Reading Notes - November

What I've been reading recently...

Country Matters: The Pleasures and Tribulations of Moving From a Big City to an Old Country Farmhouse by Michael Korda

Korda was, at the time of the book, a senior editor (possible THE senior editor, I'm not certain) at Simon and Schuster, a major North American publisher.  He also moved from downtown New York City to rural New York State to live in a farmhouse built before George Washington became president, which takes a certain amount of chutzpah.  I picked up the book mostly because it reminded me of the similar narrative of Marsha Boulton, a Canadian high up someone who moved from urban Toronto to a country farm to raise sheep.  And I really enjoyed Boulton's stories, which are also in the same popular one-story-per-chapter format as Korda's.  Country Matters gave me something light and fluffy to read while on a three day work trip with my husband, and it was ideal for that purpose, but there were too many annoying little details for me to really enjoy it.  I feel a little pedantic writing them down, but here they are:

Korda refers to the blacksmith coming to shoe the horses.  Blacksmiths don't shoe horses.  The proper name for someone who shoes horses is a farrier.  This sort of detail bothers me and it should bother a professional senior editor as well.

There is a lot of pussyfooting around the subject of fox hunting.  My opinion on the issue is irrelevant to my book review, but the author mentions having no particular opinions about it at one point, and then mentioning later that he didn't agree that the hunt was environmentally friendly and was very much a snobby and new gentry type thing to do.  This kind of 'say one thing here then say another thing there' writing was all through the book.  It made it very challenging to get absorbed into the story because I kept getting sidetracked.  "wait, he just said all these things about this guy over here and now he's saying he likes him?"

I know this is trivial but honestly so much of the story is about the vast amounts of money Korda and his wife poured into the property.  The bought more land that butted up against their own, they erected new buildings, they did masses of renovation work, they hired a very expensive decorator, they kept buying horses, they hired multiple staff members, even at one point buying and renovating a second house so the handyman and barn hand have somewhere to live...you get the idea.  But instead of being able to focus on the story all this mention of money just kept making me wonder where it was coming from!  Where?  How much do a former model and horse event participant (his wife) and publishing house editor MAKE?  Which I realize is not part of the story, but was such an ever-present question.

Anyway, all this is to say that there were little details that annoyed me enough that I didn't love it.  It wasn't Marsha Boulton.  But it was interesting.

Discipline: The Glad Surrender by Elizabeth Elliot

I only knew of Elizabeth Elliot through the movies about her first husband, Jim, and their work with indigenous people groups in South America.  I knew she had written books, of course, but this was the first one I've read.  I really enjoyed it!  There were a few times I felt as if Elliot and I had differing views on a religious subject but compared to her I haven't lived, so who knows, maybe years from now I will re-read her and those more challenging views will suddenly be in perfect alignment.  The vast majority of her writing was spot on, and I found it very interesting to see how faith based non-fiction has changed in the thirty or so years since Discipline was published.

The struggle I had with the book was in knowing how to suggest it to others.  It's not a particularly deep exploration of the topic of Christian discipline, so I would tend to think it would be more helpful for those without a lot of experience with the topic or who need a peaceful refresher, but then the style is very old fashioned and that makes me hesitant to recommend it to a new Christian nowadays, because I'm not sure they would take the time to get past that to the meat inside.

It's...it's like Oswald Chambers!  My Utmost For His Highest is, in my opinion, probably one of the best devotionals ever written, but the only Christians I know who read it are older, or appreciate the classics in that genre.

Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Anne Kidd Taylor

I am puttering through this one slowly.  Kidd and Taylor, a mother/daughter author team, take turns alternating viewpoints of the same time period when Taylor has been rejected from her first choice of graduate school and Kidd is progressing through menopause - two seasons of life that seem very different but are knitted together by the story of Demeter and Persephone.  There was quite a bit of 'divine female' type delving into the topic of womanhood, which can be very heavy handed in some texts but I thought was handled well and sensitively by Kidd and Taylor.

I'm not done yet.  But I will say it has inspired me to look into more Christian feminist writings and see what else people have to say about all that.

