I, Juan de Pareja

I am woefully behind in my Newbery project!  Only one book this year!  The 1966 winner of the Newbery Medal.

I, Juan de Pareja is the imagined autobiography of real-life painter Juan de Pareja.  Juan was born a slave of mixed-race in seventeenth-century Spain and willed to master painter Diego Velasquez on the death of his mistress, becoming Velasquez's assistant. He was later freed and became a respected painter in his own right (The Calling of St.Matthew is his most famous work, apparently on display at the Prado but I can't get a link for it). 

de Trevino's rendition of Juan (or Juanico, the diminutive used for much of the book) presents him as a an open, good-hearted boy, a good Catholic, and an earnest servant with some self-awareness that he is different from Spanish servants.  As a young man he becomes more aware of his situation as a slave.  Although he does not actively rebel against "the system", there is some feeling of injustice or unfairness in how he can be owned simply for being dark-skinned and born of a woman enslaved. 

The best passages of the book come from Juan's budding fascination with painting and his attempts to learn to paint as Velasquez does although the slavery laws forbid it.  Juan's awe at how Velasquez used light and dark in the paintings, how the colors were mixed, can be shared by the reader.  I don't paint or draw and I felt awestruck just reading the imagined depiction of Velasquez's studio.

This book is not a fast read despite being fairly short.  I think it would be of good use in a unit on slavery to show that the concept was not limited to certain parts of the world and to introduce the historical foundations of racism and slavery.

Now for the vocabulary - there were so many words!  Some are in Spanish or have a religious or historical origin.  Definitely a good book for making word-lists:

laboriously, siesta, sweetmeats, mantilla, mangy, urchin, rosary, melodious, vestments, deceit, maravedis, constricted, cipher, ignominy, conviction (idea, not jail), sullenly, niggardly, coddled egg, morsel, frugal, Damascu paper, capricious, dictated, "Ay de mi", taciturn, fretful, portended, premonition, miser, penury, Romany, subservient, crony, scourged, real (coin), zaguau, prophetic, intuitive, retching, ravenously, "Quien?", pattered, magistrate, tottering, convent, mortars, apprentice, obligated, commissions, taffeta, azure, schemer, copyist, scrivener, dais, vulgar, frivolous, inconspicuously, corpulence, puritanical, parasite, stripling, indefatigable, sanctity, shriven, manumission, slap-dash, departure, jovial, craggy, impetuous, retinue, unguents, encysted, despondency, repentence, temerity, wallowing, miasma, ominously, swart, obeisances, coolly dispassionate, Regent, cosset, meticulous, adulation, communicant, scrupulous, treachery

Whew!

The Midwife's Apprentice

Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice was published in 1995, winning the Newbery Medal in 1996 (the same year I finished high school).  It's not a long book, only about 120 pages, but is a wonderful historical novel for middle school readers.  A strong central character really pulled me into the story.

The narrator is Brat, a young girl who has never known a family and has fended for herself since she can remember, scrounging for scraps and sleeping wherever she can find shelter.  The medieval English setting doesn't afford Brat many kindnesses and she is regularly teased, taunted, and chased from town to town as an outsider.  One cold night she finds a dung heap to sleep in (which can be nice and warm) and wakes to find the town midwife looming over her.  Although the midwife is gruff and suspicious she allows Brat - renamed Beetle from her origin in the dung heap - to carry her bundles, fetch firewood, gather herbs, help with the laundry, and so on.  Beetle is very clever and learns very quickly; she visits other artisans in town to learn about their professions and even chooses to give herself a new name - Alyce - in a boost of confidence.  Even though the midwife won't let Alyce learn midwifery, she peeps in the windows to learn how to deliver a baby.  Or at least she thinks she learns.  Alyce makes a mistake and runs away from the village; she finds an inn in need of a scullery maid and determines to to forget the midwife and her life in the village.  However, Alyce has one more lesson to learn...

