From the archives: Serious Times (book review)

First posted September 2011

"God calls us to live large on the very stage we find ourselves.  God has placed us in this very situation to infuse it with meaning and significance.  This enables us to live for Christ now rather than waiting for a set of circumstances we imagine will allow us to serve him in the future.  This simple but profound attitude has marked many of the great lives...."

The best book I've read lately...really the best...is Serious Times: Making Your Life Matter in an Urgent Day, by James Emery White, published in 2004.

I'm not sure if I'd ever read anything by Dr. White before.  I didn't go looking for him.  The book turned up in a pile of "religious non-fiction" I was pricing at the thrift store.  I liked the look of it and decided to buy it myself.

The Amazon reviews are pretty right on.  To say it's an entertaining book (as someone there said) might sound like you were doing it an injustice (I mean, the title is Serious Times); but it is written in an engaging and readable style.  Good thought stuff, good faith stuff, good life stuff.  I especially liked the chapter on "Developing Our Minds."  Here's a quote from that chapter:

"Beyond engaging various fields of thought, it is critical to be able to think about our faith in relation to its significance.  In dialogue with the world, the deepest question regarding the Christian faith is 'So what?'  This simple question gets to the heart of not only thinking Christianly but communicating Christianity itself....The Christian mind must understand the significance [of the resurrection] in order to offer it to the world.  If we cannot, we will have lost our place in the most critical of conversations--indeed, the only conversation that matters."

This one is a keeper.  I'd like to figure out a way to use it for an adult Sunday School class.  It would also be a great addition to a highschool worldview course.

One more quote:

"By nature we tend to adapt, to conform, to our surroundings.  There are only two forces shaping us: one is the world and the other is the will of God.  If we are to avoid becoming in the surrounding culture, we must take a stand.  That stand comes through the renewing of our minds....Taken into prayer, ideas become real, life-changing, dynamic.  Then, and only then, they change my life."

The last Wednesday Hodgepodge, and Mama Squirrel's summer reading list

I have not Wednesday-Hodgepodged for awhile, but I'm glad I didn't miss this one: it's the last-ever Hodgepodge. (First time we participated: July 2015.)

1. What has been the highlight of your summer so far? (It's still summer, people!)

That would be the trip to the U.S. in July, which was a sort of working holiday, retreat and reunion all at once. Some of our family also had a nice one-day holiday on Lake Huron.

2. What do you wish you'd done more of this summer? Less of?

Eaten more peaches: the ones we had were amazing.

I spent half the summer finishing a spring-term online course, and then a couple more weeks working on a writing project. So I could say I wish I'd done less work, but I really don't wish that, because Things Got Done.

 3. Something you're looking forward to on your September calendar?

My fall term online course, Designing Curriculum for Adult Learners, starts today. (So I'm procrastinating by answering the Hodgepodge.)

 4. Best/favorite book you've read this summer?

In June, I finished two education textbooks, a book of Denise Levertov's poetry, and the business book Scrum, which I'm still pondering.

Here are my four favourite books from July, August, and the first few days in September (because it's still summer):

Ulin, David
The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time

Walsh, Peter
Let It Go (about decluttering)

White, James Emery
A Mind for God

Willis, Connie
To Say Nothing of the Dog

 6. Insert your own random thought here. 

Our family has now been online for twenty years. Definitely a life-changing decision, to dial up that first connection. Our two youngest cannot remember life any other way. It's been good, bad, strange, useful, productive, time-wasting, annoying, and amazing by turns. Right now it means that I have to go and work on my online class.


Linked from The Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.

Four thrifted books

 The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, by Lesslie Newbigin

"What comes home to the heart of the hearer must really be the gospel and not a product shaped by the mind of the hearer...But of course the truth is that every communication of the gospel is already culturally conditioned...[the need is] to speak God's word to the total context in which people are now living and in which they now have to make their decisions."

The Art of Facilitation: How to Create Group Synergy

"The way to bridge the gap between groups is to establish commonality of values, purpose, vision and shared experiences. Full humanity covers the whole range of human emotions including love, joy, sadness and loss. Consciousness leads us towards one another, unconsciousness leads us away."

