working up hatred between those who say 'mass' and those who say 'holy communion' when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker's doctrine and Thomas Aquinas', in any form which would hold water for five minutes. And all the purely indifferent things--candles and clothes and what not--are an admirable ground for our activities. We have quite removed from men's minds what that pestilent fellow Paul used to teach about food and other unessentials--namely, that the human without scruples should always give in to the human with scruples. You would expect to find the 'low' churchman genuflecting and crossing himself lest the weak conscience of his 'high' brother should be moved to irreverence, and the 'high' one refraining from these exercises lest he should betray his 'low' brother into idolatry. And so it would have been but for our ceaseless labour. Without that the variety of usage within the Church of England might have become a positive hotbed of charity and humility,

a book has been read

Congratulate me!
I finished an actual book. Four years ago while I was in labor with Gladys, I started reading The Pickwick Papers and Last Night I finished it!

I imagine everyone reading this will fall into one of two camps.
Either you will think, 'that's amazing! What a huge book! How persistent she is! Would that I could also finish reading an actual book'
or you will think, 'are you kidding? FOUR years to read a book! I read 57 books in one month. What a looser! I'm never reading this blog again."

Either way I hope you will congratulate me and muffle your righteous disdain in your sleeve. I think for my next venture I will try to finish reading Black Lamb Gray Falcon which I started in 1998. By the time I finish it we will have all moved on from the internet to the next great thing and some of us will be living on the moon, or in caves beating each other with clubs, whichever turn civilization happens to take.

A Foretaste of our Busy Weekend

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being 'a general disinclination to work of any kind'. What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.
'Why, you skulking little devil, you,' they would say, 'get up and do something for your living, can't you?--not knowing, of course, that I was ill.
And they didn't give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the head. And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often cured me--for the time being. I have known one clump on the head have more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight away then and there, and do what was wanted to be one, without further loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now. You know, it often is so--those simple, old-fashioned remedies are sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary stuff.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

Oh to be like other people

So I've been reading the first three pages of Charles Williams' Descent into Hell over and over for the last three weeks. I'm not trying to memorize it or anything, I just forget that I've read it already and pick back up at the beginning and then never get farther than the first chapter. Except for last night when I finished the chapter at 10:45 at night and had to read the entire first half of The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass to be able to go to sleep. And then I had weird dreams anyway. This is why I Don't Read. If I'm going to read a new book it has to be during the day. But who really has time to sit down during the day to read something.

I mean, I do sit down six or a hundred times a day to feed the Enormous Baby who can nurse for up to an hour.  This, according to so many blogs, ought to be an ideal time "pray", "read the Bible", "blog with one hand", and "read books".

"Make the best use of your time," I read yesterday from an advice giving "Mommy Blogger" who has just had her fifth child and has it all figured out.

"Make dinner early in the day" opined a  brilliant mother of two.

"Pretend to be an amputee and train yourself to do important tasks with one hand."

Why am I reading this?! I shout silently to myself. Why am I not reading an actual book?
So I got a book. I sat down. I juggled baby and book. I stared blankly at the page and  dozed off, waking up briefly to scream hysterically at Marigold who would really and truly love to kick Enormous Baby in Enormous Head.

Whatever. I don't have to read books to be an interesting person. I have the internet.

reading and typing with one hand...

As a palliative to the horror of having to read Treasure Island (never before has anything entirely killed off my small desire to take to the sea in ships) I'm rereading Sense and Sensibility at the same time. I am convinced, again as I am every time I read it, that in this book more than any other, Jane Austin had very particular people in mind rather than just types of people. There is too much blended together in Mr. Collins to make him only one person. So also with practically all the awful Bennets. But Miss Steele, my heavens! She had to have had a very particular woman in mind to produce such a creature.

It grieves me, deeply, that she fixed on naming her 'Anne'.
 


'

a small failing

So I finally read The Hobbit. 

I know, I'm late to the party.  And I didn't read it of my own free will. It was the only book I could get enough copies of in time for the start of classes in September and so I had to just bite the bullet and do it. 

So there it is. Apparently the next step is to face The Lord of the Rings. There's probably no way around it. Its just that I really don't like suspense, or violence, in movies or in books. That's why my reading diet consists almost solely of PG Wodehouse, with occasional trips to visit Lord Peter Wimsey (its not really suspense, is it? or violence, its just Lord Peter) and a history book here or there (because I already know what happened).

My students, of course, have loved The Hobbit. I don't think any of the other books on my list will top it in pure literary delight--good solid books probably (I don't actually know, its almost entirely a list of books I was too afraid to read as a child, or didn't have time for) but I don't think any of them will touch Tolkien.