The butler did it

My father sent me the sad but not surprising news that the Murder Ink bookstore on upper Broadway is closing today, New Year’s Eve. I still have, tucked away somewhere, my black gun-shaped Murder Ink bookmark/business card from the original store on West 87th Street.
I also remember the Bar-B-Queen and the candy and nut shop, [...]

The year-end list of "100 Cool Teachers in Children’s Literature"

Mary Lee and Franki at A Year of Reading have posted their complete list of the top 100 wonderful teachers in children’s books. At this time of year, I tend to get listed out, but this is a fun one, and I’m happy to see so many of my favorites here, from Little Women’s Jo [...]

A Christmas treasure in disguise

Karen at lightingthefires has a post with an absolutely lovely Christmas poem, A Merry Literary Christmas by Alice Low, which, since we’re smack dab in the midst of thank you card season, is more than timely. And might be rather nice printed on a handmade card with all the books I give my nieces and [...]

Made you look

Stocking up on reading material for the weekend at the library, I was rather startled to find the January 1st edition of Maclean’s Magazine (at left) looking out from the shelves at me with the cover headline “Why do we dress our daughters like skanks?” over a girl about Laura’s age dressed like a hooker. [...]

Poetry Friday: The New Year’s edition

I rarely make resolutions, of the New Year’s — or any other — variety, mostly because they seem to be a sucker’s bet.
Though if one did want advice for a New Year, it’s hard to top Kipling; among other things I rarely do is fret about the idea of mankind in general or the last [...]

Christmas week reading: "lovely interesting discussions"

My Christmas week reading so far:
Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York by Adam Gopnik (thanks, Mom and Pop); my Upper West Side past and rural Canadian prairie present run into each other:
In my experience, at least, it is liberal parents who tend to be the most socially conservative — the most queasy [...]

Cool runnings

Though we don’t have any sledding hills near the house, I’m told by those in the know that our snow-filled but otherwise empty silage pit at the corrals makes a dandy sledding hill and bobsled run. It also for some reason is amazingly effective at making the kids whiz through chores faster than usual. [...]

Worth remembering

“The harder you work, the luckier you are.”
Gerald Rudolph Ford, 1913-2006

Happy Christmas wishes from Farm School and Thomas Nast

Christmas Eve: In appreciation of Dudley

(as well as Clarence) at Christmas, from Verlyn Klinkenborg, in today’s Times,
We watched “The Bishop’s Wife” at our house the other night. Some years at Christmas we hang a wreath from the kitchen door, and some years we decorate a tree. But we always find an evening to watch “The Bishop’s Wife.” The camera hovers [...]

Jo on modern kids, classic poetry

Hop over to Jo at Tricotomania for a post on Accessible Poetry, part of a conversation Jo and I have been having about modern children and classical poetry, in part because her daughter’s drama class just had an end of term performance that had included the recitation of the whole of The Lady of Shallot [...]

Christmas bestsellers in Britain

According to The Guardian, surprise Christmas hits at the bookstore this year include the Australian Where’s Wally-inspired Where’s Bin Laden? cartoon book, along with “Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze[: And 114 Other Questions, More Questions and Answers from the Popular 'last Word' Column], The Dangerous Book for Boys* and Stephen [...]

Poetry Friday: Christmas Magic

When Laura was a wee babe, I discovered at our Goodwill shop the charming Random House Pictureback holiday anthology, Diane Goode’s Christmas Magic: Poems and Carols. It was published in 1992 and is probably out of print but worth tracking down, especially because Diane Goode is the Diane Goode who did such a marvelous [...]

Solstice

Our resident snowy owl flew overhead this morning not once but twice as we did chores, a sign, the kid and I thought, of the day’s importance. We celebrated by helping pack food hampers and toy bags at the local Santa’s Anonymous effort, and now the kids are stringing up some extra outdoor lights they [...]

What to get your favorite kidlit character for the holidays

Gregory K. at Gotta Book has a wonderful holiday list brewing, and better than all those “best books of the year” lists one gets as the year winds down: a list of gifts you’d get your favorite kidlit characters.
He starts off the list with
The Pigeon — a ballpark dog with the worksThe Baudelaire children — [...]

A friend in need

My homeschooling friend Frankie over at Kitchen Table Learners, and her son Thomas, have the true spirit of Christmas. Frankie wrote a post the other day about a Pittsburgh, PA, home educating family with six children who last week lost everything, including Christmas presents and homeschool items, in a house fire, the result of [...]

Christmas on Huckleberry Mountain

Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book (HB), offers his blog readers a very fair, well-reasoned review by Melinda Cordell, of the new Charlotte’s Web movie, over at the HB website.
While at the website, I happened to notice on the sidebar a link to a special Holiday Posting of Lois Lenski’s memories, entitled [...]

Digging out

We’re in the midst of another snow storm, and we’d be in big trouble if it were any colder; luckily, the temperatures are right below freezing. It started snowing again yesterday, and the wind started yesterday evening, so by 3 pm Laura’s voice teacher reluctantly decided to cancel the recital. They’ll try again next month. [...]

Ah, welladay

Trying to distract myself from the sparkly movie poster and today’s, erm, grand opening (not unfavorably reviewed in today’s New York Times, by the way), I’ve been rereading The Letters of E.B. White. Sometime during the week, while looking up something in the book, I stumbled across the new revised edition published under the direction [...]

Poetry Friday II: For Andy White, on a difficult day

One of E.B. White’s favorite writers was Don Marquis, author of archy and mehitabel, 1927, from which:
pity the poor spiders
i have just been readingan advertisement of a certainroach exterminatorthe human race little knowsall the sadness itcauses in the insect worldi remember some weeks agomeeting a middle aged spidershe was weepingwhat is the trouble i askedher [...]