July 8, 2006 ~ Books, Books, and Books
Saturday.
two weeks old
I'm nearly done with Grove's birth story, but in the mean time I have a few things that have been cluttering up my folders that I wanted to post.
Someone asked in the guest book a while back: how do I manage to get so much reading done, with a baby to care for?
During the first few months, I read all the time. Reading and hiking were the only things I could do for any length of time. Grove was not very mobile, couldn't sit up on his own, and couldn't even really play with anything until he developed some motor control, so I did a lot of holding him in those early months.
one and a half months old
And he loved to be held, of course. I quickly found that I could prop a book beside me or in one hand and read while I nursed him, while he slept, or while he wanted to be held. And newborns nurse a lot, sleep a lot, and need to be held a lot, so I ended up reading a lot. Grove is also very fixated on faces and voices, so he loved to watch me while I spoke, and I often read aloud to him, quickly skimming through any parts that would be age-inappropriate. (Yes, he probably didn't understand, but what if he did?)
Now, things are a little more complicated. He's a wiggly mess of curious reaching fingers most of the time, so I don't have as many chances to read while I'm holding him. And he's very interactive, now, even when nursing. But I do still read when he's subdued and nursing himself to sleep or when he wants to be read to. And I have time to read if I wish during his naps or after he goes to bed at night.
four months old
Um... Does anyone have any ideas for childproofing bookshelves? Grove is getting really close to crawling. We're not too worried about protecting the books so much as preventing him from pulling himself up on a bookshelf and making it topple over onto him. For instance, the cheap plywood sort of shelves where each individual shelf slides right out... Eesh. We're not too worried about most of the baby proofing things, but we have so very many bookshelves, and most of them not very sturdy...
I have a feeling this is going to be another one of those "watch him every single second" sort of things.
 
Grove's books
Morgan was commenting that Grove has more books already than we did throughout our childhoods combined, and he can't even read yet. And that's not even all of them.
If the boy doesn't end up being much of a reader, it will be a tragic waste. Instead of the typical admonition, "Eat your dinner! Think of all the starving children in Africa," around here it will be: "Read your books! Think of all the children in Africa who don't have a single book in their whole village!"
I have been collecting children's books since I moved to North Carolina, scouring library book sales, checking our sources of free books, searching used bookstores, picking up titles that I remembered loving as a child and sometimes finding new ones that looked enticing. I had amassed quite a collection, all of them tucked away in a corner of the study. I never read them. I hardly ever even looked at them. They were waiting for someone I wanted very much to meet. There was a time, after a long time of trying, that looking at those books had become a little painful--what if their destined owner never came?
Once I was pregnant, though, a look at those books spread warmth through me. My Aunts sent boxes and boxes of my old children's books that had been in storage back in Oregon. Several people gifted us with books for the coming baby. The collection quadrupled and lived in stacks and boxes.
Two weeks before Grove arrived, we got two used bookshelves from the Habitat for Humanity Store. In that last week before he was born, I arranged all of those books on the shelves. I stood back and looked at my work--from childhood favorites like Where the Wild Things Are to new discoveries like Harry Potter. Only then did I know I was prepared to give birth--the child's books were ready. Labor could commence.
I'm way behind in recording what I've been reading. So. Some miniature book reviews. Feel free to skip this if you're one of those weirdoes who hates reading. Heh.
I finished Ivanhoe, and it was really interesting to read something set in the times of knights and chivalry that was actually historically based, rather than fantasy. (As a side note, wow, that book really doesn't cast the Knights Templar in a very positive light, huh? But the whole, um... resurrection... thing that happens at the end: where the blazes did that come from? If Sir Walter Scott had sat down in a writer's workshop with that, I suspect they would have torn him to pieces!).
Moving on, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd was a very beautifully written book. Who recommended that book to me? It is reminiscent of The Color Purple, but with some other themes (adolescence, mothers, civil rights). I loved the Southern voice and mood that Kidd pulled off so well in that novel.
After that I read A Passage to India which I never did finish when it was assigned for one of my college classes. I'd enjoyed it, but I was swamped with other assignments and didn't manage to finish it back then. (I'm really sorry, Professor Bradshaw...). I'm glad I finally got back to reading it, though, because it's a pretty incredible book. I damn near cried in frustration for the characters in the end. I'm curious, though, how British Imperialists in India at the time reacted to it. It's not exactly flattering. Rather the opposite. Ouch.
In addition, I finished A Country Year: Living the Questions by Sue Hubbell. Linda gave me this book when she visited back in February, and I'm really thankful that she did. It is an inspiring selection of nature writing. I really enjoyed the voice and the ideas, and I'm betting Linda gave me the book because Sue reminded her of me, for I was relating to her on every page. This book makes me want to dig up one of my book ideas and start working on it again...
Also, Children of Dune by Frank Herbert. Still good, but it doesn't quite live up to Dune, which I still believe is one of the best-written science fiction novels out there. After Children... I read God Emperor of Dune which was... weird. I'm going to take a break from the Dune books for now, because between the change to a less personal narrative writing style, the multiple Duncan Idaho ghoulas, the arrogant and detached worm-Leto II, the skip of 3,500 years between the last book and this one, the lack of the fascinating Fremen culture that drew me in in the first place... Well. Yeah. Weird. Kinda hard to get through.
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire was a very entertaining book, and I really enjoyed the read. I did not, however, feel that it is so good that it is destined to be a classic, as some reviewers seemed to believe. And it was not as profound as those reviews had hyped it to be; for instance, it did not say anything about evil that I hadn't thought about before. It was still an amusing new look at a familiar story, however, and a clever little book.
And I am currently in the middle of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series of five young adult books. I loved these books as a child, and recently pulled them out for Grove's bookshelves. I was surprised to find that, while the reading goes really fast, now, they are still a pretty compelling read. I'm looking forward to sharing them with Grove.
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