Today is a Halloween freebie so I am making a list of the top ten musicians to listen to while reading that might also put you to sleep.
Diana Krall
My husband turned me on to Diana Krall and I used to play her music to help calm my son when he was a baby and to help him fall asleep. We listened to Diana up until he was probably 5 or 6 to fall asleep and he said the other day that he has a type of Pavloveyn response to her music because no matter where he is and hears it, he immediately wants a nap. I can say the same thing because one time The Husband and I were in Barnes and Noble (many years ago because we have not been to one in probably a decade) and Diana came on. I immediately looked at the comfy chair I was standing next to and considered a nap.
2. Frank Sinatra
The best album of his to listen to for reading or dreaming is The Wee Small Hours
3. Nat King Cole
Just about any Nat King Cole album will do but I love any of his albums with a lot of ballads on them for this purpose
4. Miles Davis
Kind of Blue is a good album choice for this one
5. Harry Connick Jr
Harry has some peppier albums so I stick with his more mellow tunes but one of my favorite albums of his is Red Light, Blue Light
6. Alison Krauss
You’re either going to relax or cry listening to her.
7. Rachael & Vilaray
A recent duo for me suggested to me by The Husband
8. Michael Buble
Don’t listen to his fast stuff or you will have to get up and dance and sing because his music just makes people happy. Stick to the smooth, easy going songs or albums.
9. JJ Heller
I don’t remember how I discovered JJ Heller but I listened to her lullaby album to help Little Miss sleep and now when I hear songs from the album I burst into tears remembering those wonderful days of naptime with a newborn, infant, and toddler, cuddling and just connecting as JJ’s music played in the background.
I always imagine that heaven will just be full of those moments – reliving those special times with our children and loved ones over and over again.
10, Vince Gill
Specifically his box set These Days. This is another set of albums I listened to when The Boy was little. I love the jazz album for sleeping/reading and just every other album for anytime listening. I combined him and Allison for this clip — love this song.
Bonus:
Elliot James Reay
I discovered this guy while looking up these videos so I am adding him as bonus.
So how about you? Do you like to listen to music while you read? What are your go to genres or musicians? (I’d also add classical music to this list, personally, but didn’t choose any to share this time around. Maybe a future list!)
I’ve been reading through the original Nancy Drew books, which, as many of us now know, were written by around 28 ghost writers. These first books I am reading, though, were written by Mildren Benson using outlines given to her by either Edward Stratemeyer or his daughter Harriet Stratemeyer Adams.
The Secret of Red Gate Farm is number six in the original series and was first released in 1931 with some rewrites of it done in 1961 by Adams.
In this book we find Nancy caught up in a mystery that starts on a train while she and her friends George (female George) and Bess are coming home from a shopping trip.
Let’s start with the summary: “Nancy and her friends, Bess and George, meet Joanne Byrd on a train ride home. Joanne lives at Red Gate Farm with her grandmother, but if they do not raise enough money to pay the mortgage, they will soon lose the farm! Nancy, Bess, and George decide to stay at Red Gate for a week as paying customers. Soon, they learn about the strange group of people who rent a cave on the property. They describe themselves as a nature cult called the Black Snake Colony.”
Nancy Drew books are written simplistically in many ways but the storylines are not light by any means. There are subjects of abuse, criminal underworlds, abandonment, parental loss and many other hard-hitting issues.
This one was no exception. A young woman goes to the city to look for work because her grandmother is going to sell the family farm because they are losing money. While there she meets Nancy and almost gets caught up in a gambling ring of some sort when she interviews for the job and the interviewer is super, super creepy. I’ve watched too many movies and written up too many stories for newspapers so I imagined all the horrible things that would happen to this girl and Nancy while reading these scenes. It made me a bit lightheaded, but since it is a Nancy Drew book I knew things would turn out okay in the end.
Nancy decides she and her friends will go with the young girl back to her farm and pay to stay at the farm while also encouraging others to do the same. Nancy’s idea is like an early Airbnb. People can rent rooms at the farm and this will help the farm owners pay off their dept.