UnPoverty: Rich Lessons from the Working Poor, by Mark Lutz

"When we lived in South Africa, my family constantly heard our white friends rationalize the injustice of apartheid, unable to see wrong in what they were doing and unwilling to recognize rampant exploitation. Knowing this propensity, I must force myself to stand back and look objectively at my position in the world, lest I continue in blissful ignorance."

Tales from Ovid, translated by Ted Hughes

"Some are transformed just once / And live their whole lives after in that shape. / Others have a facility / For changing themselves as they please." ~~ "Erysichthon," in Tales from Ovid

From the archives: Mozart, long division, and the tough stuff

First posted April 2010

Last night I found myself deep in Charlotte Mason's School Education (the third volume in the Home Education series), because I was thinking hard about how what we do for school here does or doesn't match up with CM goals. (Sometimes it doesn't!) I did take some time out to watch Mr. Holland's Opus, including the part where Mr. Holland's school cuts out all the music and drama courses because of lack of funds and because the administration does not value those things.

Vice Principal Wolters: I care about these kids just as much as you do. And if I'm forced to choose between Mozart and reading and writing and long division, I choose long division.
Glenn Holland: Well, I guess you can cut the arts as much as you want, Gene. Sooner or later, these kids aren't going to have anything to read or write about.

It's hard to get away from the discussion and thinking over educational questions in Ontario over the past couple of weeks, questions about political correctness, about the school vs. the family's role in teaching anything beyond the "basic" subjects. The Toronto weekend papers were full of comments from people who would seemingly like nothing better to get their hands squeezed tightly around the minds of my children. We've also been talking about spiritual warfare as part of a study at church. It all leads me to a sense not so much of despair but of urgency, a sense that if our children are to have a chance to stand against not only systematic reprogramming of personal values but against the Vice Principal Wolters of the world, we need to give them some very strong tools to do it with and we need to do that now.

Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley, though not necessarily kindred spirits to CM, agreed on one point: that books, real books, are the strongest of those tools. Take books away from people, either physically or by taking away their ability to read them (or their belief that books are valuable, or their understanding that some books are just paper with covers while others are more than that), and you can reprogram your subjects to think any way you want. Find them again, and the winter of frozen minds starts to thaw and bud into spring. It even happened in the Bible.

That's why slaves were forbidden to read. That's why printing presses and newspapers are often damaged or closed down during times of political turmoil. Knowledge (not just information, as Charlotte Mason repeatedly said) is power. Thinking is power. Reading is power. We have the natural world, we have Mozart, we have paintings, we have so much more there to discover...but beyond that, we have books. They are still there. We can still read them. They disappear from the library shelves and from publishers' lists, but they often show up (as if in retaliation) as e-books and on used booksellers' sites. Nobody's taken away the Harvard Classics online. Nobody's yet taken away your right to buy books by David Hicks and Richard Mitchell. Or Bibles, at least for the time being and at least in this country. Or Shakespeare. Or the books that inspired Frankenstein's monster. If they humanized him, can they do less for us?

The definition proposed here for "a leisurely education" was having the freedom (time, space, opportunity) to discover what makes you fully human. Without a doubt, that freedom is being pulled away. Pull back as hard as you can, as long as you can.

Quote for the day: sometimes ideas are there and not there

 

"Ideas are everywhere, in the words and, so to speak, behind the words, present because they are literally present and present even if they appear to be absent. A writer may despise the idea of zoos and communicate that hatred by writing a book about animals in the bush, never mentioning zoos, never alluding to zoos or dropping a hint about zoos. Because of the way the mind works, we get the message...A book about the ethical nature of Christ may in fact be an argument against Christ's divinity. A book of recipes for winter soups made by cloistered monks may really be an argument against the modern world...If you picture a page of writing as three-dimensional, with the words hovering a half-inch or so above the paper, then you begin to see where the ideas are: behind the words, between the words, really everywhere." ~~ Eric Maisel, Deep Writing

Quote for the day: the democratic right to grammar

"Since we live in a competitive society in which the struggle for survival is primary, power exists, and power will have its symbols. Literacy is a far better tool and symbol of empowerment than any other, even money...However much you may hate grammar, think how much better a system ours is in which even the lowest peasant can achieve literary equality by learning rules of writing, spelling, grammar, and diction that are available equally to all and that apply equally to all." ~~ David R. Williams, Sin Boldly!: Dr. Dave's Guide to Writing the College Paper