Brat/Beetle/Alyce is a great role model for girls and young women.  Alyce is stubborn and refuses to kow-tow to others simply because she is a girl and doesn't know where she comes from.  She is resilient, resourceful, clever, and intelligent; Cushman has given her character a great thirst for learning, particularly in a setting where women did not receive an education, and Alyce excels at one of the few respectable postitions open to women at that time.  Cushman also lends a lot of period detail to her short novel - the style is similar to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth - as well as a wealth of herbal knowledge that Alyce garners throughout the novel.  The Midwife's Apprentice is definitely a book deserving of the Newbery.

Vocabulary (and I'm sure many of these are herb nicknames):
fleabane
ragwort
dung
jasper
columbine
comfrey
wormwood
boneset
borage
bryony
milwort
wag
lardy
pockmarked
mewling
mallows
birthwort
anise
dill
oskins
boskins
rebec
gitterns
sackbuts
Magister
larkspur
meadowsweet
foxglove
thimbleberry
fennel

The Wheel on the School

Lina wonders why there are no storks in her costal Dutch village of Shora but the nearby village of Nes there are storks on every roof.  After some investigation, she realizes that the village roofs are too steep and pointed; storks need a flat space to nest, like the wagon wheels on the roofs of Nes.  Lina's enthusiasm, and her classmantes', causes her schoolteacher to suspend lessons to look for a wheel.  The children's persistence leads the whole village to put a wagon wheel on the schoolhouse to entice a pair of nesting storks in Meindert DeJong's The Wheel on the School.

There's a sweet, earnest sentiment to DeJong's writing in The Wheel on the School; a can-do attitude.  Eelka finds a wheel, but it starts to fall apart from age; old Janus, on the other hand, can put the pieces back together.  Auka aids a tin peddler during his search for a spare wheel.It reminded me very much of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, a book I haven't read in years; both have a make-the-best-of-any-situation tone and have very resourceful characters.  Perhaps the attitude is due to the storks - it is said that storks bring good luck to a house when they next on the roof.  Shora certainly sees it's share of fortunate events during the children's quest to put a wagon wheel on the school.

Maurice Sendak contributed simple drawings to the book.  Used as chapter headings and sprinkled throughout the story, the drawings add a little bit of whimsy.  Rowing out to rescue the storks, the women struggling through the storm to church, the children gathered around Janus.  They look like simple charcoal sketches, very sweet.

DeJong's book was quite fun to read, a happy story (every once in a while, we all need a happy story), and it was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1955.

Vocabulary:
notion
hedgerow
corset
queer
quavery
dike
scuttling
dominie
spume
roiled
spindrift
scheme

Secret of the Andes

Winner of the 1953 Newbery Medal, Secret of the Andes follows a modern (for the 1950s) Inca boy as he matures in a secluded valley of the Andes.  Cusi has lived with the old llama herder Chuto for as long as he can remember...but Chuto is not his father.  Cusi has been raised with traditional Incan instruction and has learned traditional Incan crafts such as spinning, weaving, and, of course, breeding llamas.  However, Cusi is starting to grow-up and the time comes for him to leave the valley and seek his family.

Compared to my previous Newbery book, The Matchlock Gun, Secret of the Andes is very much centered on the richness of native cultures.  Chuto and Cusi greet the sun daily, Cusi is instructed in Incan traditions, and the Spanish conquerors are most definitely not well thought-of - there is a song/rhyme that recounts the death of the last Incan king at the hands of the Spanish.  Cusi's handicrafts and daily chores are also detailed; he is proud of his ability to make strong rope, spin good-quality yarn, and raise pure-bred llamas.  There was just a little weirdness when the narrator referred to "pan pipes" and some of the constellations/celestial bodies were referenced by Greco-Roman names like Venus; I'm thinking that Incas who are very firmly committed to retaining their own traditions would have their own names for the planets and reed pipes, even those Incans who are fictional characters in children's literature.

Newbery vocabulary (mostly cultural):
ychu
gourds
olla
chicha
papa-aw-ki
canihua
vicuña

The Matchlock Gun

In my quest to read all the Newbery-winning books I knew that I would find some that I didn't like.

I don't like The Matchlock Gun (this edition is closer to the edition I borrowed from the library).  Winner of the 1942 medal.  It's probably more interesting as an artifact of American publishing mid-century than as a fun story to read.