While there Nancy and her friends notice people in the woods, wearing all white, and dancing in the moonlight. This doesn’t seem like your everyday farming community activity so they ask Joanne’s grandmother what that is all about. The woman says she’s renting her land to a group of people to help avoid selling the farm but she doesn’t really know what they are doing up there. Can we say “RED FLAG”?
In addition to that craziness, there is also a man trying to buy the rest of the farm but the grandmother is trying to push him off until she sees if other options work to raise some money.
Despite the simple and fairly innocent way the Nancy Drew books are written, this one was a little creepy for me because of the cult angle.
Even with the simple writing, the dark subject matter leaked through and left me a little unsettled part of the time. People wearing white robes, dancing weirdly in the moonlight? Shudder!
Then Nancy and her friends decide to infiltrate the group at one point and I swear I was about to faint from the tension.
Nancy Drew books might be written simply but their plots still hold together well in my opinion.
Either Stratemeyer or Mildred had quite an imagination.
Have you read this one in the series yet or before?
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
The beginning of this week the weather was beautiful which led my dad to decide to take my kids for a hike along the old railroad tracks near his house two days in a row. I stayed back at my parents and helped my mom with cleaning the house.
The kids enjoyed walking the path where the train tracks used to be and my dad told them the history of where the station was and where the trains traveled. He also talked to Little Miss about where the old French mill used to be along the creek.
Zooma The Wonder Dog also loved the trip. She and Little Miss splashed in the creek and looked for fish, but didn’t see any.
The kids took some photos:
Two days later our little town was placed under a water boil advisory when there was a water main break. This made cooking and washing dishes a challenge, but we managed – not without complaint from me. The advisory was lifted on Friday, thankfully.
Last week I wrote a bit about our family’s cats over the years and barely scratched the surface of all the cats we’ve had over the years. I’ve decided I’m going to sit down one day this week and write about all the cats I can remember us having. Cats have such interesting personalities and each one seems to be different.
Mom and Dad’s cat Molly.
I also hope to write a blog post in the next month or so about the letters we have between my great-grea-grandfather and his brothers and mother that were written during the Civil War. They are very interesting.
What I/we’ve been Reading
The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood and The Anne of Green Gables Devotional by Rachel Dodge
Murder Handcrafted by Isabella Alan, which I have been sharing the wrong title of for a couple of weeks. So this one was good but also annoying. First, I didn’t know it was the last book in the series until I read some reviews. Second, there were some super weird typo and consistency issues that really threw me out of the story. I was surprised to see this because the book was published by Random House Publishing.
I really shouldn’t have been surprised because I’ve seen some errors like this before in Amanda Flowers’ books and Isabella Alan and Amand Flowers are the same person. There are so many books out by Amanda that I feel like they are trying to push them out way too fast and therefore letting quality slide.
Now, as someone who is independently published and has a lot of errors in her book as well, I’m not trying to act superior. I’m just surprised because so many readers are so negative about independently published books because of their supposed lack of quality but I am seeing that lack across the board in publishing right now.
In some ways I think the production of books needs to slow down and focus on quality over quantity. There are just too many rushed books out there.
All of this said I did enjoy the story of the book. I was, however, really annoyed to find out this was the last book in the series and she did not wrap up the love story between the main character very well (I mean they were still together so I guess that’s good at least) and left the storylines of other characters hanging. I still enjoy the stories and her writing, though, so this doesn’t mean I won’t read further books by her. Just not for a while.
I need to take a break from mysteries for a bit so I am going to try either Miracle in a Season by Sarah Loudin Thomas or Finding Lady Enderly by Joanna Davidson Politano
I haven’t read either of these authors before.
I decided to put The Cat Who Brought Down the House by Lilian Jackson Braun aside for now since I learned it was one of the later books in the series. I read one or two of those and they weren’t as good, and I think it might have been because Lilian was quite old by then and others may have been writing them or she was, and they just weren’t as good.
