It's the time of year when everyone seems to enjoy looking back over the year that's been before moving on to the year to come. I suppose I'm no exception. Lately I have been thinking a lot about my reading. I started the year reading David Denby's Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World and I came to the end of the year with Ten Books that Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker. So I started thinking, you know, I like reading all these books about the Great Books, maybe I should actually read some of them? Hmmm. Well, that's for the new year. As for the old year...
January: In addition to starting Denby's book, I decided that I would give everyone a virtual tour of our bookshelves. I got as far as the cookbooks on my kitchen island, which really hasn't been much of a tour. January also saw Katydid begin a term at Hogwarts, but the boys were much more interested in movies.
February: I was still reading Denby's Great Books in February, along with a bunch of books about homeschooling high school (you can see the whole giant list of books, which I read in February and March, here). But what I was reading to the kids was The Story of Caves, an old book I found in our library which contained a fair bit of information about our local caves, and sparked a fair amount of interest around here, especially with Farmerboy. Closet spelunking gave the boys something to do when it was way too February-ish outside.
March:I made some notes about my reading for the year, which is the only reason I can now remember that I read Kon-Tiki in March. Not that Kon-Tiki is forgettable. On the contrary, it's the kind of book you read when you're in your 30's and wonder why you didn't read it sooner. And then it sort of passes into your permanent, dateless memory, where all the best books are held. You know round about when you read it, you can remember snuggling up under the blankets after the toddler is *finally* asleep, you can remember setting it down on your husband's nightstand and telling him it's the kind of book that he would enjoy and also that you are hoping your 12 year old son will read it because -- well, archaeology! adventure! lots of weird fish! -- but as far as summoning "March 2009", your brain is at a loss. The allure of armchair travel passed a little by the end of March, though; we were preparing for our annual trip to Tennessee and winter was ending.
April: We spent Holy Week and Easter in Tennessee visiting family and friends, and I read He Leadeth Me by Walter Cizsek. What an excellent (and challenging) book, written by an American priest who spent years as a political prisoner in the Soviet Union. I also started Fahrenheit 451, and on the long car ride home, I read Real Food for Mother and Baby by Nina Planck. The arrival of spring saw us in the garden and at the library, checking out lots of books about plants, frogs, and dirt.
May: What did I read in May? May is sort of a blank on my reading radar. May was all about putting in gardens, getting turkeys and chickens, birdwatching, and being outside. Oh, and emergency preparedness. I read Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens, by Kathy Harrison, a good reference book for the family. To the kids, I started reading In Search of a Homeland: The Story of the Aeneid, by Penelope Lively, which rounded out a year spent with ancient mythology, epics, and fairy tales. While reading this retelling of the Aeneid, the boys got interested in volcanoes, and we built a few. I also contemplated the simple life, and ended up concluding that I don't really have one... but that my kids might.
June: June was for wrapping up the school year and preparing for the new one. I read Working in the Reggio Way by Julianne Wurm and Designs for Living and Learning: Transforming Early Childhood Environments by Deb Curtis and Margie Carter, and I posted a few "Reggio reflections" of my own. Both books were excellent and prompted a lot of thinking about how to handle the projects the boys do. While I was reading about how to do projects with little people, my big kids were immersed in the Warriors series of cat books... but Katydid did take a break from Warriors to read Black Beauty and In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. After she'd finished, she was rather heartbroken to learn that the Dodgers were not in Brooklyn anymore.
July: July was rainy, cold, and asthmatic... 3 things not generally associated with July, I know. My garden persevered in spite of the weather, and so did the kids. I read Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig and started adding coconut oil to my smoothies (hoping to tame the asthma), a couple of art books, and In a Patch of Fireweed by Bernd Heinrich, which taught me more than I ever thought there was to learn about how insects regulate their temperatures.
August: August was again focused on homeschooling -- plans, plans, and more plans. Accordingly, I read a few books: Snowball Earth by Gabrielle Walker, which kept me up at night so I could finish it, and most of Reading the Rocks: the Autobiography of the Earth by Marcia Bjornerud, which... did not. I also reread Homeschooling: a Patchwork of Days, edited by Nancy Lande and wrote about our not quite average day. And after reading Mudpies to Magnets, we made ice cube necklaces. Gareth was reading Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis, and Katydid read A Little Princess and began Little Women. All my tomatoes died of late blight.
September: Well, this is what I thought Gareth would be reading. He didn't actually read much of it. He did actually finish Fellowship of the Ring. He also spent some quality time with Genetics of the Fowl. Mostly, though, in September we were sick. (I would give you a link but which one??) We had an interesting not back to school day, and I nursed myself through the flu with Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness.
October: October was a birthday month -- the twins turned 4 and Gareth turned 13 and made his own birthday cake using a 1950 version of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. I also discovered that I was pregnant with #7. I read some very good spiritual biographies/autobiographies, including Come Be My Light (Mother Teresa) and In the Shadow of His Wings (Fr. Gereon Goldman). In fact, October was a very good month for reading. I read some of the best books of the year in October. Gloria Whelan's Homeless Bird was definitely one of them; the story of a young, widowed Indian bride, it ranks high on my all-time favorite list. So glad I checked that one out of the library. Some time in here I finally finished reading The Hobbit to the kids, too.
November: First trimester nausea moved in, and I didn't feel much like reading or doing much of anything else either. Raymond Arroyo's biography of Mother Angelica, Mother Angelica: The Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles kept me interested, though, and so did my friend Sarah's books, The Magic Thief: Stolen (#1) and The Magic Thief: Lost (#2). We took an unexpected day trip to Honesdale, PA, and I had all I could handle keeping up with the little boys.
December: December was a tough month. The little boys all came down with a bad case of croup. My nausea started to lift a bit, but none of us read a whole lot. I finished Ten Books that Screwed Up the World, which was not my favorite but brought me around full circle again to the Great Books, and I also read With God in Russia, Walter Ciszek's memoir of the time he spent in the USSR as a political prisoner (and after, until he was finally able to come back to the US). Andy read James and the Giant Peach (one of my most favorite books ever, which probably says a lot about me) to the little boys before bed, and we wrapped up the year playing Lego Star Wars and Wii Baseball, watching new Doctor Who episodes on BBCAmerica, and Julie and Julia and Star Trek on DVD.
And so went our year. :-)
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