The plot is fairly simplistic: white settlers of Dutch descent in colonial New England are threatened during the French and Indian war; father leaves to help the militia leaving mother, tweener son, and young daughter at homestead; wouldnchyaknowit but a group of Indians shows up, wounding the mother as she runs to alert the children; the son saves the family by firing the 16th century Spanish matchlock gun; the home burns down but the family is alive when the father returns.  The end.

According to the author's lengthy foreword (which ought to be an Afterword since it gives nearly the whole book away), the story is based on a real event in the author's family history.  Fair enough.  However, the way Native Americans are depicted in the illustration and description, essentially as savages, is a reflection of a mid-twentieth-century viewpoint; it really doesn't work in 2010.  The illustrations are also very garish and look like they were done by a grade schooler with a limited number of crayons (the illustrations were also placed in odd areas, sometimes before the text of the scene depicted).

Vocab: muster, culverins, boneset (I think this is an herb), camomile, schnapps

All in all, I wouldn't assign this as a book for children.  Maybe for a history of publishing class or as a refence about cultural attitudes.  Caddie Woodlawn is older by about 6 years and is far better in both tone and story.

A Gathering of Days

A Gathering of Days by Joan W. Blos is a book I never heard of until I hunted down the list of Newbery Award winners for my project.  An imagined diary written by a young teen girl in early-nineteenth century New Hampshire?  It won the Newbery in 1980, so I should have run across this as a child, but it was never put forth as something I should read.

I loved this book.  I'm pretty sure I would have loved this book as a child, too, because it fits with my Laura Ingalls Wilder and Caddie Woodlawn interest (I have no idea how many times I read the "Little House" books).  The structure of the "diary" makes it very easy to read and Blos introduces many themes that are only tangentially touched on by Caddie and Laura: the loss of a parent, the loss of a close friend, slavery.  However, there are many similarities: school lessons, learning to quilt, caring for the household, trading for household goods in the "big city".  Catherine has a very real voice - she doesn't sound like an adult stuffed into an adolescent character.

Catherine's age-appropriateness is important because Blos made the language structure authentic to the time-period.  It sounds a little like a Jane Austen novel in that the sentences are formally structured.  Now, I, having posted a rant about why Austen, Bronte, and etc. are not old English, think it is wonderful that a children's author wrote a historical novel/reconstructed diary that has time-period appropriate language.  It doesn't hurt anyone to read formal English.  Blos also provided an afterword in my edition where she briefly described her research for the book - her work is greatly appreciated because the "reality" of the book wouldn't have felt right without her research.

I wish I'd read this as a child alongside my Laura and Caddie - I would have appreciated it far more for Catherine's story rather than her research or use of language (stupid grown-up brain).

Vocabulary (a long list, since this is a historical novel):
virtues, receipt (as in "recipe"), silhouette, ruefully, sere, lows (as in cow), bound boys, vagrant, teaze, parlours, recruiter, thrashed, foolscap, capacious, satinette, cassimere, simper, abated, divers, ermined, inclement, cyder, trasnpired, nubbly, turpentine, indenture, buttery, plausible, adamant, presume, tinker (as a job type), cyphering, durable, chagrinned, scruples, suffices, exhortation, arable, sirup, contrivance, quirky, foiled, shewed, abcedenarians, bundling, mooning (not that kind), mince (pie), pedlar, dispossess'd, lead plummet, forfeit, chaises, Hessians, traffick, muslins, tansy, comfrey, peaked (as in sick), dimity, loquacious, flouting, bantam, harangueing, contrite, naught, blaspheme

*PS: Catherine knits stockings as does her friend Cassy; Matty, who is seven or eight is learning to knit stockings....so all y'all who think that knitting is that hard it's not, you just need patience

Dear Mr. Henshaw

There are very few Beverly Cleary books I haven't read - Dear Mr. Henshaw is one of them.  I'm not quite sure why it never appealed to me as a kid.  It probably has to do with the main character being a boy; I remember reading the Henry books and thinking they were OK but not as good as Ramona.

