The Spiderwick Chronicles: A Review

Showing kids that it is fun to read is an ongoing challenge. There are probably hundreds of books written by parents, psychologists and educators who could come up with different theories of why this is. I’m none of these three, so I’m going to humbly put forth a simple and unscientific theory of my own, and you can do with it what you will.  

My theory is that children are not naturally averse to books or reading. Look at how many toddlers will waddle over to their parents with a stout board-book in their grubby paws and eagerly await the story to be read to them. Then look at how many teenagers hate to read.  There are no Cliff’s Notes for toddlers like there are for high-schoolers. What happens between those years to change book-loving kids into effectively illiterate adults? 

Technology might be one of the problems. A girl once tried to turn the page of my hardcover books by sliding her finger over it. “Doesn’t it have a touchscreen?” she asked.*  

I see news coverage of students in classrooms using pads and pods and things for learning—which is fine, unless it is somehow training them to view anything that doesn’t resemble a video game as “boring.” 

Another problem is, sadly, parents. Remember that toddler? What happens when he brings a book over to his dad, and said dad is too busy watching TV to read to his kid? Parents, not teachers, are the examples that their children are going to try to emulate.  

While working in a library, I cringed every time a family came into the Children’s Section and, when the child ran to the book section, the parent pulled them away to “pick out a DVD.” 

But I digress. 

The “Little House” books by Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Review

Well here it is, the dawn of a new month! And, at least where I live, no sign of spring in sight. This winter has been brutal, either sunny and the bitterest of colds or snowing copiously. It’s the kind of winter where you want to just curl up beside a fire and read a long novel from the 1800’s. It’s basically the human form of hibernation.

Or, rather than just one book, you could probably tuck in a whole series of them. Yep, in honor of this Long Winter, today I’m going to talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose “Little House” books contain quite a few wintery doozies themselves. 

First, to reminisce on my first exposure to these books.  I remember them being the one of the first Read-Alouds my mom did when she started home-schooling me in the first grade.  She got me to sit still because the main character’s name was Laura.  To six-year-old me, anyone named “Laura” was bound to be awesome.  It didn’t hurt that this was about the time the Little House on the Prairie television show was still in regular circulation, along with Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman.  Pioneer stuff was “in”—and I was the perfect age to have a “Pioneer Girl” phase (as I’ve found with other little girls about that same age, even recently). 

The Works of Horace: The Art of Poetry

When I first started this series on Horace, I said that one of the main draws of reading ancient literature is to see how literature first developed as an art.  You can almost see the mechanics of Greek, Latin, Old English, Middle English, all developing not only their own cultural tastes and literary styles, but the very evolution of storytelling and writing conventions that we take for granted today. Philosophers like Aristotle question “What is poetry, what makes an epic and epic, or constitutes a love song?” and even though these questions may be old hat now to our world, saturated with books and literary criticism, it’s important to remember that these questions weren’t always old hat. Someone, after all, had to be the first to question and characterize the different types of literature, to divide the prose from the poetry.