The running path by our house looks like it might be good for mushrooming. And I'm pretty sure The Big Bad Wolf is wearing Grandmother's nightgown and glasses and waiting for Little Red Riding Hood at the end of that path.
And look what came in the mail today! 600 pages of Annotated Dracula, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman! I'm excited. Creeped out, but excited.
Jennifer and James, our former next door neighbors here in Niger, have written a new book. Walk don't run to Amazon.
My fifth grade teacher read "A Wrinkle in Time" aloud. I loved this book and read it over and over again. Now, I'm reading it aloud to Camille. It's a little bit of a slow start for her, but I love the cozy east-coast life the writer settles us into before we take off for the Andromeda galaxy. Today is Madeleine L'Engle's birthday. From the writer's almanac:
Madeleine L'Engle was born in New York City (1918). She struggled to find any success as a writer with novels about ordinary families and ordinary situations, but after reading about the ideas of Albert Einstein, she wrote a science fiction novel called A Wrinkle in Time (1962), about a group of children who have to rescue their father from a planet where individuality has been outlawed. The book was rejected by 26 different publishers, who all felt that the book was too difficult for children but too fantastic for adults. But when it came out in 1962, the novel won the Newbery Medal, and it sells about 15,000 copies a year. L'Engle put a clause in her publishing contract that gave her publisher the rights to A Wrinkle in Time in perpetuity in the whole universe except for the Andromeda galaxy. She died this year.
Madeleine L'Engle said, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
My copy had a much scarier cover. I like this one by Peter Sis much better, but it has its detractors. What was your favorite book in the 5th grade?
Amazon gave it's top 100 reviewers advance copies of Khaled Hosseini's new book A Thousand Spendid Suns and it mostly got five stars. They are saying it's even better than The Kite Runner. Can it be possible? Looks like we'll have to buy this one in hard back.
Meanwhile, me and the CaSt are at my parent's house: going to Curves with my mom, following them both around to doctor appointments, messing up the house with trains and dominos, playing cards with a tablefull of eighty-year-old faces I love, cooking enchalada dinners, buying peaches from a 100-year-old farm down the street, and enjoying the cedar-scented air.