The Husband is reading Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
Little Miss is reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone. At night we are sometimes reading The Four Story Mistake. During the school days we are reading Johnny Tremaine.
The Boy is listening to an audiobook – Tales From The Gas Station Part Four.
What We watched/are Watching
Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown. This was my first time watching this one and I found it very interesting. It sent me down a rabbit hole of reading the real story of John Brown and Queen Victoria.
For Comfy, Cozy Cinema with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs, I watched Dial M for Murder. If you want to join in on our movie marathon posts for the rest of October and November you can follow the list here:
You don’t have to blog about them if you watch them but if you do write a blog post about your impression about the movies, we will be adding a link up at the end of our posts.
On Nov. 14 we will be watching Chocolat as a group watch. We will be pushing play together at the same time and then chatting about the movie in our Discord group (The Dames), which you can join for free now here: https://discord.com/invite/J7qQ36Uf
On my own I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (original with Danny Kaye) this weekend and really enjoyed it. I loved the music and Danny Kaye’s performance overall. I watched an episode of the first season of Only Murders In The Building as well last week. I am really enjoying it and it’s hard not to binge watch it but I’m trying to wait for my husband to be home to watch it with me.
What I’m Writing
I am getting much closer to the end of the third Gladwynn book.
I released the description this past week, if you are curious:
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
The leaves have almost all fallen off here in Pennsylvania which means it is time for leaf jumping for our youngest and maybe for our oldest too if the youngest can convince him to jump with her.
I don’t remember jumping in piles of leaves very often when I was younger but my kids have always loved it. Little Miss raked some leaves yesterday to get ready for more jumping today and as she raked, my parents’ cat, Molly, watched quietly from the porch. Looking at Molly I thought about how little I know about my parents’ current cats. My parents don’t seek out pets. Any cats my parents end up with were dropped off at the non-working barn on the property or wandered up from the neighbors who seem to refuse to spay or neuter.
Two cats, both now passed away, were mine/ours. When my parents first moved to my grandmother’s house when I was in college, our all-black at Zorro came with us. We had moved from my great-grandparent’s house across a little creek (over the creek and through the woods was how we got to grandma’s house) so I was worried Zorro would try to walk through the woods back to our old house, but, as far as I remember, he never did.
Between college and when I got married, I lived at that old house (built in the mid-1800s) and had a cat named Four that I rescued from my pet-hoarding mother-in-law’s house. The cat once belonged to my sister-in-law who adopted pets and got rid of them like she did old shoes. The cat was mostly gray but had a number 4 in orange in the gray for on the top of her head. When my sister-in-law had her, she peed on my ex-brother-in-law’s side of the bed because she hated him. I wish my sister-in-law had seen that as an omen since she didn’t see his drug use and abuse as one and remained with him for years until he cheated on her after baby number five.
My parents took Four in and when my aunt moved in she fell in love with Four.
Both Four and Zorro are gone now and I miss them terribly.
When I was in college someone dropped a cat off at my parents/grandmother’s house and I named the him before my parents and grandmother could even consider sending him to the shelter. I knew if I named him, it would be harder for them to get rid of him. I named him Leonardo after Leonardo DiCaprio because he was very popular at the time – Romeo and Juliet and Titanic had both come out that year.
Mom said there was no way she was going to go out on the back porch and yell “Leonardo!” but she did for the next several years, including one week when he went missing and we all thought he died somewhere. Instead, my dad went to the small granary where he stores lawn equipment and various other items and a skinny cat darted out and ran to the patio. Mom said, “Well, what cat is that? It’s not Leonardo. He’s too skinny.”
Poor fat Leonardo had been locked in the granary for almost a week and had lost a ton of weight.
I always wanted to pet Leonardo but he had no interest in letting me. In fact, the only one he would let pet him was my 88 year old grandmother who sat calmly in her chair on the deck to enjoy the sun. He would curl up next to her and she’d rub his head. She was not a animal person either. I never remember her ever having a pet when I grew up. Leonardo loved her though.
