Dadblog
Bobby: A New Life Another of the many good Dad journals out there.
Bobby: A New Life Another of the many good Dad journals out there.
What happened? If I’d known what this kid knew in 9th grade, would school have been less painful?
Here is what looks to my layperson’s eye like a pretty solid list of pointers for those who want or need to discuss horrible events with their children. Courtesy of Joe Kelly of the Dads And Daughters website, which has a lot more stuff like it.
Not one to let a hot media trend pass her by, Laura has been working on a series of short self-published books. In this one, she offers an unexpected take on her favorite parts of the Wizard of Oz story.
The difficulty with reading Stuart Little to Laura is that every few pages — and more often than that in the last couple of chapters — I have to stop for a while to let all that E.B. White soak into my ears. Laura finds that annoying, but I can’t help it. If anyone has [...]
CAUCASIAN AMERICANS: BASIC SKILLS WORKBOOK is reviewed on this lively website about Native American literature. It apparently helps children develop empathy for this often-misunderstood ethnic group. There is also this capable assault on that mawkish “Chief Seattle” iconography.
Are these boom times for Kid Lit or what? “Surely it says something about Powell’s loyalists that ‘Captain Underpants and The Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman’ is currently our bestselling book — we’re just not sure exactly what.” That from the ever-so-literate Powell’s Books email newsletter that arrived this morning. On a work trip [...]
OK, it’s a little dorky and middle-brow, and we could go on and on about overexposure sapping the power of critical cultural signifiers and everything, but come on: this is pretty stirring stuff, if you let yourself think about it. Everybody in Chicago (my home town!) is reading the same book together for a few [...]
I wonder what some of these online-branded-content outfits are doing to stay alive. Most of them I don’t miss, but I’m glad this one is still with us. For publishing this informative piece on girls and self-confidence, I vote them another, say, six months of life.
Someone told me about this ultra-hip collection of Asians’ and Asian-Americans’ weblogs. Never mind the unfortunate name, it has some interesting stuff. (Warning: When you open the site a bunch of annoying little advertising windows pop up. If you hate that kind of thing, don’t click on the link.)
Cathy responds: Although l too love Princess Mononoke, I seem to enjoy just the things that you find silly. I think that the supernatural stuff, though maybe too far on the spiritual realm for you, adds a density and poetry to it that grabs the viewer’s imagination. So what if it’s dark, maybe too heavy-handed. [...]
Princess Mononoke reminds you at once of how far Japanese animation has come since Speed Racer and how much it’s stayed the same. The motion is still jerky, the dialogue choppy and heavily reliant on exclamation marks, and the good guys’ faces are all drawn exactly alike. They look like what would happen if someone [...]
You can picture James Gurney’s publishers, worried that they might not be squeezing all the lucre they could out of his wildly popular Dinotopia franchise, begging Gurney for something even juicier for the third book in the series. “We’ve hit the young adult demo and the older kids, but the real gold is in them [...]
Riding the skybax. Inspired by James Gurney’s Dinotopia, which has dominated our bedtime reading lately.
Movies of the Month:Ground Zero: When Dinosaurs Ruled: Desert dino digs in South America.Princess Mononoke: We cannot get enough of this movie. Foods of the Month:Puree d’Acorn Squash; Rice cereal mixed with ground-up banana, apple, plum, string beans or carrots.
Demanding, high-minded stuff from the girls’ resource site that I mentioned somewhere below. It’s related to this excellent site for dads. (I hope I linked this one before Cathy did.)
More on that thing about pretentious literature (see July 18 entry). Here is a summary of the rant in the Atlantic, and here is a nice exposition of the remedy, if you like that kind of thing.
A funny bit about raising a non-reader, from a classy children’s literature magazine called the Horn Book.
All my English major friends and relations will want to look at this guy’s rant (you have to scroll down to Monday the 16th) on how all the good stuff to read is consigned these days by the high-brow to “genre fiction,” meaning mysteries, thrillers and sci-fi. Of course it is; always was; the real [...]
C.S. Lewis was a big figure in our house when we were growing up, and the damage was minimal, I guess. I wallowed in Narnia for years and yet I don’t hate Arabs or celebrate people dying in train wrecks or have an opinion on Turkish Delight. Last week my Dad sent around an article [...]