Bibliomama

School started. My kids wore this on their first day. I wanted Eve to wear this. But I didn't insist on it. I feel pretty good about that. Three week-ends ago, we went to our friends' cottage. There was a difference of opinion on whether or not it was still swimming weather. My son was allowed in the knife-throwing gang even though he didn't wear the requisite navy blue hoodie.  He also took a sharp left turn in the backpack department. He told me which website to go to, picked a black one, then suddenly said "no, wait - get that one". The colour is called "Coral Peaches Wild At Heart". And he uses it every day.  When the kids went back to school, I started trying to organize some stuff around the house. First, I tackled the cookbook cabinet. I could have sworn that we'd only lived here since 1999, but apparently I was wrong - clearly we moved in sometime during the 1950s. Seriously? W hat if you don...

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell was the 1961 Newbery Medal winner. I had seen it on library and bookstore shelves many times but never read it. The shocker for me when I flipped the last page was that it's based on a true story, about a girl who was alone on an island along the California coast for nearly TWENTY FREAKING YEARS. I also hadn't realized that there was a s equel , published sixteen years later, which takes place after the original protagonist has left the island and features her niece. I do feel like this was written in a way that would be effective for a younger audience. The language is quite simple, and although the story is affecting (twenty years! Alone! On an island!), I sometimes found myself wishing for a bit more complexity. There would definitely be much to discuss if this book was taught in a classroom setting. Nicole mentioned that she tended to read books with female main characters when she was younger - well, here you go. Not ...

Photo by Boemski For the past few months I've been going to physiotherapy twice a week, with exceedingly bad grace. Back in the spring, my husband was run off his feet between work and baseball, so I did all the backyard clean-up and gardening myself. My left arm was sore afterwards, but I assumed it was just normal-exercise-sore, like after weight-lifting, and waited for it to get better. It didn't. Every time I lifted something, even a glass of water or a book, with my left hand, burning needles shot down my left forearm. I waited until the kids went back to school and booked an appointment. While I was there, I figured I'd also get my physiotherapist to have a look at my right shoulder, which I hurt while working retail in Toronto many, many years ago when we were too poor and carless to bother with any medical appointment that wasn't an emergency. Yes, please ask me how badass I felt sitting there explaining my two injuries as "over-exuberant gardening...

The Door in the Wall is copyrighted 1949 and won the Newbery Medal in 1950 (oh hey, I believe I'm sensing a pattern here.) Goodreads synopsis:  The bells clang above plague-ridden London as Robin lies helpless, cold, and hungry. The great house is empty, his father is fighting the Scots in the north, his mother is traveling with the Queen, and the servants have fled. He calls for help but only the stones hear his cries. Suddenly someone else is in the house, coming towards Robin. It is Brother Luke, a wandering friar, who takes Robin to St. Mark's Monastery, where he will be cared for until his father sends for him. At last, a message comes--Robin is to meet his father at Castle Lindsay. The journey is dangerous, and the castle is located near the hostile Welsh border. Perched high in the hills, the castle appears invincible. But it is not. Under the cover of a thick fog the Welsh attack the castle. And Robin is the only one who can save it. Insofar as I can put myself i...

All photos from Eve's session with the incomparable Sarah McCormack .

This was a weird summer for reading. Not that I stopped reading, or read stuff backwards, or, God forbid, finally read Trollope (I did actually stick the one Trollope novel I own on my bedside pile at one point. Then I picked it up and realized that it was the second in the series I meant to start with, and I had only bought it because it was pretty and on sale - then I did, in fact, put The Warden on my Kindle, when I found it in the Kindle store for ---- wait for it --- 0.00 dollars. But I still haven't started reading it). I just felt kind of scattered, read a lot of short stories and skipped from book to book, reading widely but not deeply. Which, now that I look back at some previous posts, seems to be how I generally read in the summer, so maybe I should stop being surprised. I had three or four books that I had bought instead of borrowing from the library, chiefly because I meant to read them in the summer - outside, preferably. It didn't happen. This isn't a bad...

The Giver was published in 1993 and awarded the Newbery Medal in 1994. Synopsis from back cover: " Jonas's world is perfect. Everything is under control. There is no war or fear or pain. There are no choices. Every person is assigned a role in the Community. When Jonas turns twelve, he is singled out to receive special training from The Giver. The Giver alone holds the memories of the true pain and pleasure of life. Now, it is time for Jonas to receive the truth. There is no turning back." Is there a difference between a dystopia and a false utopia? I feel like the distinction should be made. Also, because I fell down a rabbit hole on Goodreads last week when I read a scathing (and overly long) review of The Giver and then many of the two-hundred plus comments on it, I feel that I should say that I actually felt a large degree of sympathy for the Elders and creators of Jonas's community.  They weren't evil. They weren't trying to be harsh or despotic. They...

Photo by JD Hancock Okay, whatever happens here, I am just so hoppily happily excited right now. As much as I always did enjoy researching and writing papers for school, there is something so purely, giddily exhilarating about researching and writing just for the hell of it. Also, at times like this I am just so glad that I haven't ever managed to brand my blog - not that I think I really could have, but every now and then I just revel in the sheer goofy joy of being able to slap ridiculous, un-SEO-able titles on posts and write about whatever the hell I want, and have people like Lynn and Mary Lynn make kick-ass comments that make me feel like we could crowd-source a hell of a series on the Newbery Medal that could CHANGE THINGS FOREVER.... Photo by  JD Hancock Except not. Because Award Committees are notoriously stodgy and un-goofy, and I have a Masters in Comparative Literature but haven't really done much with it, and, oh yeah, the Newbery Medal is an American th...

A few weeks ago, I came across a  Buzzfeed Quiz  about Newbery Medal books with a tagline: Were you a well-read child ? Naturally, this pissed me off a little (I just typed "got my knickers in a bit of a twist" and then erased it, for some reason. I wonder why that is. It's a perfectly serviceable expression, and yet I felt disinclined to use it. Curious) since there seems to be a bit of a fallacious assumption going on there: one could surely have been a well-read child (I was) without having necessarily read a great number of Newbery Medal-winning books (I hadn't, as it turns out). But doing the quiz (I can't resist quizzes where I get to check off books, even ones that irritate me - the quizzes, I mean, not the books) reminded me of a few books that I had always meant to read and had somehow never gotten around to, and introduced me to a few others that looked interesting and worth a look. So I decided then and there that I would read and blog about all the New...