Anyhow, back to my parents’ current cats. They are Buzz, a gigantic, fluffy, orange beast who looks like a Main Coon, and Molly, a black and white polydactyl. I visit them once or twice a week but don’t know the cats well because they are usually hiding from Zooma The Wonder Dog when we visit which means I can’t sit and really learn about them. I’ve only managed to pet Molly once.
Buzz is almost feral, though, so I wouldn’t get to know him anyhow. My dad is the only one who can pet Buzz and the one Molly will come right up to. I think her tendency to run when we are there and her usual fear of us is why I was surprised she watched us in the yard yesterday. Zooma was even with us, which made it even more surprising. I think both Zooma’s smell and eyesight were broken because she never saw Molly or chased after her like she usually does.
By the way, none of the cats we’ve ever had have been able to be inside cats since my mom is actually very allergic to cats. They make her itch all over.
What I/we’ve been Reading
I am still reading The Case of the Innocent Husband by Deborah Sprinkle and Handcrafted Murder by Isabella Alan. I will finish The Case of the Innocent Husband this week.
I have put the Lilian Jackson Braun book on the backburner because I would really like to read The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood to see what it is like.
After that I would like to finish The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, which I recently started.
Little Miss is reading Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone at night (I’m trying to convince her to also read it during the day. Not going so well.). Some nights she and I are reading The Four Story Mistake by Elizabeth Enright and during the school day we are reading Johnny Tremain which we are both enjoying. Last week we painted pumpkins while listening to it on Audible, but normally I read the book to her as part of our school day.
The Husband is reading Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie.
The Boy and I will be starting The Hound of the Baskerville by Arthur Conan Doyle this week after suffering through Beowulf, which I actually just read the summary of. I’m not going to lie about that.
What We watched/are Watching
This past week I rewatched parts of Rear Window so I could write about it for my blog post and then I watched a lot of Murder She Wrote.
The Husband and I watched an episode of the new Frasier show as well. I started watching Only Murders in the Building now that we have a Hulu subscription and then made The Husband watch the first episode with me. We are hooked and I can’t promise I won’t watch more of the show without him since he often has night meetings and I am impatient to find out what happens.
I hope to watch some more old movies this week in addition to Dial M for Murder that I am watching for the Comfy, Cozy Cinema.
What I’m Writing
Still working on Gladwynn Grant Shakes the Family Tree and having fun.
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
I’m so glad you are here and participating in our weekly link-up of family-friendly, fun, educational, interesting, crafty, fashionable, and whatever else posts. I hope you’ll tell your followers about our post (feel free to copy and paste the graphic) and visit the blogs in the link-up.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago. You can share up to three links each week.
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“Nothing has caused the human race so much trouble as intelligence .” – Stella from Rear Window
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching Comfy, Cozy movies this September and October and this week we watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window – or rewatched for me.
Rear Window is one of Hitchcock’s more well-known and praised movies because of the intricacy of the story, the attention to detail, and the masterful storytelling that makes the viewer as desperate as the main character to find out what happens.
Laid up with a broken leg, our main character, photojournalist Jeff Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) is stuck in a two-room apartment looking out on all his neighbors on the other side of his apartment complex.
It’s like he has a bunch of TV channels in each window to watch. There’s always something on. He uses a pair of binoculars to watch what they’re doing part of the time and part of the time he can see them with the naked eye.
There is a newlywed couple who are – ahem – getting to know each other; a couple who appear to be arguing; a woman who lowers her dog down to do his business in the little yard below each day; an athletic dancer who likes to stretch in front of her window; a lonely woman who eats her dinners alone; and many other characters for Jeff to watch.
One night he wakes up in his wheelchair, where he has been sitting for the whole movie, because he hears a scream and breaking class. He can’t figure out where the sounds came from and drifts back to sleep but later, when he wakes up again, he notices the one neighbor – the jewelry salesman who argued with his wife — acting very mysterious.
