Reading to My Child

One of the things I most looked forward to, and most enjoy, about being a mother is reading to my child. It's an excuse to reread childhood favorites, and something for us to share.

Check out this blog post from the New York Times about revisiting childhood favorites as adultss.

Review: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

"About this period her brother remarked to her: 'Mag, I'll tell yeh dis! See? Yeh've edder got teh go teh hell or go teh work!' Where upon she went to work, having the feminine aversion of going to hell."

From my TBR List I picked Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Other Short Fiction by Stephen Crane. I read quite of bit of Stephen Crane in college when I was studying American Literature. Maggie was a new one for me and an interesting read. Apparently it was too risque for its time and Crane published it himself under a pseudonym. After he became famous for The Red Badge of Courage, his publisher asked him to clean up the language in Maggie and they published it. Mostly he took out a lot of "damns."

My version was the original. The damns didn't bother me, but the dialogue was hard to follow at times. It's definitely a story from the streets of New York. I had read most of the short stories in this volume. I even remember writing a long paper on the symbolism in "The Open Boat."

But if you want to read something representative of Stephen Crane, you really should just read his classic, A Red Badge of Courage.

Learn more about Stephen Crane here.

Reading Aloud: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

In our adventures of reading The Chronicles of Narnia together, my daughter and I just finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I haven't seen the movie yet because we moved to the middle of nowhere with no gas station let alone a movie theater a few weeks before the movie was released. I look forward to seeing it soon. Even if I have to wait for it to come out on DVD, it will be relatively close to my rereading of the book and I hope to be able to compare the two mediums with more accuracy.

Reread: Catherine, Called Birdy

Despite my goal to start reading all the heavy classics that I have on my TBR shelf, I needed something lighter the past few days. So I reread Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman.

My sister read it a few months ago and said that she thought it ended in a strange place because you really don't know what's going to happen with our heroine. I hadn't read it in years so couldn't remember it well enough to comment at the time.

I can definitely see what she means. Catherine's fate is uncertain at the end of the book. But the book ends at the close of her childhood and just before a new chapter in her life begins. So although I'm left wondering what happened to Catherine, I feel that what happens next would be another book entirely. And yet I don't think Cushman would write that book because the next book would be Catherine stepping into adulthood and wouldn't fit into the YA genre anymore.

The appeal of this book is a spunky, independent girl in a world where most women were neither of those things. And we'd all like to think we could be the same in her situation, but I don't believe that any of us can really know what we would have been like in a different time and place, if we had been raised in a completely different world. It makes me grateful for being born when I was, and especially grateful that one of my regular household chores if not catching and squishing the fleas in my bed.

Review: The Help

"Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. No that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought."

I know I'm late on the bandwagon of reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. My hold copy finally came into my library--and then I moved. I reserved it at my new library and the copy finally came in--a few days before I was moving. (I don't recommend moving twice in the same year if you can help it.) I put it on hold yet again and got it via books by mail.

And it was just as good as I'd heard that it was. I completely agree with what I've heard--everyone should read this book.

I'm not surprised to see that the book is being turned into a movie, and I hope they do it justice. I'll be watching it--though I will most likely be really late in seeing it just as I was with reading the book. Better late than never.

New Year Book Challenges

At the beginning of 2010, I made a goal to read 100 books by the end of the year. That didn't happen. I might have read 100 books in a year when I was a literature major, but (unfortunately) my main job in life is not to read like it was back then. I finished 58 books in 2010, more than I did the year before. And that's all I'm expecting of myself this year. I'm signing up the Outdo Yourself Challenge at the measly "getting my heart rate up" level of reading 1-5 more books this year than last.

I could never have anticipated the changes and challenges I was about to face in my personal life in 2010. So instead of setting an unreachable goal, I'm just going to keep trying to do a little better than I have before. Plus my goal for the year is to attack my large and lofty To Be Read list. (Shouldn't reading something like War and Peace count for a lot more than one book?)

In 2010 I did meet my long-time goal of reading all the Newbery Medal books. I'm looking forward to a new year where all I have to do is read the newest winner.

Besides reading more books than I did last year, my goal for 2011 is to write more. I'm not going to be picky about what I write or what it's for, but I used to be a lot better about writing in general. I'm going to try to write a little bit each day and then have one day a week where I take more alone time to write more intensely without interruptions.

What are you looking forward to in 2011?