Quote for the day: you make it sound easy

"It's harder to begin a sentence well than to end it well. As we'll see later, to end a sentence well, we need only decide which of our ideas is the newest, probably the most complex, and then imagine that complex idea at the end of its own sentence. The problem is merely to get there gracefully." ~~ Joseph M. Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace

Mama Squirrel's Reading List: 2017 Apologies, 2018 Plans

Edited March 2018 to mark "read" books. ☆

I had about forty books on my 2017 reading list, and I read about seventy (including re-reads). But most of the books I read weren't the ones on the list.

Sometimes it's easier to read the ones that come into my hands than it is to make a point of ordering or borrowing others. And needs change (i.e. suddenly desperately needing books about downsizing).

So, this year I have 45 books so far on the to-read list. Six of them are have-to-reads, because I will be taking courses that include them. There are also some really- hope-to-find, really-hope-to-reads, including a few from last year's list. And there are some that just sound interesting.

(The links are from GoodReads.)

Required Reading

Collaborative Learning Techniques: A Handbook for College Faculty
Barkley, Elizabeth F.

Facilitating with Ease!
Bens, Ingrid

The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom
Brookfield, Stephen D.

Planning Instruction for Adult Learners
Cranton, Patricia

Designing Effective Instruction, 7th Edition
Morrison, Gary R.

The Purposes of Adult Education: An Introduction
Spencer, Bruce

Other Education Books

T. S. Eliot And Education

Bantock, G.H.

Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

Barzun, Jacques

Beauty for Truth's Sake: The Re-Enchantment of Education

Caldecott, Stratford

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education

Caldecott, Stratford

The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What it Means to Be an Educated Human Being Gamble, Richard

Know and Tell
Glass, Karen
  Vittorino Da Feltre And Other Humanist Educators
Woodward, William Harrison

Teaching As A Conserving Activity

Postman, Neil

Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education

Taylor, James S.

Writing, Poetry, and Literature 

Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning

Barfield, Owen

This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979 - 2012
Berry, Wendell

Uncovering the Logic of English

Eide, Denise

Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination

Guite, Malcolm 

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
Scott, A.O.

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer

Turchi, Peter

Style: Toward Clarity and Grace ☆

Williams, Joseph M.

Things I Would Just Like to Read


The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood
Aalto, Kathryn 

Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do

Bargh, John A.

Mythologies

Barthes, Roland

The Culture We Deserve

Barzun, Jacques

Time and Free Will
Bergson, Henri
(Downloaded free from archive.org)

What Are People For?

Berry, Wendell

The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings

Brann, Eva

The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life

Buechner, Frederick 

Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina

Casey, Michael

Manalive

Chesterton, G.K.

Two Awesome Hours: Science-Based Strategies to Harness Your Best Time and Get Your Most Important Work Done

Davis, Josh

When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself

Corbett, Steve

To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World: The Life of Freida Fromm-Reichmann

Hornstein, Gail A.

The Weight of Glory

Lewis, C.S.

The Irrational Season(Crosswicks Journals, #3)

L'Engle, Madeleine

Hallelujah: A Journey through Advent with Handel's Messiah

Rollins, Cindy

You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Smith, James K.A.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

Taplin, Jonathan

The Ethics of Evangelism

Thiessen, Elmer John

The Entitlement Cure: Finding Success in Doing Hard Things the Right Way

Townsend, John

Ideas Have Consequences

Weaver, Richard M.