The neighbor in question, Lars Thorwald, (Raymond Burr) starts going in and out of his apartment with a suitcase. It’s around 2 a.m. when this starts at it’s pouring out. Jeff can’t figure out what that’s all about and struggles to stay awake to watch the man but finally succumbs to exhaustion.
I should mention that Jeff has a girlfriend, Lisa, (Grace Kelly) who is absolutely perfect, but he is making all kinds of excuses not to marry her and one of those excuses is that she won’t enjoy traveling with a journalist.
He tells his nurse (Thelma Ritter) and Lisa about it on their separate visits, but both seem to think he just has a bad case of cabin fever.
As he continues to ponder it all and notices that the man’s wife is no longer in the apartment, Jeff pulls out the zoom lens of his camera and watches the man cutting something up, putting it in bags, and carrying it out. Now he’s starting to really get antsy about what he’s witnessed. It isn’t until Lisa is over one night and he’s telling her what he thinks that she begins to get a little interest as well. What piques both their interest is how the man is tying up a trunk and removing the mattress from the room.
Soon the nurse, Stella, is also pulled in, and all three of them begin to speculate what really happened.
Before long Jeff has Stella and Lisa acting as willing spies for him to find out what really happened.
If you want suspense then this the right movie for you. It is one of Hitchcock’s most suspenseful and nail biting movies.
The movie is based on a short story by Cornell Woolrich. I read an essay online (the author of which I couldn’t find, but it did say it wasn’t AI) that said this movie didn’t attempt to copy the story but instead recreated the plot based on the idea of it.
I did find a summary of the story and the ending is different in some ways to the movie, but with the final outcome being the same.
This writer, as other critics, point out that one aspect of this film that makes it so brilliant is that the viewer knows as much as Jeff does during the movie. We, the viewer, are watching it all unfold as he is and are seeing it from his same vantage point. We aren’t taken into apartments where he isn’t or into scenes that he isn’t looking at from his window. We are a participant in the film, so to speak.
Rear Window was filmed on a budget of $1 million but pulled in $36 million and became the top grossing film of 1954.
According to the site, All The Right Movies, the original story was based on a high-profile murder case in 1924 in Sussex England where a man named Patrick Mahon — committed a crime – well, I won’t tell you what happened in case you haven’t seen Rear Window.
Stewart had already been in one Hitchcock movie before this one (Rope) and would film two others afterward – Vertigo and The Man Who Knew Too Much.
For this film he was anxious to work with Hitchcock and said he wouldn’t take a salary but would take part of the film’s profits, which I think worked out very well for him. While the two got along, there were also times they spoke very little to each other, according to other actors who worked with them.
Wendell Corey, who played Detective Doyle in the movie, said, “Jimmy and Hitch would communicate in unspoken glances, and Jimmy would give him a steely look if Hitch said something he didn’t like. The only direction I ever saw Jimmy take was ‘the scene feels tired’ – there was steel under all that mushiness.”
Corey wasn’t a fan of Stewart in some ways. He was a nice guy, he said, but claimed he was also very arrogant on the set of Rear Window.
Others didn’t apparently didn’t hold this assessment and to me I think it was Corey who had the arrogance issue.
I thought it was interesting that Stewart’s wife asked to be on set during the filming of this movie because of Grace Kelly. According to trivia on All The Right Movies, “Grace Kelly may have been a little too friendly for some people, though – especially James Stewart’s wife. In 1954, Kelly had a reputation for having affairs with her leading men and, after she told a magazine she thought Stewart was one of the most attractive men she’d ever met, Stewart’s wife, Gloria, insisted on being on the set every day to keep an eye on things.”
Rear Window was Stewart’s favorite film of those he worked on Hitchcock with.
“The wonderful thing about Rear Window is that so much of it is visual,” he said in an interview. “You really have to keep your eyes open in the film, because it’s a complicated thing. This was my favorite film to make with Hitch.”
One more piece of trivia that had me snickering was that Hitchcock made the bad guy in this film (Again, I’ll keep it quiet on who the real bad guy is) look and act like David Selznick who produced Rebecca with Hitchcock. Hitchcock said Selznick interfered so much on that film he disowned it. In Rear Window he got his revenge by making the guilty party look like the producer he couldn’t stand.
