Reading

[lunabee34]

The Borrowers Aloft by Mary Norton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I absolutely adore this series. I wish I had read it as a kid. I already spent ages outdoors making little caps out of acorns for fairies and other diminutive items; this would have been right up my alley.

I really love the way that the Borrowers figure out how to build a hot air balloon using items in the attic in which they've been imprisoned.

Also love the part in which Arietty declares that she's going to marry Spiller one day and she supposes she'll have to tell him that at some point.

I'm sad we only have one volume left in the series. It's been fun inhabiting the world of the extremely resourceful and clever Borrowers.



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Judy Moody Was in a Mood: #1 by Megan McDonald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is really cute with great illustrations. Throughout the whole book, Judy and her classmates are working on Me Collages (collages that explain who they are); the end of the book has some instructions for creating one, so that's what we're going to do next. I think it'll be a fun project.



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I reset my Goodreads challenge for 150. Now that Fiona is exclusively reading chapter books and not a dozen picture books a week, there's no way I'm going to reach 200 (especially if I continue to doggedly read that interminable Ginsberg collection--only 500+ pages to go! *sobs*).



If You Ask Me: Essential Advice from Eleanor Roosevelt by Eleanor Roosevelt

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a fascinating book that consists of answers Roosevelt wrote in advice columns over the course of a couple decades. I didn't know anything about her before reading this, but now I want to read a biography of her. As the book foregrounds, so many of the issues that readers were wrestling with in the 40s and 50s are issues that still preoccupy us in the 21st century; I find most of her answers very kind, thoughtful, and pertinent to life almost 100 years later and very few of them to be dated.



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Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think the pieces about assault and violence against women are really powerful, especially the titular article.

I am less interested in Solnit's thoughts on Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag.

Solnit also uses the same handful of examples in each article, which works fine and wouldn't be noticeable in a magazine or on a blog, but in essays back-to-back in a book, it just seems like she's repeating herself.



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Comments

[nyctanthes]

I find essay collections tough. The most recent one I read was Philip Pullman. Besides being a blowhard and incredibly tiresome on the subject of atheist (and *I'm* an atheist!), he also repeated themes over and over. 400 pages of his thoughts was 200 pages too much.

And even when authors don't repeat themes/are strong essayists (e.g., Mary Gaitskill), I find that reading so much of one person's thoughts can be a bit much. One or two at a time is what I can handle without starting to feel personal animosity towards their opinions. :P

[lunabee34]

I don't actually read single-author essay collections very often; David Sedaris is the only one who really comes to mind, but he's totally different because it's humor. I think this is the first I've read in a very long while.