Renewing the Christian Mind: Essays, Interviews, and Talks

Willard, Dallas

Quote for the day: we all need someone to talk to

"[Language] lets us know, in fact, why we are together. Most of our human functions are singular: we don't require others to breathe, walk, eat, or sleep. But we require others to speak and to reflect back to us what we say. Language...is a form of loving others." ~~ Alberto Manguel, The City of Words

Quote for the day: Stories tell us that we are

"Stories can feed our consciousness, which can lead to the faculty of knowing if not who we are at least that we are, an essential awareness that develops through confrontation with another's voice...to know that we are requires knowledge of the others whom we perceive and who perceive us. Few methods are better suited for this task of mutual perception than storytelling." ~~ Alberto Manguel, The City of Words

Quote for the day: Sounds like twaddle to me

"Entirely pleased with themselves, they offered the child books that represented themselves, with all their attributes thrown in, their practical sense, their science, their hypocrisy,and their ankylosis. They offered him books that oozed boredom, that were likely to make him detest wisdom forever; silly books and empty books, pedantic books and heavy books; books that paralyzed the spontaneous forces of his soul; absurd books by tens and by hundreds, falling like hail on the springtime. The sooner they stifled a young heart, the sooner they effaced from a young spirit the sense of freedom and pleasure in play; the sooner they imposed limits, rules, and constraints, the more men were pleased with themselves for having raised childhood without delay to their own state of supreme perfection." ~~ Paul Hazard, Books, Children & Men, translated by Marguerite Mitchell

Wednesday Hodgepodge: Your flag, my flag

1. The Hodgepodge lands on June 14th this week, Flag Day in the US of A. Do you fly your country's flag at home? Sometimes, often, or every single day? Have you ever visited the city of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia)? Did you make a point of seeing The Betsy Ross House? Have you ever made a trip to Baltimore? If so, was Fort McHenry on your itinerary? (where Francis Scott Key was inspired to write The Star Spangled Banner)

I have never been to any of those places. I did go to Walt Disney World during the Bicentennial.

(There is some extreme political incorrectness in "America on Parade": you've been warned.)



2. Red flag or white flag? Which have you encountered most recently? Explain.

I take it you don't mean the Maple Leaf on the Canadian flag?

Neither, really, that I can think of.

3. Are you a stay in the car listen to the end of a song kind of person? What kind of person is that?

Someone who likes to see things through to the finish, not leave loose ends? Or just someone who's compulsive about listening to the ends of songs?

Do I stay in the car listening to the ends of songs? I don't listen to songs in the car, so I can't say. I remember a couple of times when I was much younger, asking my mom to drive around the block again so we could hear the rest of the latest top 40 song on the radio. But that was before you could easily click the button and listen to anything you wanted, when you wanted it.

4. What are some of the traits or qualities you think a good dad possesses? In other words, what makes a good dad? What's an expression you associate with your father?

To answer the last question first, "that's a lulu." If it's not a lulu, it might be a humdinger.

Finding the balance between protecting kids and letting them try their wings is something all good dads have to figure out.

My kids would also assume that any good dad should know how to hook up a stereo.

5. What's one rule you always disagreed with while growing up? Is that rule somehow still part of your adult life? Is that a good or bad thing?

I have told this story before, but here goes. At my very first school, we were marched down to the school library once a week and told to choose a book. The books were arranged by height: first grade books on the bottom shelves, and so on up to fifth or sixth grade. The first day of library time, I spurned the picture books on the bottom, and climbed my little jumpered self up to a higher literary plane, only to be hauled back down again by the book police, I mean librarian. To her credit, it did turn out okay, even after she ratted me out to the teacher, because on later visits she would pick out special books I might like. But why just for me? Maybe other first-graders would have liked to choose from those books too. The very bad idea of books labelled only for this or that grade or age stuck with me forever, and when I had my own kids, I tried not to say "you are too young or too old." That is why we had four-year-olds talking about "deadly faints" and "gallant ships," and listening to that famous composition "Tchaikovsky's Cannibal."

6. Insert your own random thought here.

Another little transition about to happen here: Lydia is in her last week of tenth grade (except for exams), and she is hoping to hear back about a summer job. The hazy days of summer await us.

Linķed from The Grand Old Wednesday Hodgepodge at From This Side of the Pond.

From the archives: Gladys Hunt gives one reason for reading

First posted January 2006

"Books are wonderful ways to learn the possibilities of being human. We can define character traits with words, but they take shape only when you see what they look like in a person. How can we understand honor or valor or courage unless we have sometimes seen these traits in someone's life? Good literature may so move the reader that is seems impossible to verbalize about it. The experience is what counts.... 