I love the trivia behind the making of movies, as you know if you’ve read any of my previous posts, so I could go on and on about it. I won’t though. Instead, I’ll point you over to Erin’s blog for her views on it:
Keeping with the Hitchcock and Grace Kelly movies, we will be switching up our movie lineup next week and watching Dial M For Murder. To explain why we are choosing to watch this instead of Murder by Death, I’ll refer to Erin’s well-written explanation, which she also shares on her blog today: https://crackercrumblife.com/2024/10/17/comfy-cozy-cinema-rear-window/
“We were originally going to watch a movie I chose, Murder by Death. I chose it because I read that it was funny and because it has Maggie Smith in it but I didn’t do much research on it other than that.
However, after doing some reading it looks like it could be considered problematic so we are going to scrap that one and trade it for Dial M for Murder instead. It is probably not a bad movie, but a movie that didn’t meet the goal of what was trying to be achieved – it was actually trying to shine a light on racism and homophobia, and no one mentions the ableism but I think I read that is in there too, that was prevalent in Hollywood and the world, but instead just looks like it is in fact all of those things itself.
Anyway, we decided to watch Dial M for Murder for Comfy Cozy Cinema, since we are trying to be cozy and snug with this fun movie watching challenge. I think both of us plan on watching Murder by Death at some point though, whether it is together or just on our own.”
Here is the rest of the full list of movies we are watching or have watched.
I’m also including a link to my blog posts up from this year’s Comfy, Cozy Cinema, at the top of the page under the heading Movie Impressions.
Before I close out for today, I wanted to mention that we did pick a winner for our Comfy, Cozy Giveaway – Yvonne – and she has been notified! Thank you to all of you who entered the giveaway, followed our blogs, Etsy and Substack and I hope you will stick around and have some fun with us as we write about books, movies, and our lives.
If you end up writing about Rear Window or any of the other movies we are watching, please feel free to link up with our linky. You can add a link to the link if it is open, even if it is for a different movie.
My 10-year-old daughter picked out a hardcover copy of Move Your Blooming Corpse by D.E. Ireland for me at a used bookstore about a month ago.
As soon as I saw that cover, I had a gut feeling I was going to like it. Luckily my gut was not wrong. As soon as I saw that cover and title I wanted to know if it would feature the characters from My Fair Lady since I knew the title was alluding to the famous line Eliza Doolittle yells out in the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’ll have to look it up.
When I read the title of the series on the front (An Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins Mystery), I was giddy with delight to know that it was based on the same characters.
This was a delightful, fun, and engaging mystery that takes place – as the inside cover says – in the Edwardian racing world. It is a very fast-paced story with very few slow scenes.
The book starts with Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins at a horse race to cheer on Eliza’s father’s horse, which he co-owns with a group of about 10 other people.
When a murder occurs after the race it seems to be an isolated incident but future developments show that someone is after the members of the horse-owning syndicate. The question is – why?
Woven into the murder mystery is an underlying story of women’s suffrage as women fight for their right to vote in England.
The main characters – Eliza, Henry, Arthur (Eliza’s father), and Freddy (Eliza’s “boyfriend”) are very likable and fun, much like the characters in My Fair Lady. I will say that Henry Higgins was much more likable in this book than the film since I only wanted to throttle him a few times in the book instead of almost the entire time in the movie.
I loved the quick wit of the characters and how closely they mirrored the wit and charm of the characters in the movie. The movie is based on the 1957 Broadway Musical, which was based on the 1914 play, Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.
The back-and-forth, quick-paced conversations between the characters, the complex mystery, and the well-developed side characters made this one a very fun read for me.
I was very excited to see there are four other books in the series. This was the second book in the series but I didn’t feel like I’d missed something by not reading the first. I also liked how the plot and outcome of the first book weren’t given away in this book, which means you don’t have to read the series in order to understand what is going on in each book.