Dear Mr. Henshaw won the Newbery in 1984 making it next up on my Newbery Project quest (Paul Zelinsky did the illustrations, pretty cool).  Leigh Botts is a grade-schooler who moves to a new school when his parents divorce; one of his school projects is to write to an author so Leigh writes a letter to his favorite author, Mr. Henshaw.  Mr. Henshaw (occasionally) writes back and Leigh begins a correspondence and keeps a journal addressed to a Pretend Mr. Henshaw.  The whole book is told through letters and journals so it reads very quickly, even for a kids' book, due to the amount of white space.

I did like Dear Mr. Henshaw - Leigh is a great character for boys to read.  He isn't the cool kid, he's the new one, someone keeps stealing his lunch, and his dad never calls or visits when he promises.  He is pretty ingenious, though, and his correspondence with Mr. Henshaw leads him to learn a little bit about himself.  But Ramona is still a cooler character (what can I say - I love the cat commercial and dancing in three-way mirrors) and I have no idea why Cleary didn't win the Newbery for Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

Vocabulary (a shorter list and occasionally a time period-dependent list):
mincemeat
kids (i.e. goats)
sugar beets
gondolas (semi-truck related)
vocational
shrubbery
reefer (not the pot kind, the trucking kind)
canapes
quiche
curry
halyard
composition
nuisance
fictitious
mimeograph
wrath
"herb tea"
pimples

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

So who wouldn't want to live in a museum filled with really cool stuff like Michaelangelo sculptures and Tudor furniture?  I wouldn't mind, although, having a skinny-dip in the Met fountain to fish for spare change might bring me up short.

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is a book that somehow missed my reading years.  I'm not quite sure why I never read it and I certainly had the opportunity since it was published in the 1967, well before I learned to read.  Maybe the reason had to do with the title because it is quite a mouthful but more appealing than Claudia and Jamie Runaway to the Museum or something like that.  I started my Newbery Project just so I can fill in some of the gaps.

FtMuFoMBEF (what a name) is such a fun book to read and the pen-and-ink illustrations are perfect.  As an oldest child myself I could really sympathize with Claudia; it really stinks when you're always the one to have to set the table, or watch the youngest kid, or help with the laundry (with 20-20 hindsight, I realize no one would want the kid who would live in the same clothes for weeks if given the opportunity to come within 10 feet of the laundry basket).  You're always the role model and it does stink that no one recognizes you for it; in reality, my mom was pretty good at thanking me but it was still irritating that the little bros got to watch TV and I got to load the dishwasher.  The sibling interaction between Claudia and Jamie was pretty cute, especially Jamie with his miserly/practical ways, even though the kids did sound more like a retirement-age "Odd Couple" at times instead of school-aged siblings.  The "Angel" plot was a bit of a stretch but it did lead to a situation that allowed Claudia to go home "different" since that was her object in planning the sojurn in the Museum.

I found plenty of vocabulary words in this Newbery winner.  I think I could have figured out many of them from context but I could see some winding up on vocab or spelling lists for middle school students.
knapsack, accustomed, tyrannies, ventured, forceps, tycoon, injustice, fiscal, percolator, jostling, Neanderthal, perspiration, pamphlets, flattered/flattery, quarrel, expenditures, cheapskate, exhaustion, accumulation, inconspicious, chauffeur, check (like the money kind), orlon, "chancellor of the exchequer", veto, tightwad, fussbudget, musty, anemia, sarcophagus, stencilled, embalm, vat, smoldering, pagan, dope (as in the drugs kind), conscience, sane/insane, mastaba, paupers, funnels, stall (as in delay), Kaleidoscope, commotion, boodle, caper

Next up for my Newbery Project is Dear Mr. Henshaw.