"This is why an evil character in a story may reveal the real nature of evil more clearly than a sermon on sin. Reading stories is also a vicarious way to see how goodness and humility and honesty and beauty play out in life. Literature does instruct us, even thought it may not be our main reason for reading. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in Jesus Rediscovered that books like Resurrection or The Brothers Karamazov gave him an overpowering sense of how uniquely marvelous a Christian way of looking at life is, and a passionate desire to share it. Good books have a way of instructing the heart."

~~ Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman's Heart

From the archives: Notes from a Book Talk

First posted October 2007. Links edited/updated.

(Adapted from a talk I wrote for a support group meeting. Are you sitting comfortably?)

Books fall open, you fall in
Delighted where you’ve never been
Hear voices not once heard before
Reach world on world through door on door
Find unexpected keys to things
Locked up beyond imaginings
What might you be, perhaps become
Because one book is somewhere?...

(from "Books Fall Open," by David McCord)
When Mr. Fixit and I were at the beginning of our journey together, one of us once gave the other one a gift bag with a Winnie-the-Pooh illustration on it and the words, "As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was going to happen." That's almost identical to a chapter title in Gladys Hunt's Honey for a Child’s Heart (at least the 1978 edition, which is what I have): "The Pleasure of a Shared Adventure."

Reading is an adventure, and even better, it can be a shared adventure.

What do you need for an adventure? You need some place to go—often some place unknown. Adventures require at least a bit of the unexpected, the unknown, a bit of uncertainty; “things locked up beyond imaginings.” Most adventures don’t happen right in your own backyard. To have a real adventure you need to step outside, push beyond your comfort zone.

Real adventures can include buried treasure, answering riddles, fighting dragons, outwitting giants. They include big problems and big decisions.

Adventures go better with food. Apples, popcorn, hot chocolate…

Here’s a quote, see if you know what book it’s from. "Her own small bedroom now became her reading-room and there she would sit and read most afternoons, often with a mug of hot chocolate beside her….It was pleasant to take a hot drink up to her room and have it beside her as she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new world and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village."

And it’s nice to have a place to come home to afterwards. Our adventures are enjoyed more when they’re framed in the familiarity and security of home.

What should you expect from an adventure?

Expect it to take time. You can’t have a real adventure in five minutes, and some of the best book adventures are very long. We are often too impatient and we settle for abridged versions or just skip things altogether because they’re so long. But if you take, say, the long unabridged version of David Copperfield, there’s just a huge amount of wonderful stuff in there that hasn’t made it into shortened versions or movie versions. In other words, you don’t really know David Copperfield until you’ve explored the whole thing, and when you’re done you’re tired but you know it was worthwhile.

Expect some degree of danger, risk, opposition and difficulty. Being a reader these days can be a subversive activity, both inside and outside of the Christian community; it can make people angry; it can make a lot more people yawn with boredom. It’s not the books that get banned by school libraries that you will have to struggle to read or even to find; it’s the books that nobody’s actually supposed to be able or be interested in reading any more; that includes some of the treasures of our Christian literary heritage. How many people do you know--Christians or not-- who have actually read and enjoyed Paradise Lost or Pilgrim’s Progress, just for a start? How many homeschoolers will include those books in their children’s education? For some people, concentrating our children’s reading on the dead white guys (particularly dead Christian white guys) is seen as some kind of an act against contemporary culture. And those who don't get outright angry may try to discourage you in other ways. Just like in Pilgrim’s Progress, you are going to meet people with names like That’s-So-Dull and Much-Abridged who are going to try to get you to turn back; but press on, the rewards are there in the end.

And expect to be rewarded when you climb to the top. Who goes on a quest without hoping to bring back treasure? Without even specially looking for them, we can expect to make discoveries that lead to wisdom, teach discernment and critical thinking, inspire us with courage, and build character; or "moral imagination."
Charlotte Mason said that “stories make the child’s life intelligible to himself; Gladys Hunt wrote in Honey for a Child’s Heart that “books help children know what to look for in life.” It helps to know what you’re looking for when you’re hunting for treasure. And besides that there are a lot of little side benefits of reading, like improved vocabulary and listening skills, creativity, and having bits of useful information stored up in the mind.

Again from "that book": 

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen. If only they would read a little Dickens or Kipling they would soon discover there was more to life than cheating people and watching television.”

