Reading review

Our house has been invaded this week:

There are books on the sofa, books on the floor, 

books on the table, books by the door; 

Books in the living room, books in the den, 

Books in the bedrooms, books on my Ben....

Ok, that last line is a stretch, but I don't have time to find a better rhyme. 

We've settled in to the summer schedule; a state of boredom is no longer being declared.  Trips to the library take place two or three times a week. The youngest and I are doing the summer reading club, and I'm trying to get the older ones to sign up at the teen desk, but they don't want to be official. The 12 and 14-year-old (we have had all the birthdays for the year now, and all the kids except the oldest are an even number) are doing the junior lifeguard program again from 9-2, so they come home exhausted, ready to collapse on the couch, and read. Well, really they want to play Mariokart, but we have negotiated a deal - an hour of brainwork (reading, writing someone a letter, a math page or critical reading workbook page) and a chore equals an hour of media time. The accord was accepted by all parties, and peace reigns --- for the moment.

What are we reading? The oldest is reading a variety of books given him by his Protestant girlfriend - surprisingly, they are The Benedict Option, Forming Intentional Disciples, and A Severe Mercy. Have I mentioned I really like this girl? She is a Program of Liberal Studies major after my own heart. I also picked up The Boys on the Boat for him, which I've heard good things about but haven't read. 

The second is slogging slowly through The Brothers Karamazov, while dipping into Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. He has decided he is a Christian anarchist after listening to some podcast on his daily commute about anarchy.  We have had some entertaining conversations when he is not being an intern or making pizzas. 

Third son is reading The Kite Runner and Harry Potter in Spanish. He suddenly came up with this idea that he might double major in Spanish, even though he didn't want to take Spanish 4 last year in high school. He also wants to double major in Physics and Medicine or Science and Business or Science and Art. And he whipped out two pairs of winter handwear over the last couple of weeks: a pair of gloves and a pair of mittens in a Fair Isle pattern. This gave him the idea to sell handcrafts on the local facebook page, but I reminded him he needs a stash and the number of hours he spent knitting makes the profit margin slim to nothing unless he charges about $50 for a pair of mittens. His next entrepreneurial idea is to sell notecards he made for thank you notes. This is more likely to earn money than the knitwear but will see if this happens in the next month before he heads off to college. He still needs to sell his baby betta fish, who are thriving, while their father is wasting away. Something killed off three of our adult bettas (the girls each had one in their rooms), which makes me wonder if our water is tainted from the sewage spill in Tijuana... conspiracies...

More books: Fourth son likes to read but not to sit still. Big books don't interest him, but he is spouting trivia from Uncle John's Bathroom Readers, still sitting on the back of our toilet for 4 years or so now. We have three or four that they rotate. I also put Humility Rules: St Benedict's Twelve Step Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem back there, so we'll see if he reads that. Right now it is Paul Zindel's The Pigman and Hardy Boys books he's reading. Not challenging, but something.  The siblings are harassing him and me to make him read Great Expectations because they all had to suffer through it to get social media. 

What makes me happiest is my most reluctant reader, the 12-year-old, has been blazing through The Mother-Daughter Book Club series. Again, not challenging, but she's reading. And I told her I want her to pick one of the books they read for us to read together.  After months, she finally finished the fourth Harry Potter book, and really isn't interested in more. She likes real-life stories.

So does her big sister, who is reading Call The Midwife while we are watching the series some evenings. Love a good British series. I picked up the book from the Little Free Library for me to read, but I only got through the introduction because TIME, but I want to read it, too. She also is reading about a page a day of Portrait of a Lady in exchange for the three or four YA romances she read. I don't know if she'll finish it or not. She also is reading Unbroken and lots of recipes. Last night she made a homemade curry sauce that had us all sweating from the cayenne. But I have loved the help from the girls in the kitchen.

