How to read your way out of a crisis

About Farm School

We're a Canadian family of five, farming and home schooling. I'm nowhere near as regular a blogger as I used to be, and tend not to blog as much about our home schooling efforts as I used to.

"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live."
James T. Adams

Family, books, food, organic farming, classical home education, books, gardening, journeys, music, books, thoughts, movies, and books.

Davy is in seventh grade, Daniel in eighth grade, and Laura in tenth grade

Email: farmschool at hmsinet dot com

Notable Quotables

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."
Clarence Day

"Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing."
Cicero

"Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend."
Sir Francis Bacon, "Essays"

"The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."
Gilbert Highet, "The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning"

"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."
Walter Wriston

"I'd like to give you a piece of my mind."
"Oh, I couldn't take the last piece."
Ginger Rogers to Frances Mercer in "Vivacious Lady" (1938)

"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
Booker T. Washington

"Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."
Attributed to Groucho Marx in "The Groucho Letters" by Arthur Sheekman

"If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

"If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives, we feel all our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'."
Jean Hagen as "Lina Lamont" in "Singin' in the Rain" (1952)

6 Responses

Elaine Green, on April 5, 2009 at 6:15 am said:

My comfort reads are the Williamsburg novels by Elswyth Thane. They take a Virginia family (along with the British relations) from the colonial era to the early days of World War II. I first read these while a young teen. Fearing the local library would discard them, about ten years ago I purchased the reprints. When we bought our cottage on Kootenay Lake two years ago, I bought a second set of reprints to keep in that house. I reread the series every year, always at a time when I find I just need to totally take myself away mentally from whatever is going on in my life. There are a number of books I reread on a regular basis of more lilterary quality, but I find the Williamsburg series is the best for a sustained escape.

Elaine in Montana

Reply
Becky, on April 5, 2009 at 9:31 am said:

These are completely new to me, Elaine, thank you! And you’re completely right about “a sustained escape” — there’s something about a series or a number of books in a similar style by the same writer (such as Austen and Mitford). Otherwise it’s like eating only one chocolate or potato chip, and where on earth is the comfort in that?

I’ll have to search out Elswyth Thane as soon as I can…

Reply
Elaine Green, on April 5, 2009 at 6:36 pm said:

Don’t expect quality writing……and the language is definitely dated in terms of racial sensitivity. Oh, my gosh. Is it ever dated! But Thane tells a good story.

Elaine

Reply
mary lou, on April 16, 2009 at 6:55 am said:

I love getting these recommendations – i have never read Mitord or Than or Buchan. On to comfort reading. I’m currently reading Wartime Women, an anthology of Mass Observation writing from WWI, really interesting, and perhaps something for your history gang.

Reply
MamaShift, on April 28, 2009 at 3:45 am said:

Still digesting that…

I do wish, however, that people could find smaller, independent book sites to link to in articles.

Reply
Becky, on April 28, 2009 at 8:46 am said:

mary lou, Mitford and Buchan are great fun, and of course perfect for a crisis what with that underlying stiff upper lip. When we were in NYC in November we took the kids to see a spiffy new Broadway production of “The 39 Steps”.

MamaShift, I don’t know if The Guardian’s ideas are similar to my own, but as I note on my “About” page, most of my links are to Amazon.com, rather than any Canadian online seller (including Amazon.ca) or independent sellers, not because I think Amazon is the best purveyor but because it has the most complete and informative website.

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