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

I've heard people say they just love the Maisie Dobbs series for a very long time, but I am a slow embracer of new mystery authors in a way that I am not, necessarily, with other genres.  The last time I really, really enjoyed a new mystery author was when I read the first Flavia De Luce story, A Sweetness at The Bottom of The Pie, by Alan Bradley.  Since I read that while in labour with my first child, who is now 8, I think I can safely say that new authors in this genre do not come to me easily.  But I really enjoyed Winspear's rather endearing Maisie.  There was tension, and also a very unexpected twist, and I was pretty captivated by the novel.  I think I might just have found my once-per-decade addition to the mystery shelf.

What Is Stephen Harper Reading?  by Yann Martel

Not only do I (obviously) love talking about the books I've been reading, but I equally love hearing about what everyone else has been reading, and I think that must have been my thought process behind picking up this book.  Which in hindsight was perhaps a little narrow sighted of me because one very obvious reason why someone would decide to send a book every two weeks to the leader of one's country, along with a letter talking about the book...it's an attempt to 'educate'.  And this seems to be Martel's plan - he apparently has judged Prime Minister Harper as uneducated in the literary arts and has taken it upon himself to show him the light.  Frankly, with the condescending tone of many of the letters I am surprised that Prime Minister Harper's office bothered to respond even the two times they did.

That being said, and if you are able to ignore the heavy handed advice in the book suggestions, it's an odd list that Martel offers the politician.


And there you go.  That's what I have been reading.

The literature we're using in this session

This year I have split up my lesson planning into sessions, or sections, each one lasting a few weeks and outlining what we will focus on weekly.  At the end of the session I can re-evaluate if we need a break, if we need to focus on any particular areas, if we need to revisit any topics, etc.  It's a bit easier for me than trying to lesson plan for an entire year, or even for a semester.  So much can change from week to week or from month to month.

Here is the literature that the 8 year old and I are using for this session, which will last until early December.  I chose reading that focused on nature for this session, not for any particular reason, just to help me pick readings because I have so many books.  Poetry is in quotation marks.  Sections from larger books are underlined.

One Day In the Woods - Jean Craighead George
Grass and Grasshoppers - Rose Wyler
How To Be A Nature Detective - Millicent Selsam
Can You Find The Animal? - Wilda Ross
Who Lives There? - John Hawkinson
Animals In Winter - Henrietta Bancroft
"The Lonely Land" - A.J.M. Smith
"Indian Summer" - Wilfred Campbell
"A Vagabond Song" - Bliss Carmen
Migration of Birds - The Handbook Of Nature Study
The Asters - The Handbook Of Nature Study
First Walk In November - Enid Blyton
The Chipmunk - The Handbook of Nature Study

November

Several years ago I became interested in the idea of starting to organize our family year in a more seasonal fashion, mostly using the liturgical year as a basis but incorporating a lot of the old seasonal rituals and folklore that used to be prevalent when we were all more closely in tune with the cycles of the year.  I don't remember exactly what started me on this but I definitely remember the first book I read about it - Sarah Ban Breachnach's Mrs. Sharp's Traditions.  I have to say, regardless of your faith or how much time you might have to engage in more optional pursuits, I can't recommend this book enough to start building your own family traditions.

I always turn to thinking about this topic in the fall.  There is something about fall that makes me feel like doing things, some primitive urge to put away and tidy and prepare.  In past years I've mostly satisfied that urge by making masses of preserves and cleaning the house out, but in more recent years I've had to change that up as schoolwork has become more intense and I just don't have the time to spend six hours bottling jam.

Today, being the day after Hallowe'en, and also All Saints' Day, is a good day to work outside.  The pastor is visiting the bereaved (a good day for that, as well), and the children are very happily busy creating a fort out of a large box, and so I am putting away the summer toys and bicycles, sweeping the decks, tidying the last of the gardens, picking up the clothespins that have flown from the line these many months, and stacking wood.

The lead up to Remembrance Day on November 11th is always filled with a lot of little tasks as we get ready for a day of several cold, windy, bitter services back to back to back - a day of standing silently in churchyards and at cenotaphs in the surrounding valleys and villages.  It does us good, like a fast before a feast, to start this season off remembering the saints, and stacking the wood.