I was thinking again today about what an avid reader I was as a kid. I'm still a pretty avid reader - I spend at least a couple hours a day reading, pretty much every single day, and I can read fast, yo. If the Harry Potter books had existed then, they'd for sure have been my favorite books. As it is, my internal 12-year old self adores them with ( Read more... )

My very first post in this series about books that I loved (and usually re-read) when I was a kid was about Little Men, which was the first follow-up to today's book, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott.

I first read Little Women when I was about eight or nine. The copy of the book that I had had, I believe, belonged to my mother or one of my aunts ( Read more... )

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Continuing my series on books that I read and loved as a child, today I'm talking about Charlotte's Web. I first read the book when I was about 8, and I read it at least twice more as a child. This book is a fascinating one, because the main character is a talking pig named Wilbur: not Charlotte the spider, found in the title, and not Fern, the ( Read more... )

Picking up on my series of books I read and re-read and loved as a child (I discussed Jane-Emily the other day, and The Borrowers and Little Men earlier this week), today I bring you The Swiss Family Robinson. It's not pirates, but as they lived in fear of pirates and on a deserted island, I thought the icon was close enough. I cannot share with ( Read more... )

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Last week, I spent some time cleaning up the basement, in anticipation of the arrival of our Spanish exchange student, Javier, who will live with us for nearly three weeks. He will be living in S's bedroom, but she will be living in the basement: hence, the cleaning. Much of that cleaning involved going through the three bookcases that live down ( Read more... )

This post has nothing to do with the rain, but the phrases in the icon and subject are from a song Shakespeare wrote and/or incorporated in Twelfth Night:

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.Place your bets now: Those that think I'm going to ( Read more... )