Current book-in-progress: I am almost done with The Corrections
Current knitted item: pretty blue shawl
Current movie obsession: Criminal Minds (dear CBS, you stink for messing with the ONLY show I watch on TV)
Current iTunes loop: "Reading" playlist

Caddie Woodlawn

I was a big Laura Ingalls Wilder fan, had all the books in the pretty hardcover bindings, and read them cover to cover many times, the whole series through. They were a gift from my grandmother. My grandmother is also the one who introduced me to Caddie Woodlawn but I don't remember ever owning a copy so I must have read it at my grandmother's house. I was always very partial to Caddie; she and Laura were very similar, even from the same area of the country, but for some reason Caddie always seemed a little more "real" to me and I can't quite put my finger on it. Re-reading Caddie now I think it's the author/subject that causes the difference; while Laura wrote from an autobiographical stand-point, Carol Ryrie Brink wrote about her grandmother, the real Caddie (nee Woodhouse), and perhaps that created more space between writer and subject, however small.

The new edition of Caddie has a note from Brink - something missing in my grandmother's old copy - and it was very nice to read a bit about how Brink and her grandmother interacted. There are some things I did not remember from my childhood readings and, strangely enough, the biggest hole in my memory centered around Caddie's father; I completely forgot he was from England which is huge because that fact informs several other plot points in the book including the final chapters. I do realize now that I read Caddie long before I had a good hold on the historical timeline (I believe I first read this in second grade because we hadn't moved to the new school district at the time); there are a number of facts related to the Civil War that I have a far better understanding of having had fifth-grade history. A hold-over from childhood is my lack of knowledge of the folk songs Robert Ireton sings; I'd not heard of any of them at the time but this time 'round I have Google so I can search for the music.

Caddie lived in Wisconsin about ten years or so before Laura so the setting is slightly altered. There is more interaction with Native American tribes in Caddie than in the Little House in the Big Woods and there seems to be better communication with the rest of the US at large in Laura's time than Caddie's. Brink seems to include a subtle lesson on racism and tolerance which I don't recall from the Little House books. While the Ingalls' don't seem to mind the neighboring Native American tribes but interact little with them, Mr. Woodlawn actively seems to offer friendship and assistance to John's tribe; Brink also treats the biracial Hankinson family with sympathy, showing how the father's cowardice and lack of tolerance drives his wife to return to her people, leaving her children behind. Mr. Woodlawn also relates the stringent nature of the class system in England through the story of his childhood.

The one thing I'm not quite sure on was Brink's stance on women's rights. She wrote Caddie in 1935-36 so women were in the workplace, had the right to vote, etc. but still had a bit to go. in the 1860s of Caddie's childhood, she was allowed to run and play with her brothers as a counter against the poor health that killed a younger sister; she can do just about everything her brothers can but her mother constantly pushes her to act like a proper young lady of the 1860s (like her elder sister Clara). In a scene near the end of the book Caddie's father comes to comfort her and talks of how women are meant to be good, and keep house, and tame the wild fathers and brothers (a bit like the "Angel in the House" Victorian concept, which wouldn't be off time-period-wise); I'm sure it was decently close to the real conversation between Caddie and her father. Caddie decides that she ought to start learning to help Mother....but Brink doesn't let us know how Caddie feels, truly. Caddie enjoys her first foray into ladyhood - learning to quilt - and seems to like being in the kitchen, too, but the book ends shortly after. I get the feeling that Caddie won't go over to the "accomplished" side like Cousin Annabelle, but I feel like Caddie's voice gets lost at this point in the book. There is a follow up volume, Caddie Woodlawn's Family, so I'll probably need to read that (which I've never done) to see where Caddie's life takes her, if the book extends that far.

The vocabulary list is quite long this time; I pulled words and phrases that I'm sure I didn't actually know as a second grader and inferred the meanings for myself:
inseparable, hassocks, "hot pitch", indignation, leisurely, disinherited, lofty, taverns, frail, "public houses", escapade, titters, smarting, inconsolable, disgrace, massacre, victuals, obscurity, insure, impassive, enthralled, remote, irksome, cowards/cowardice (cowardice is the actual word), pendulum, unfathomable, weariness, abolition, aristocrat, homesteads, sportsman (in the upper-crusty sense of shooting), wholesale, slaughter, haymow, smirk, reproaches, drenching, whippersnapper, "treading on air", trinket, darning, sulphur, gravely, pompously, wheedled, enterprise, daintier, challis, sedately, muffler, dassn't, sledge (I might have known this one), tumultuous, picallili (guaratee I didn't know what that was), soliloquize, titillate, muskrats, breeches, clogs, gimcracks, clambered, notions, guttural, tactful, bewilderment, proteges, capered, jostled, coaxed, arbutus, "accomplished", anticlimax, trilliums, hepaticas, impartial, wistful, churning, vicissitudes, apparition, cultivated, quaint, rustic, impish, fatigued, vivaciously, momentum, pandemonium, stupendous, distraught
(sorry for the paragraph - the list was way too long)

