Saturday, August 31, 2024 →
Finished reading: The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚
By the end you know all the players, some have already been lost, others have played out their parts, and still more have shown the true good in their hearts, and the depths of evil the Ring may inspire them to should they come to possess it.
This is probably my tenth or eleventh time reading these books, but my first time reading it with my kids. Sure, I’m editing on the fly because they’re both younger than five, but they’re loving it.
Monday, October 30, 2023 →
Finished reading: Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White 📚 — ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.
It sure is.
What a hell of an amazing book to relegate to the unjustly dismissed “children’s” shelves. This book gets five stars, no question about it.
White manages to address, in my opinion, so many of The Important Things We All Should Learn About Rather Young If Possible, including misogyny/clueless men, bullies, transactional acquaintances, competition, the joy and sorrow of freedom, the dilemma of the naive but intelligent, parenting (well, let’s be honest, mostly motherhood), the distinction between pathology and an innocent’s rational-from-their-perspective perceptions, the rarity and value of adults who are aware of the immediately preceding concept (like the inimitable Dr. Dorian), evolution, religion, birth and death, and, of course, the intergenerational power of real, no-but-seriously-really-real friendship that reaches out beyond its originators and enriches those who come after, in ways known and unknown, for years or decades to come.
Like I said, just a hell of a book.
Sunday, August 20, 2023 →
Sherlock Holmes giving serious Nardwuar vibes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle📚:
My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.
This particular quote, for nerds who know, is from adventure number seven, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
Tuesday, May 9, 2023 →
Currently reading: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams 📚
I’m reading this one with the kids at bedtime. I definitely do a bit of light word replacement here and there, mostly where death or sex are mentioned. But it’s fun, especially with the 3-year-old, who can understand just enough of it to be interested but has sufficient trouble keeping up with the weirdness to make it, eventually, conducive to falling asleep.
Saturday, December 17, 2016
I’m in a bookstore, Joseph Fox in Philadelphia, and there are people here in the cramped sometimes hallway-narrow store with me. Many of them. People I mean. Some smell like rain. That’s how close they are. It’s raining outside and they’re coming into the store and I can smell the rain on them.
You …