For those who are not fans of romance in books, there is very little in this one, and the romance that is there is so minor and secondary that it’s barely a blip on the romance meter. For those who are not fans of swearing, there is, I think, only one or two minor swear words. For those who are not a fan of graphic descriptions, this book will also work for you because there are no graphic descriptions of any of the crimes.
As a side note – the cover art for the Kindle version of this book is hideous and amateur-looking to me. The cover on the hardcover/library version that I bought is – dare I say it? Delightful. So if you go to look for the Kindle edition, please don’t run away. I promise the book is much better than the cover that is shown.
Have you read this book or any of the others in the series?
This week’s theme is: Books I Was Assigned to Read in School (These can be books you loved or hated. Or just tolerated. Bonus points if you give us a tiny review of your thoughts!)
While I was looking up books to jog my memory on some of the books I read (I remembered many of them but was trying to get the list to ten), I found a post by a teacher on a forum lamenting the fact that students no longer want to read novels and are pretty much only interested in getting the grade, not learning. They don’t want to take the time to read the novels and learn from them and that is heartbreaking to me. Sure, some of these books were torture for me to push through, but the lessons in them were important and if a teacher hadn’t said to me, “You’re reading this or you won’t pass this class,” then I might have avoided them. That would have been a shame.
I’m glad I’ve exposed my kids to some classic books, even if they’ve whined quite a bit about it. Anyhow, I’ll step off my soapbox now and just list those books I was assigned in school.
Hiroshima by John Hersey – about the atom bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, Japan to end World War II. For a AP English course. Horrific, nauseating, and horrifyingly eye-opening for me.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin for AP English. Hated it but may suffer through it one day again to see if I hated it as much as I think I did. I probably will.
1984 by George Orwell – for AP English. Scared the living daylights out of me. Scares me more even now as I watch it unfold around me.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding. For 9th or 10th grade English. Disturbed me. Disturbed me worse when I read it two years ago with my son for his high school English.
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I read this in sixth or seventh grade and then was assigned it in eighth grade and when the teacher found out I’d already read it she was surprised. I couldn’t get into it until my mom started to read it to me in her Southern accent. It became my favorite book. Read it again with my son two years ago for English. It impacted me even more the second time. So much so that I sobbed through half of it. It’s still my favorite book.
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck – I don’t remember a ton about this book except it was sad and I didn’t like it.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickins. I don’t think we actually read this entire book. What we did read was okay for me but when I tried it again for eleventh grade English with my son we both ended up avoiding it and switched gears.
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. I’m not sure this counts as a book because it is a play but I had to read it and with the help of translation by my teacher, I ended up liking it quite a bit. I also liked Taming of the Shrew.
Silas Marner by George Elliot. My son and I read this for his English class so I am going to count it for school, even though it wasn’t my school. I ended up like it much more than I thought I would.
The Year of Miss Agnes by Kirkpatrick Hill. This is another one I didn’t have to read but was assigned reading for my daughter for her history curriculum last year. We both really enjoyed and – yet again – I cried through part of it.
This is a blog link-up where we not only allow you to share your past posts but we encourage it. So share away!
Remember when I was all like, “I can’t wait for fall weather! I want to cozy under my blankets and read a book!”
Yeah, well, fall weather is one thing. Winter-like weather in October is another. This past week our temps dropped close to the 30s and I was a bit shellshocked by it. Luckily I did have a warm blanket and a book to survive it and didn’t have to leave the house too much for any appointments or other events.
How is the weather where you are?
We had some great links this week for our link up. Did you get to check some of them out?
I’m so glad you are here and participating in our weekly link-up of family-friendly, fun, educational, interesting, crafty, fashionable, and whatever else posts. I hope you’ll tell your followers about our post (feel free to copy and paste the graphic) and visit the blogs in the link-up.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago. You can share up to three links each week.
We are always looking for additional hosts so let us know if you want to help out and we are also looking for more links from fashion bloggers so let your fashion bloggers know!
Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!