Next up in the Newbery reading is From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - who wouldn't want to run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Current book-in-progress: Wives and Daughters, Sexing the Cherry, The Palace of Illusions, The Liar, A History of God, Burnt Shadows
Current knitted item: Karma's poncho - one stripe repeat left
Current movie obsession: Ian McKellan's Richard III should be in the mailbox today
Current iTunes loop: Lost in a Good Book is in the car; have some yummy classical CDs winging their way to me from B&N

The Westing Game

Having taken a two-month break in my Newbery reading, I returned to the quest by inviting myself along on the mystery that is Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game. I had the store order in the Puffin Modern Classics edition because it's much prettier than the chess-piece designed mass market we carry in the store. I first read TWG in fifth-grade and I can honestly say that there is nothing in Raskin's narrative to explicitly place the novel in 1978 (the year it was published, incidentally, also my year of birth) and I'm pretty sure I initially placed the novel's setting as around 1990; it makes a very modern novel seem timeless because there are no specific pop culture references except to a few car models, the Packers (but only because the novel is set in Wisconsin), and the market Turtle plays only goes up or down 30 points or so a week rather than hundreds of points in a day.

On a re-read, this is still a very spell-binding book. I read it all this afternoon (only pausing to trade out the laundry) and finished in about two hours total; why I never asked for a copy of my own is beyond me because I remembered so many scenes from the book in exact detail (Angela's injuries after the bombing particularly). I must have checked this out from the library hundreds of times. The great power of the novel is that the reader has access to everyone's clues in the game, making us know more than everyone else, and Raskin expects the reader to figure out the answer before any of the characters. Which you never do - it takes Turtle to put everything together at the end of the book because she is the one who realizes what it missing. Also, being a young adult book, the narrator treats the reader like an adult, which is always nice when you're trying to act more like a grown-up; re-reading TWG as an adult I think that the level of writing and structure is quite similar to many literary novels in a simple way.

I still love Turtle; she is my favorite character (partly because she and I are so much alike, right down to the competition with the boys) followed closely by Chris and then Angela (but only about half-way through when she stops being a pansy and we find out her secret). I still hate Grace Wexler and wish she hadn't been so successful; at least she started working instead of decorating and "putting on airs" like royalty. I do confess that I remembered Turtle as considerably older than myself, nearly finished with high school and the same age as Doug and Theo, rather than only a year or two older than myself (perhaps this is because I was the youngest in my school class and always felt a year off birthday-wise from everyone).

Vocabulary Lesson:
bookie
facade
pyrotechnic
billiards
coroner (that would depend on how many crime shows are watched)
executor
audible
pyramidal tract
sporadic myositis
cunning
dastardly (which is loosely defined nearly 100 pages later)
autopsy
inscrutable
bigot
incriminating
elephantine
stoolie

One of my favorite bits occurs near the front of the novel:
"Who were these people, these specially selected tenants? They were mothers and fathers and children. A dressmaker, a secretary, an inventor, a doctor, a judge. And, oh yes, one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person." - page 5.

I am debating on whether to re-read A Wrinkle in Time since I last read it in 2007 in honor of L'Engle's passing; but in any case my next choice is Caddie Woodlawn.

"Stories are light" - The Tale of Despereaux

As I mentioned earlier, I decided to re-start my Newbery Project with The Tale of Despereaux: being the story of a mouse, a princess, some soup, and a spool of thread. The movie is due out December 19 and I wanted to read the book before seeing the film (which looks very cute, by the way).