Northrop Frye said that literature is true, more true in some ways than our everyday existence; because when our everyday life is disappointing and superficial or truly horrible, it is in literature that we find examples of true love, true honour, true courage. Reading is more than just escapism. It’s not escapism to find strength by remembering Christian’s defeat of Giant Despair; by thinking of wise words that Corrie Ten Boom’s father and sister told her; by making yourself smile at a lovely line of poetry or laugh at the Pooh stories.

But reading is an escape as well, in a good sense. We rebel against ignorance and smallness and look for something more; we try to remember what we are or should be as human beings. We can escape from the pride of thinking we know it all, and from limitations like not really being able to sail or fly or ride horses, or find a secret garden or a buried treasure. We may not have people in our everyday lives who are as loyal as Charlotte, as resourceful as Laura’s Ma, as wise as Clara’s grandmother in Heidi, as encouraging as Ratty, or as valiant as Reepicheep; but in books, we can do all these things and know all these people.

Expect to have fun. The roads through books aren’t all serious; there is a great deal of humor, delight and pleasure, even nonsense. About a hundred years ago, a parent in England wrote this:
“I cannot count the times I have read aloud the stories in the "Just So" book. During a dreary month of grey skies and perpetual snow, spent in the hotel of a grim Yorkshire village, those stories were our daily bread, especially those that took us to the sunshine of South Africa. And the greatest favourite of all was The Beginning of the Armadilloes. Only Rudyard Kipling or Lewis Carroll would dare to write anything so absurd. Day after day, for thirty days or thereabouts, those two rascals, Stickly-Prickly, and Slow-and-Solid, played their pranks, and day after day we laughed at the same places, and when Slow-and-Solid said to the Painted Jaguar--"Because if she said what you said she said, it's just the same as if I said what she said she said"--day after day we bounded out of our chairs with joy….Let us arm our children for the slings and arrows of later life by cultivating the spirit of innocent laughter.”

Terry Glaspey says that “being in the presence of greatness cannot but change us.” So expect to be changed, strengthened, stretched, widened, given a different perspective as you go on a particular adventure. As characters in books grow throughout a story, we share their experiences and also find ourselves growing and changing. One of my favourite short books is Rumer Godden’s The Mousewife, about an unhappy mother mouse who develops a friendship with a dove living in a cage. The dove tells her stories about the world outside and gives her a lot of new ideas about things she has never seen. Eventually the mousewife finds a way to help the dove escape, but suddenly realizes that she no longer has her friend there to talk to her and teach her things. Then she looks out the window. “She looked out again and saw the stars….When she saw them shining she thought at first they must be new brass buttons. Then she saw that they were very far off, farther than the garden or the wood, beyond the farthest trees….’I have seen them for myself,’ said the mousewife, ‘without the dove. I can see for myself,’ said the mousewife, and slowly, proudly, she walked back to bed.”

How can we get to be more adventurous, and get more out of our reading adventures?

Use the services of an experienced guide—in this case, booklists and books about books, including homeschool book catalogues and online reviews—but use them cautiously. In your book adventures, as in real life, some guides are more to be trusted than others; and some may simply suit your purposes or personality more than others do. What one hiking guide calls a nice little stroll may leave you exhausted; and what one booklist calls suitable for a ten-year-old may be your idea of something better saved for high school, or the other way around.

To have the greatest adventures, seek out the greatest treasures. Our culture tends to cheapen and trivialize reading (formula series, TV-tie-ins, other kinds of books that barely qualify as books); the media tells us we should read mostly because it’s fun. But even fun gets boring after awhile.

To have the greatest adventures, don’t stick only to the roads marked “fiction.” Read some of the history of medicine, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy. Find out what was beautiful, revolutionary and even dangerous about scientific discoveries. Read history, and go beyond “how the peasants lived.” Read biographies, poetry, nature descriptions. Read the Bible together.

There is also the idea these days that there are no specific important books—wrong. Some book adventures are just more rewarding than others, especially the places you know you’ll want to go back to again and take your friends along to enjoy. There are certain real-life places that everyone should try to see once; and there are book adventures that are too good to miss. You may not be ready for them all at the beginning, but you can work up to the challenge.

