I’ve been reading Borges again, for the first time since college, if you don’t count the way you glance through stuff while moving books around over the years. It came to mind because Laura was reading Isabel Allende, and I suggested that if she enjoyed that she might like 100 Years of Solitude. She liked [...]
…was a blast as expected. Laura was annoyed at the liberties taken with the plot, but I was too busy soaking up the Terry Gilliam silliness to notice. Evil minions in funny hats, fisheye lenses, the whole thing — it reminded my suddenly how long it’s been since Brazil, and what an impact that movie [...]
Look for us in that long, roped-off line for the opening night of Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass movie. We never do that, but I have a good feeling about this one.
Now that we’ve moved closer to my work, I don’t get much time to listen to audio in the car. But I still like to strap on the pod whenever I have a long wait in a line or something. I’m bookmarking this site here for the next time I need something to listen to.
Usually when I see a site I like I subscribe to its RSS feed and it shows up in the left column here, but this site out of Kerala, India has no feed, so I’m putting it here to remind me to go back and read it sometime.
The more you think about it, the less crazy it sounds.
I’m importing a bunch of old entries, and there’s a fair amount of manual work involved, so things will be kind of out of sequence around here for a little while. Bear with me. Update: Done with 2001. Intervening years to follow as time allows.
Let us now praise really, really bad books for children. Has anyone seen anything worse than Robert Munsch’s monumental Love You Forever? Forget about books that don’t quite live up their potential (see below). This one has none to live up to. This unbelievable dog, which regularly shows up on the checkout stand racks at [...]
From the Children Now site’s new report on kids and computer games:”The video game industry explains that girls are not interested in gaming and that it would not be economically wise for them to invest in producing games for a female market. The truth, however, is that girls do enjoy playing video games. According to [...]
Lemony Snicket is flying off the shelves. Now here’s something I can get behind. Says the Post: “Child psychiatrists say that these books, and other works that deal with kids’ deepest and often unspoken fears – of separation, abandonment, loneliness and death – can be therapeutic, far more so than tales that are relentlessly optimistic. [...]
our first lady agrees with me on the virtues of bilingualism.
The Women’s Sports Foundation put up these handy reminders about helping girls with sports.
Reader Service Dept:If you have ever fallen asleep while reading a Potter tome, here is where the Guardian lets you know how much you’ve missed. I didn’t do so great, but I feel very well rested, thank you.
From Cathy: J.K. Rowling may not be a literary giant, but like many children around the world, Elena is engaged in a way I hadn�t expected, and eagerly anticipates her nightly dose. So what if it�s �skim-milky?� I wasn�t expecting E.B. White, Milne or Lewis Carroll. Most readers aren�t primarily drawn to Rowling because they [...]
Stephy Says: That tired old saw about “just get them reading,” to which you refer, my dear Ted, is no small thing. Reading is the cornerstone of all learning, and as such, of all revolution. Not to sound too much like my grandmotherly old self, here, but look: once they learn to read, they can [...]
I suppose to someone not as hopelessly geeky as me (or you, Stephy), the themes Rowling works in Harry Potter might seem fresh and intriguing. Now that I think about it, Ursula LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea stories, aimed at a similar audience, struck me that way 30 years ago, and you could shoot some of [...]
Stephy was just explaining why she doesn’t mind having an ad at the top of her website, and I scrolled up to see if there was an ad there, because I had not noticed. There was, and it was an ad for this nifty all-around book site, which I wish I’d known about ages ago. [...]
I’ve been reading Harry Potter to Laura a little bit — only when she brings it to me; I don’t bring it up myself. It’s not that I mind it so much, but I wonder if other people who have read Douglas Adams or Fay Weldon or C.S. Lewis find this Potter stuff as skim-milky [...]
Why do I always assume this guy is going to be obscure? Some clarity from Humberto Eco in La Repubblica last week: “What is confusing is that often we don’t understand the difference between identifying with our own roots… and distinguishing good from evil.”
My aunt Judy does serious genealogical research, which frees up the rest of us for the spurious kind. The most glamorous thing I’ve dug up so far involves an L.A. lawyer named Ted Kuster (no relation, I’m pretty sure), whose fame derives from his wife Una leaving him for the poet Robinson Jeffers (now remembered [...]