This is a story that I'm pretty sure I would have read to shreds as a child because first, and foremost, Despereaux is a good story. A story is all that matters to a child because little minds don't actively search out form, style, genre, etc. like a grown-up one might. So this grown-up mind enjoyed Despereaux's story as much as she enjoyed the writer's style. I really did appreciate the "fourth-wall" asides that DiCamillo uses throughout the book, much like a Bronte or a Dickens, where she speaks directly to the reader. It makes the story seem far older than it really is and it follows more along the lines of a traditional fairy tale or morality story. DiCamillo also uses the asides to illustrate concepts she introduces in the story; she introduces "perfidy" and "forgiveness" as well as the translation of "adieu" so not only is a child getting a good story in Despereaux he/she is also getting a vocabulary lesson (and there are many, many more advanced words in this novel than the other two that I read, but they don't seem out of place).

The other thing that makes this novel so appealing is Despereaux himself. He is far too small, too naive, too brave, and too loyal for anyone not to love him.

Vocabulary (and I'm basing this on words I probably would not have known or not known the alternate meanings to in 4th grade):
obscenely/obscene
Furlough
Merlot (Despereaux's siblings have odd names)
dungeon
conform
indulge
elemental
tribunal
perfidy
assured
egregious
ignorant
gusto
renounce
repent
bellow
defiance (I might have known this one)
ominous
covert
adieu
Cripes
all-encompassing
beleaguered
empathy/empathetic
infringe
Chiaroscuro (I only learned this about 5 years ago, so I'm pretty sure I didn't know this one)
minstrel
capacious
torturous
clout (the hitting kind, not the reputation kind)
vicious
portentous
aspiration
diabolical
comeuppance
emphatic
consigned

(that's quite a few, isn't it?)

Random acts of life

In the last few weeks, I finished several books, watched almost no television, didn't knit anything, played a lot of Packrat, put together a porch swing, and contemplated revenge on a fellow RA. I've been busy.

I finished The Story of Mankind (1921) edition. I've got about 70 pages to read in the 1972 update and I peeked through the 1995 edition. None of the language has been updated nor have citations been added in any of the later editions, so there goes my hopes (I was really hoping for citations, at the very least, in the 1995 edition). I think if I had a child reading this there would be some supplemental reading and research going on especially if interest was sparked in a particular topic. It was just too much of a storybook and not so much a history book, in my opinion. Next up on the Newbery list is The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle, the 1923 winner. I've got an Illustrated Junior Library edition checked out from the Coralville Public Library so I'm ready to go. Here's a list of the vocabulary from the last half of The Story of Mankind:
sturgeon
cipher
serf (which is not defined nearly as well as it should be in the text)
thither
commodity
unscrupulous
parallelopiped
heresy/heresies
mulcted (which I had to look up because NONE of us had heard of it, ever)
Zwingli
abjured
predestination
remonstrance
timorous
Sinn Fein(er)
buncombe
demagogues
tercentenary
obdurate
bumptious
ambiguous
Putsch

I polished off The Host (finally) and was surprised that it took me nearly a month. Each of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books only took a couple of hours. I didn't read them, I inhaled them. However, with The Host I started seeing too many similarities with Twilight and that had me a little disturbed and worried that somehow Stephenie Meyer was a bit of a one-note. The Host does have an interesting premise - a sort of body-snatchers setting with a love triangle/quadrangle (depending on how you count souls and bodies) - but I stalled about 200 pages from the end due to a soccer game (there's a baseball game in Twilight). A slightly predictable ending (never intimate that the narrator is going to die in a first person narrative with nearly 20 pages left in the book) but I really appreciated how SM wrote the necessary exposition into the storyline of the book (i.e. Wanda's "stories") rather than devote pages and pages to it separately.

