Tag Archives: Recommend

Books for Girl-Children

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The Sunday Indianapolis Star generally leaves me a little blue (Gannett and their weekly fluff-and-stuff) but today, it seemed a little more sad than usual. Today it announced that children's book author E.L. Konigsburg had passed away (see page A21). For those who've never heard of her, she was a Newbery Medal Winner, and the author of one of my favorite all-time kids' books: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book which retains its charms even to an adult reader. Now that I think about it, there's probably a very tiny fraction of my highly-impractical Art History degree that I might owe to Claudia, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the late Ms. Konigsburg.

In memory and honor of E.L. Konigsburg, I thought I'd post some books I hope kids still read, skewed toward the feminine– or at least, a list of books it would be a shame if no kid looks at anymore. The list, generally speaking, is probably geared for ages 6-12, though some will be a little younger or older. And heck, if your girl-children (or boy-children) won't read 'em, some of you adults may enjoy reading or re-reading them (many of them are, well, very fast reads).

The Books:

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. (1868) Despite my heartless fourth-grader teacher's statement that it was a poor book report choice because it's “too sweet,” this is a really great book. Sentimental, yes. Sweet, yes. But not saccharine.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. A Little Princess. (1905) Also, The Secret Garden. (1909-1911)

Cleary, Beverly: Actually, for this one, not a book, but many. Otis Spofford, Ellen Tebbits, Henry Huggins, Henry and Ribsy, Mitch and Amy, and all the Beezus/Ramona books. She wrote prolifically, from the silly (the Ralph-mouse-motorcycle things) to the serious (Dear Mr. Henshaw). Like most of the other books on the list, these books will seem dated, but that's okay. The heart is solid.

Grahame, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. (1908)

Konigsburg, E.L. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. (1967)

Lowry, Lois. Anastasia Krupnik. (1979).

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables. (1908) And also, Emily of New Moon (1923), The Story Girl (1911), and Chronicles of Avonlea (1912).

Raskin, Ellen. The Westing Game. (1979) Smart, funny, fast, with a surprisingly moving finish.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter. All of 'em.

Sainte-Exupéry, Antoine de. The Little Prince. (1943)

Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. (1963) Every full moon I've ever seen since reading this book has made me think of it. Happily.

Speare, Elizabeth George. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. (1958). I actually re-read this one a couple years ago and it was sadly disappointing to my grown-up eyes. However, to an 8 or 9 year old child, I think it would still be interesting. (I still remember how exotic and new the book seemed as a kid, with “Barbados,” the sea, and peacock-blue kid slippers. Not to mention, reading it young adds a new dimension to the primary school Thanksgiving lessons and primes one a little bit to middle-school readings of colonial history into The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible).

Streatfeild, Noel. Ballet Shoes. (1936)

Honorable Mentions: White (Charlotte's Web), Wilder (The Little House books), Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia), Woolley (Ginny Joins In), Parish (Amelia Bedelia series), Lindgren (most famous for Pippi Longstocking but I always preferred Mischievous Meg)

(Illustration: Mary Engelbreit)

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International Notebook Clean-up Day (Quotes from the Last Many, Many Moons)

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“That's when you know you're living right, when you're an eighty-something percent free throw shooter and you get your own rebound. But I think he needs a haircut.” I.U. Men's Basketball Coach Tom Crean of Jordan Hulls, following the 01/12/13 game against Minnesota. Indianapolis Star.

“There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.” Leo Tolstoy

“Some argue that [flat and falling wages, labor conditions, loss of well-paying "middle class" jobs, and inequality] was an unavoidable result of deeper shifts: global competition, cheap goods made in China, technological changes. Although those factors played a part, they have not been decisive. In Europe, where the same changes took place, inequality has remained much lower than in the United States. The decisive factor has been politics and public policy: tax rates, spending choices, labor laws, regulations, campaign finance rules…. Inequality hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people in the circumstances of their birth– a rebuke to the very idea of the American dream. Inequality divides us from one another in schools, in neighborhoods, at work, on airplanes, in hospitals, in what we eat, the condition of our bodies, in what we think, in our children's futures, in how we die…Inequality corrodes trust among fellow citizens, making it seem as if the game is rigged. Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can…Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy.” George Packer, “The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline,” Foreign Affairs, November-December 2011. (Don't let the date on this one fool you. This is still an engrossing journal article with important things to say about what's happened in American life and what it means.)

“Government, politics, corporations, the media, organized religion, organized labor, banks, businesses, and other mainstays of a healthy society are failing…With few notable exceptions, the nation's onetime social pillars are ill-equipped for the 21st century. Most critically, they are failing to adapt quickly enough for a population buffeted by wrenching economic, technological, and demographic change.” Ron Fournier and Sophie Quinton, “In Nothing We Trust,” National Journal, April 19, 2012. (still a worthwhile and relevant read.)