Which is another good point: to have the greatest adventures, take along some good companions; make it a shared adventure, and everyone who goes along will be in on the shared vocabulary, experiences and “book friends” that you meet along the way. How do you work around different ages? Not everyone who comes along will get the most from a particular book journey, but sometimes what they do bring back will surprise you. There are times in life when you just can’t read with everyone, but even if it’s just you and one other person, you’re sharing that adventure together, and maybe somebody else will decide to come along if the two of you look like you’re having fun.

How do you deal with general reluctance, the attitude that books are hard or boring? I once went to a health-food demonstration where the presenter was asked, "How can I encourage my children to eat some of these foods instead of hot dogs?" She answered, very unhelpfully, that really they should have just been better trained from the start. In the same way, it would be easy for me to say that if your kids are brought up reading with you from babyhood, you probably won’t have a problem with this, and that if you do you should just force it down them; but that sort of answer just makes you want to give up, doesn't it? So a better suggestion might be that you’re going to have to woo them—maybe with the hot chocolate and popcorn, maybe with a particularly wonderful or funny book that you know gets right into the story very quickly. These suggestions might also apply if you really want to involve a spouse or another adult family member; nobody wants to be made to read, especially if they think they’re going to be bored by kids books; so make sure that it’s something that everybody’s going to enjoy. One recommendation is Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It’s nothing at all like the movie and it’s a lot of fun and has lots of things blowing up in it.

How do you cope with busy schedules, and the competing attractions of other media? You can use audio books, maybe during mealtimes or travel; you can use more homeschool time just to read; you can leave books lying around; you can give books as gifts. Even the cost of new books shouldn’t be a deterrent to reading, not with libraries and used books and online books readily available; Emily Dickinson was right when she said that reading is a pretty frugal chariot compared with a lot of the other ways we can find to spend money.

HE ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book.
What liberty
A loosened spirit brings! --Emily Dickinson

To have the greatest adventures, let the adventures find you. "Books fall open, you fall in." We can’t always regulate reading by squeezing it into a READING period; by labeling books according to grade or age; or excluding every word or idea that we don’t think our kids will understand. Again, you have to risk a little. Lines like “bequest of wings,” “loosened spirit” and “take us worlds away” speak to us of flight and freedom; the idea of moving outside our own place and time, being able to see beyond our own lives; that’s what the word education means, a drawing out. As our “spirits grow robust,” we are able not only to handle more difficult book adventures but to use our experiences in the everyday world as well, to survive the “dingy days” and also to change them into something better. “Robust spirits” implies strength and health; this kind of reading is not a weak, wussy thing or just an escape from reality. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Cousin Eustace was the cowardly, mean character; C.S. Lewis says it was because he hadn’t read the right books.

What are the right books to adventure with? A great storyteller named Ruth Sawyer gave this list (quoted in Honey for a Child's Heart): 

“Stories that make for wonder. Stories that make for laughter. Stories that stir one within with an understanding of the true nature of courage, of love, of beauty. Stories that make one tingle with high adventure, with daring, with grim determination, with the capacity of seeing danger through to the end. Stories that bring our minds to kneel in reverence. Stories that show the tenderness of true mercy, the strength of loyalty, the unmawkish respect for what is good.”

Let’s have the courage to adventure with books…and…Let’s go there together.

Shopping at Hampstead House Books (for Canadians)

I got a print catalogue recently from Hampstead House Books near Toronto (remainders, imports etc.), and noticed several things that homeschoolers and other curious readers might like. Remember that their inventory changes quickly, so what's there one month may be gone the next, never to return. I haven't actually seen most of these, just going by the titles and sometimes the online reviews.

Some of what I found:

Freshwater Heritage: A History of Sail on the Great Lakes

The Greek Myths: Stories of the Greek Gods and Heroes Vividly Retold, by Robin Waterhouse

Sacred Art

A Journey into Michelangelo's Rome

Kipling's Just So Stories

Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm

Pride and Prejudice

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

A reprint of Puss in Boots from the 1930's

Learning Resources POP For Colors and Shapes. "Give your little ones (ages 3+) a head start on language skills. Set incl. a 34-pp. write and wipe spiral book with marker, 20 flash cards, activity guide, 100-pic. colour and shape games, 4 double-sided Bingo cards, and a spinner." Also: POP for Numbers.