I also finished Songs for the Missing, an advance copy of the next Stewart O'Nan novel. Never having read O'Nan (Kat staff rec'd Last Night at the Lobster) I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Lurid? Simple? Absurd? Strangely enough, the situation seemed almost mundane, aside from an eighteen-year-old gone missing. It wasn't mundane as in "I'm so bored I can't finish this" but mundane like "this is LIFE, this is what happens when a child goes missing." Other readers compared Songs for the Missing to Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which is a phenomenal novel simply for the power of the author's descriptions. There are some parallels, but what was striking to me was that after Kim went missing in the first chapter that was it. No following her until she's grabbed, no struggle, or what the perpetrator did with the car; instead, we stay with the family and friends as they try to find her. The Lovely Bones, being a first-person narrative followed Susie's thoughts as she watched her family and that provided a completely different sense of the action. One thing I really noticed and appreciated throughout Songs for the Missing was the choice of third-person narrative; the narration wasn't truly omniscient and tended to follow one specific character for each chapter (Fran, Ed, Lindsay, JP, Nina). A very thoughtful novel about how time continues to push us forward even when something terrible happens. Eventually you have to go back to work, to school.

In other random life events, I bought a porch swing - yay, evenings on the porch, reading, napping, etc (must get more citronella to ward off the mosquitoes). It was a pain to assemble because apparently it was "requires two adults for assembly" - phoo on them. I did eventually get the assembly done all by my little self.

And we had an RA bugger off last week and not do what the boss told him to do before he left. So I had a panic and a cold sweat on Monday. Turns out he threw his project at a different (new) RA and left her to do the surveillance cultures instead of me, like the boss said he should. I was supposed to take everything over and then train the new RA. Luckily, the new RA is a lab person so figured out pretty quickly what the project was and got Monday and Tuesday finished before I found out that she was on the project. Whew, but the little bastard didn't mention several key things like how to order more product, how to use the spreadsheet on the shared drive so all of us can stay current on the surveillance, or that other units do surveillance, too, and so you should check the patient's records so we don't duplicate testing. FYI, this is the same little bastard I complained about several months ago (he was just up here talking to one of the secretaries - I guess he needs employment for the summer? I vote "no" and think we should just hire someone else who is responsible and doesn't act like the sun shines out his posterior). I've been thinking of very painful things and I hope he comes back in his next lifetime as a roach or something.

And the weather has been really, really crappy lately.

Current book-in-progress: Persuasion, The Gunseller, Lord of the Flies, The Spirit of the Place, ideas (only 270 pages left), The Shakespeare Wars (only 150 pages left) and The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle
Current knitted item: I've been a very lazy knitter....
Current movie obsession: Little Miss Sunshine (I haven't watched any TV/movies lately except for the news and weather (strange) so LMS is just sitting in my DVD player, ready to go)
Current iTunes loop: John Mayer "Any Given Tuesday" (concert album with a kick-ass riff in the middle of "Gravity")

"The Story of Mankind" - Chivalry

"The knights tried to model their own lives after the example of those heroes of Arthur's Round Table and Charlemagne's court of whom the Troubadours had told them and of whom you may read in many delightful books which are enumerated at the end of this volume. They hoped that they might proved as brave as Lancelot and as faithful as Roland" (p 160, van Loon 1922).

Aside from the vague use of "they" (does it refer to the knights or the troubadours?) van Loon does not stop to mention who Roland is or note that Arthur and Lancelot are mythic characters. It is entirely probable that a middle-school child in 1921/1922 might have been exposed to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights through a storybook but Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland)? The end of the chapter notes that Don Quixote de la Mancha was one of "the last true knights" (p 161) and, after his old sword and armor were sold, the sword somehow ended up in the hands of George Washington at Valley Forge (and also Gordon in the fortress at Khartoum). The chapter closes by stating "And I am not quite sure but that it proved of invaluable strength in winning the Great War" (p 161). That's a fairly large metaphorical leap to go from a fictional self-styled knight to General Washington to the Great War.

I've been reading ideas, too, and it's very interesting to compare the storytelling style of van Loon, with no citations to back up a statement, with that of a modern historian.

Vocabulary for the day:
superfluous
troubadour

Current book-in-progress: The Story of Mankind, The Host, and Songs for the Missing
Current knitted item: Gray neckwarmer
Current movie obsession: Little Miss Sunshine
Current iTunes loop: Sarah Brightman Harem

Newbery Vocabulary

Reading The Story of Mankind would certainly improve the average middle-schooler's vocabulary and spelling. For instance:

peregrinations
plutocracy
stevedores
prosaic
guerrilla warfare
alas and alack

Time to start a list!