“The care of human happiness, not the destruction of life, is the first and only object of good government.” Thomas Jefferson

“We, the people, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals and those who died in their defense. As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.” President Barack Obama

“Going to war, being at war, should be painful for the entire country, from the start. Henceforth, when we ship the troops off to battle, let's pay for it… 'Freedom isn't free' shouldn't be a bumper sticker– it should be policy.” Rachel Maddow, Drift.

Saturday: Late, Late Edition

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Speak Up, I Can’t Hear You.

The State of Indiana announced this week it would be making cuts to optional services in the Medicaid program for adults. This includes chiropractics, podiatry, and dental care.

It also includes hearing aids. Which are definitely optional, if you can hear.

Proving once again, this isn’t health care, this is only-if-you’re-dying care.

Update, 21 January 2011: WFYI reported yesterday that Indiana will be covering hearing aids for adult Medicaid recipients after all. Apparently, there was a “miscommunication.” However, if you need dentures or a root canal, you will still need creativity and power tools.

I Read the News Today. (Oh, boy.)

Indianapolis retailer Don’s Guns (“I don’t like to make money! I just like to sell guns!”) has run out of high-capacity magazines for Glock pistols since last Saturday. Also, “We’re seeing a lot of young people coming into the range and practicing. Some of them are in there shooting and seeing how fast they can change clips.”

No worries, though, if you’re looking to stock up on your extended cartridges. He’s ordered more.

Keen, Judy and Tim Evans of USA Today, Indianapolis Star, 13 January 2011

Quote-idan

“I keep reminding people karma means ‘doing.’ What you sow, you reap. So you create your own karma by doing; your karma is your deeds.” – Aung San Suu Kyi

“Paradoxically, I believe that Europe’s influence depends on our not having great military power or imperial ambitions any longer. We are able to play an objective role in which we are trusted because we seek genuinely to end conflict, assist development, and resolve differences, not distrusted for being thought to have a hidden agenda.” – Catherine Ashton

“More money, by a factor of 50% was raised in IPO’s in China than in London and the United States this calendar year.” – Eliot Spitzer

“The rule for government: Be there. Do something.” – Eugene Robinson

“It is, after all, an option. To see these people dressed up as the founding fathers who want more freedom, but you don’t want an option? It’s actually more freedom, you see there.” – Bill Maher, regarding opposition to the public option during the health care debate

“Certainly, it’s worth asking if the Western tradition of militarism, which can now boast nearly three millennia of success, is reaching the end of its usefulness, even if any attempt to answer this question definitively would be premature.” – Thomas Cahill

“Community has worked; those who brand it a failure don’t have a stake in its success.” – Dan Carpenter

“It’s a classic case of, I don’t know what you want to call it, semantic corruption.” – Jerome Chanes, on the recent use of the term “blood libel”

 Excerpted, Stephen L. Carter

“But how is the public to figure out who’s winning?…How many battles of the Iraq war can the reader name? How many from Afghanistan? Out of either ignorance or condescension, the modern news media rarely tell us. One night a year or so after the fall of Baghdad, my wife and I were watching the evening news. The anchor recounted a fierce battle in southern Iraq, and told us how many American soldiers died. Here is what he did not tell us: what piece of ground the battle was contesting, what difference it made who prevailed, and who won. This is not, as the right would have it, some mystical anti-war bias. This is simple ineptitude.”

Carter, Stephen L. The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama, 2011. Excerpted in Newsweek, January 10 and 17, 2011.

Recommendations: Two to Read, One to Watch

Dan Carpenter, “Losing Common Ground,” Indianapolis Star, 9 January 2011

President Obama’s Tucson Memorial Speech, 12 January 2011

Watch: Countdown to Zero, Lucy Walker’s 2010 documentary about nuclear weapons

  

Excerpted: Travels with Charley

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From John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America

  •  “American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.”
  • “He said bitterly, ‘If anywhere in your travels, you come on a man with guts, mark the place. I want to go to see him. I haven’t seen anything but cowardice and expediency. This used to be a nation of giants. Where have they gone?…’  ‘Must be somewhere,’ I said… ‘There used to be a thing or commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone….Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that’s the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln….’ I remember retorting, ‘Maybe the People are always those who used to live the generation before last.’”
  •  “Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?”
  • “But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself…I’ve seen a look in dogs’ eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”
  • “…all the polls and opinion posts, with newspapers more opinion than news so that we no longer know one from the other…”

Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley: In Search of America. New York: Viking Press, 1962.

