Since I finally cracked it open about a week ago, we’ve listened to the entire book at least four times.  Every single trip in the car means another installment of The Secret Garden.  Sam can’t get enough, and that’s fine with me, because I love it too!  We’ve also read parts of the book out loud to her, but she is less interested that way.  I’m sure that will change, though.  I have a feeling that The Secret Garden is going to be one of those special things that both Sam and I remember as an integral part of her childhood, just like Little Bear has been (and still is!).

I’m not even sure why I bought this particular book.  I had some vague recollection that it was a classic, but after hearing the story, I don’t remember it from my own childhood.  Maybe I did read it, but it didn’t stick with me into adulthood.  But I’m so glad that I did pick it up.  It’s a wonderful story, and it’s just the right level for Sam right now – a bit of a stretch, but comprehensible to her.

Today I was catching up on the VanDamme Academy video blogs (have you been watching? you should be) and came across this one, in which Ms. VanDamme actually uses The Secret Garden (as well as Burnett’s other classic, A Little Princess) as an example of a children’s book with “good, rich, thematic material.”  So maybe I picked up the book on a half-remembered recommendation from Ms. VanDamme or someone else in the little Objectivist educators’ world.

Whatever – I have a new world of books for Sam now.  Amazon.com says that A Little Princess is for reading level ages 9-12.  I suspect that there are many wonderful books for that age that Sam could appreciate.  Audiobooks are a good thing.

Psychologically, I’m still in great need of fiction.  Any non-fiction seems like a chore (except my Italy guidebooks).  I am in the middle of Objectively Speaking, a collection of Ayn Rand interviews, but I’m having to force myself through it.  I’m finding that there’s not much new there for me.  I’ve been stuck for weeks in the middle section which is a series of college-radio station interviews.  The questions are intelligent but they feel planted, and Ayn Rand’s responses don’t feel extemporaneous.  This might be over-editing, but I suspect it was the nature of the interviews themselves.  Since I already know Rand’s positions on most of the issues, what I’m really looking for in this book are those flashes of brilliance – no, not flashes, but the consistent brilliance that she shows in her off-the-cuff remarks.  Hopefully I’ll get that in the third and final section.

From the book swap at my gym, I picked up Agatha Christie’s Funerals Are Fatal, which I found to be a complete waste of time.  I don’t know why I keep going back to Agatha Christie, but hopefully now that I’ve actually written this down, I’ll remember how much I dislike these kinds of mysteries and stop picking them up.

I’ve read two more Dick Francis books from the stack my friend loaned to me.  I was bored with To the Hilt, but I loved Risk.  I continue to be amazed by Francis’ ability to create unique, but always admirable heroes.  I’m sure that eventually I’ll start getting all of his characters and plots mixed up, but for now, each book still stands in my mind as a unique experience.

Through my online book club, I discovered a new author that I love:  Elizabeth Peters.  I read the first book in her Amelia Peabody series, Crocodile on the Sandbank.  It was a benevolent, intelligent adventure mystery with the most interesting, admirable characters!  Rational Jenn has a nice post about the series and I agree with her completely.  I’m excited to have a huge new list of fiction books to read now that I’ve discovered this gem.

I just finished Enchantment, by Orson Scott Card.  Leonard Peikoff recommended it on his podcast and I’ve loved his picks in the past (especially sci-fi author Frederic Brown).  I also dearly love Card’s Ender’s Game, but I thought Enchantment was a bore.  I’m not a big fan of fantasy fiction, and this was too wildly impossible and irrelevant to the real world for me to find much of interest in it.  I also thought it was very anti-technology, the characters were average people moved by fate, and the plot was not very exciting.  That was a big disappointment.  I wonder if I missed something.

I saved the best for last, so if you’ve stuck with me so far, you get the prize.  Go read Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day right now!  Aside from Anthem, this is the best dystopian novel I’ve ever read.  This book has a real hero who moves the plot by his choices and actions, the plot is full of twists and turns that I never expected, and it has some great themes.  I haven’t figured out the overall theme of this book yet, but it’s rich enough that I know I’ll read it again.  In fact, I almost want to read it again right now.  It was that great.

I’m still (somewhat) determined to keep going with my Great Books project.  I’m stuck on Augustine, though.  I think I’ll have to modify my plan to allow me to skip things that are just too painful for me to read, or I’ll never make it through.  So that is on the near-future agenda, along with tons of other exciting books.  They are all lined up on a bookshelf in my bedroom, waiting for me.  I love that.

I’m a bit ashamed to say that I didn’t start discriminating about the content of what Sam read until fairly recently.  When she was a baby, it was just words, voice, and pictures, so I chose books based on whether they had pictures I thought she could perceive as related to real-life objects.  I also chose books based on whether they were the right length and whether they had the right amount of words on the page – too many and she would lose interest, too few and the page-turning would become distracting and chaotic.