(I don't work for Hampstead House or get compensated for posting updates: I just like to point out good things.)

Quote for the day: Not born free?

"When God Himself gave His ten commandments to the children of Israel, He did not impose an arbitrary rule. Drawing on the principle of propriety, He expressed ten laws that, if they followed them, would lead them to treat things as they ought to be treated (Worship the Lord, honor your parents, leave the neighbors stuff alone, etc.) and, since that is how reality is structured, they could be free. Not just free from Egypt, but free to be His people who knew them and what led to their flourishing." ~~ Andrew Kern, "Writing as a Liberating Art," Circe Institute blog

Best thing to read today

At the Circe Institute blog: Great Books Give Us Something to be Human With.

Great stuff to read this weekend

The Common Room shares a number of insights on reading by Isaac Watts. One thought:

"And remember that one book read over in this manner, with all this laborious meditation, will tend more to enrich your understanding, than the skimming over the surface of twenty authors."

Joshua Butcher, at the Circe blog, talks about the problems of translating classical authors, and quotes Alan Bloom:

To this Bloom replies that such translators have, “the assurance that they have a sufficient understanding of Plato’s meaning, and that that meaning is pretty much the kind of thing Englishmen or Americans already think. However, it might be more prudent to let the reader decide whether ‘the beautiful and the good’ are simply equivalent to ‘moral values.’ If they are the same, he will soon enough find out. And if they are not, as may be the case, he will not be prevented from finding that out and thereby putting his own opinions to the test.” 

Coffee, Tea, Books and Me talks about soup and cookbooks.

"Tamar Adler shared why most of us have bland bean soup and why the soup she made for Chez Panisse was delicious.  It is because we I have believed an old wive's tale about not salting beans that are cooking from the very beginning."

Socks for a cause at Ten Thousand Villages.

Prime Periwinkle thinks about bees (sort of).

To Sow a Seed has some words for parents.

"These brief years of raising children give way to a lifetime of relationship. The little boy who comes to you for ten bandaids today, the little girl who tattles on her sister every chance she gets… these are the people who will hold your hand as the older generation passes away, who will comfort you as your own days come to a close and Jesus is nearer than ever before."

Doesn't everyone want books?

Helene Hanff, 1916-1997 (photo from GoodReads)

And maybe the question should be, does anyone?

I recently commented on a book-related blog post, and out of approximately 27 comments, I think mine was the only one that did not say "love my e-reader, love the library, do not want books around the house unless they're cookbooks or something with an obvious purpose."

I understand the freedom of decluttering, the value of empty or near-empty spaces, especially in this often-overwhelming culture of much and more. In the novel In This House of Brede, the Benedictine nuns lived under a rule of simplicity, and the number of books each one could have in her own room depended on her needs

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.” ― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

I do love my e-reader, Kindle app, and Overdrive. (Archive.org is what's giving me access to the vintage book that Afterthoughts is blogging through right now.) And the actual, physical library. I love books that have an obvious purpose. I also love books that do not have an obvious purpose.

“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.” ― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

One of the first times I ever got in real trouble as a preschooler was by disobeying a parental command not to take a certain book outside. But I wanted it with me...

I haven't come up with a one-line answer to this yet, but I do think the answer is a personal one (like the nuns), and it depends largely on what books do in your life, and what you do with them. I'll go so far as to agree that, for 26 out of 27 people (or maybe more like 20 out of 27), physical books are clutter. For whatever reason, they are just more weight to move, more things to dust, more stuff that people don't know how they acquired and why they're holding on to them. If that's the case, I agree wholeheartedly that it's time to move to library books and e-books. And if it comes down, as at least one commenter said, to having to move overseas or something where you do not have a choice, I agree also that books do weigh you down and that they should not hold you back from adventures. There will always be more books.

But for the other seven or so of the group...we are the spiritual grandchildren of Helene Hanff.

“I'll have mine [The Book-Lovers' Anthology] till the day I die - and die happy in the knowledge that I'm leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book-lover yet unborn.” ― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road