When the Frost is on the Punkin

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John Everett Millais, "Autumn Leaves,"1855-56. Manchester City Art Galleries.

“For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?” John Steinbeck

In honor of Autumn, October, and Halloween, I’ve been re-reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962). I usually do this because there’s something so perfectly fall-like about the first half of Part Two. “The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.” And so I wanted to share this, the Millais painting, and the short list of atmospherically perfect things to dip into on a crisp October day, or better, a brisk All Hallows’ Eve.

With a nod to Indiana, James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost is on the Punkin.”

For poison and pathos and the ability to stick in one’s head, “Where ha’ you been, Lord Randal, my son?” Anonymous child ballad, “Lord Randal (Randall).”

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “The Birthmark.”

Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman.” For cadence, but mostly for this:

“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees / The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas…”

Happy Halloween. Happy Autumn.

Caesar’s Breath (O Random! My Random!)

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Quotey  McQuoterson

“I thought equality was non-negotiable.” Lady Gaga

“What if we say ‘Okay, you can invade Iran, but it has to be all the gay guys.’“ Seth MacFarlane

“We’ve already fallen behind in areas like alternative energy, better batteries, and nanotechnology. Instead of racing to catch up, we’re buying seeds and garden gnomes on Facebook. This won’t end well.” Daniel Lyons

“In a dream, you saw a way to survive and you were filled with joy.” Jenny Holzer

Children’s Hour

John McCain at a California fundraiser said that Barbara Boxer “is the most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today. I know that because I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having to serve with her.”

Senator McCain, for starters, no, you didn’t have to. You’re the one who wanted to be on the big boy team. You were the one fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work on Capitol Hill and make the country better. And you chose to take it. But, honestly, no one made you serve…

And, if you’re going to play on the big boy team, you should know that at this point in this wonderfully modern and advanced society of ours, girls play there too and the optics of the homme picking on the femme might not be politically advantageous to said homme. Further, on the big boy team, sometimes there are other people on the team you don’t like. Work with them anyway. And be polite about it. See, outside of the Washington bubble in the real world, most of us have to (literally have to) work with one or two colleagues we dislike. But, being adults, most of us understand that to stand in front of a microphone and tout our disaffection, nay, our disdain for our “unpleasant” colleagues is to utterly destroy any chance of a productive working relationship. And makes us seem a little petty, infantile, and ill-mannered. Besides, sometimes we don’t wish to hurt people, even those we don’t enjoy working with, even those we actively dislike. So, as grown-ups do, we don’t say that sort of thing out loud. We certainly don’t say it where it might be heard, including in front of a live microphone at an event covered by the national media when we are, in theory, one of the grand elder statesmen of the country. Unless we are preferencing our temper tantrums over our gravitas, behaving like a toddler instead of a grown-up.

But maybe it’s the California air…after all, we had Ms. Fiorina channeling Lindsay Lohan in a Mean Girl moment, making fun of Senator Boxer’s hair.

So if people are wondering who’s watching the store or where the grown-ups are, or if you end up scratching your head and asking why John Q. Public doesn’t trust Washington, including you, Mr. McCain, perhaps it’s because from the outside your behavior appears exceptionally surly and utterly childish. And for all Boxer’s “bitter partisanship,” it has not included the very public expression of the “unpleasant experience of having” to serve with you, Senator.

Actually…

“If there’s anything voters don’t want to hear in 2010 it’s Washington inside talk.” (Mark Shields, NewsHour, 15 October 2010).

Oh, Mr. Shields, yes. Yes, actually, we do. We want to hear the guts of it all. We want to be spoken to as equals, as grown-ups, as fellow citizens and not an unknowing and uncaring gaggle of Ordinary Americans. We don’t care if CBO is mentioned (this was your example, and honestly, Congressional Budget Office is not so esoteric that it should count as “inside”). See, the abbreviations don’t really fuss us. We actually really, really do want to know the inside stuff, in detail, and in long form. Even if it’s bad news, even if it’s longer than a 30-second sound bite, even if it doesn’t guarantee a great job, sunshine and roses, and zero budget deficit with zero tax increases for everyone forever and ever, amen.

Really. Besides, Washington inside talk would sound like a choir of angels after the mindless, slogan-filled, short-form generic and/or jingoistic pablum that we’ve been fed and fed up with of late.

For Your Delectation: Read.

“Sarah Palin: The Sound and the Fury,” Vanity Fair, Michael Joseph Gross

“A Tea Party Taxonomy,” Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg

“Washington, We Have a Problem,” Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum

For Your Delectation: Watch. (Or listen. Podcast on itunes.)

“God in America,” three-part series from Frontline and American Experience.