The littlest and I are reading stacks of picture books. She is picking out a few words on her own, and I have picked up some phonics readers, but we aren't being systematic about learning to read.  I've been trying to pick up some classic picture books and new books and books about real people and books about science things - Magic School Bus has been a hit lately. But she still loves Maisy and Princess Look and Find books.  I have noticed a trend in some of the new picture books lately to have high quality paper and retro illustrations with a mix of dull backgrounds and lurid splashes of neon color. It's an interesting aesthetic, but I can only look at so many pages before my eyes are maxed out.  Maybe it is our buyer at the library who is interested in them that makes it seem like more of the new books are in this style. They tend to be British or Japanese authors. 

Besides picture books, I am also skimming through a bunch of nature books. I am going to teach that class. It turns out that the university has a pre-school on campus that has space for LK, so we will go to school together two days a week. After visiting several little schools and interviewing a couple babysitters, I am happy with this option. It's are a Christian school, so they will sing songs and learn Bible verses, and college students who are education majors come in and work and do projects. And it was the only preschool with a decent outdoor play area, other than the one close to home that was full. And we'll have the drive time to spend together, too.

So I've been diving into reading material with gusto. So many good things! I've never read Silent Spring or A Sand County Almanac, so I've been skimming those looking for selections. The previous teacher assigned Frankenstein and Oryx and Crake, neither of which I think of as "Nature Literature." I haven't read the second, though. So I think I'll assign one full-length book and the rest essays and poetry. Need to decide the novel soon - I keep thinking of children's lit and Wendell Berry, but still exploring. Have been rereading Berry's poetry and picked up Gary Snyder for the first time. Excited to revisit Mary Oliver. And I need to pull out my Romantic poets to review.  I may assign Nathanial Hawthorne for the novel, but or should I just assign one of these "classic" nature writers? Annie Dillard? Jack London?

Another book I skimmed was Laura Vanderkam's I Know How She Does It recommended by Modern Mrs. Darcy, and while most of it was geared toward women who work a lot more than me, I have been keeping a time diary this week, and being more aware of how I spend time. I have become cognizant of how I don't really waste time - I am usually doing something, - but I don't work efficiently.  I need to set limits to email/social media reading and set a routine for times where I'm distracted by different choices of what to do. If I have a set work time, then I need to stick to those limits. I also need to set up a routine for chores - one thing a day (except laundry, dishes, and sweeping up). So vacuum day, dusting day, scouring bathroom day.  Watering plants takes a long time because I fiddle around. And I'm going to try to outsource more dishes to the kids, although during the school year, their time is limited. Schedules don't work really well for me, but routines do. So the book was interesting for highlighting the need to recognize the good things you already do.

These last two weeks have emphasized what a blessing it is to build in wasted time.  Another book I'm reading is Patricia Hampl's The Art of Wasted Time in which she writes in praise of contemplation, but she recognizes the struggle between being an active or contemplative person or a pilgrim or a tourist - most of us are something of both. It's a good read so far.

I also picked up Wild by Cheryl Strayed. I wasn't interested in reading this book because I don't really like reading about someone's drug and sex problems set as a memoir, but I picked it up because of this article.  Nonetheless, I read the first fifty pages about her mother's death, and I can see why people really like this book. I think I'll be conflicted about this book. She reminds me of a friend I had in high school who went from obsession to obsession, all in every time, passionate and emotional about each new project, but many of them ended in heartbreak or fizzled out. I tend toward stoic on the emotion scale, so I may put down the book in frustration, but I'm going to give it a fast read.

Finally, my book club book is The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day's autobiography, which I read before and just loved. Here is another person who was all in, but she lacks the self-centeredness that the Strayed has. Day's center is God and the people in His image.  I read this a few years ago, but am happy to revisit it. I just finished reading about her home life and education, and am reminded of two things - one, her love for her baby brother who arrives when she is a teen is a reminder that siblings are always a blessing - and two, her parents discouraged too much socializing. The Day children spent a lot of time home with books and coloring. They did wander the neighborhood a lot, but they also had plenty of daydreaming time. They read lots of great literature - she talks about Dickens and Tolstoy.  They also lived at times close to poverty and at times very comfortably because of her father's newspaper job, so instability was something they learned to survive. I know resilience is a trendy word lately, but it's easy to see why. Hovering parents are everywhere, including inside of me.

We have another evening with nothing on the schedule, so we'll sit down again amidst the piles of books to read and read, some leisurely and some with speed.