I think this was a good set of criteria for book-choosing up until Sam was verbal. But at that point, I should have thought more carefully about what she read.  Looking back, I think in her early verbal stages (18 to 30 months old or so) I would have looked for a few things:

• Books with words on one page and a picture on the opposite page.  About 6 months ago (when Sam was 3.5), she expressed confusion about how there were “two Cliffords.”  There was a picture of Clifford (the Big Red Dog) on the left page and on the right page, and she thought there were two Cliffords!  She didn’t understand the temporal advance from left-to-right.  I was surprised that she had never figured that out.  Of course, she learned it (we focused on that for a while), but I would have isolated the skill of matching one set of words with one picture early on if I had thought about it.  (I strongly agree with the Montessori principle of isolating the difficulty, but it is a huge challenge to do it properly. Scroll down to “I” in this glossary of Montessori terms to learn about isolation of difficulty.)
• Books with a story-progression.  The purpose of fiction books is to tell stories.  Pre-verbal children obviously follow stories.  By the time they are verbal, they need to be challenged with more and more complex stories.  I think this is good preparation for literature (it is early literature!) and also a way of focusing and ordering the mind.  There are so many children’s books (obviously targeted to toddlers and pre-schoolers) that just have no story whatsoever.  There’s nothing wrong with those books – some have great language or pictures or are just fun.  My second favorite book (listed below) doesn’t have a real plot.  But if I could do it over, I would have limited them and focused more on stories.  I think we did pretty well by default, though, since we all like stories so much.
• Books with more real-life characters and less fantasy and nonsense.  I wish we hadn’t read quite so many Dr. Seuss books to Sam.  Adam and I had purchased a bunch of them for ourselves before Sam was born because we like them as adults.  I don’t think they are entirely worthless, but they are full of nonsense words, nonsense characters, and nonsense “stories.”  They’re probably appropriate later, as silly fun, when the child has a firmer grasp of reality versus fantasy.  But it’s not just Dr. Suess (though he is probably the worst offender).  Why are children’s books so full of senselessness and fantasy – and even animal characters?  I laughed with derision when I heard that some Montessori teachers recommend no books with talking animal characters at all, but now I’m not so dismissive of it.  Again, I don’t think I’d eliminate all of those kinds of books (it would be so limiting!), but I’d certainly be on the lookout for real people in real situations as much as possible.
• Poems.  We did read a lot of Mother Goose when Sam was about 18-24 months old.  She loved them, but maybe I would have differentiated poems from stories for her by only reading poems at a certain time of day or something like that.  We read her some more advanced children’s poems now, along with adult poems that seem intelligible to her.

Now that Sam is four, we’re looking for books with all of the above characteristics (except the word/picture issue), plus we are more concerned with the themes and messages. We recently got rid of one book that was explicitly altruistic and one that was pure subjectivism and egalitarianism in a sickly sweet, moralistic way.  Those pedantic books with conventional values are out.  But we have no problems with books with themes like “loyalty” or even “cooperation,” even though those are not on our list of top virtues and values.  If a book shows that loyalty is good when it is loyalty to one’s own (objective, not subjective) values in the face of pressure from others – that’s a good theme.  When a book shows that a child who cooperates with others has more success than a bully – that’s a good theme.  And “show, don’t tell” applies here.  Overly pedantic books are irritating.  The theme must be part of the plot, just as in adult fiction.

We also like books with more advanced vocabulary or interesting language, but it’s hard to get all of that in one package.  This is lower on the priority list for now, but I think it will become more important later.

Here is a partial list of some favorite age-appropriate books on Samantha’s shelf right now.  Not all of these meet all the above criteria, but each has at least one special thing about it:

• Brave Irene, by William Steig
• The Napping House, by Audrey and Don Wood
• The Wishing of Biddy Malone, by Joy Cowley (best book ever!)
• Rickki Tikki Tavi, by Rudyard Kipling and Jerry Pinkney
• Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton
• The Rusty Trusty Tractor by Joy Cowley
• The Fancy Nancy series, by Jane O’Connor
• Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak
• Buford the Little Bighorn, by Bill Peet
• Adios Oscar, by Peter Elwell
• All the Places to Love, by Patricia Maclachlan (second best book ever!)
• Dr. DeSoto, by William Steig
• The Story of Ferdinand, by Munro Leaf

Void Moon, Echo Park, and The Brass Verdict, all by Michael Connelly.  As I’ve mentioned before, I really like Michael Connelly’s detective fiction.  I didn’t like The Brass Verdict, though.  The hero was not heroic and I found the plot a bit contrived.  It wasn’t awful, but it was a disappointment.  Echo Park was good, but dark like some of his others (especially The Poet).  Void Moon was excellent.  It was told from the perspective of a criminal, but Connelly makes her likeable enough to make you root for her, even while you are not necessarily rooting for her to pull off her crime.  He did it by means of both characterization and plot, or at least situation.  I thought it was ingenious!  It had a good story and some other elements I liked a lot.  I might even read this one again some day, and that’s saying something for this kind of book.

Raising Your Spirited Child, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka.  I’ve been hearing about this book for years, but never read it because I never considered Samantha to be unusually “spirited.”  But, I figured, it might be worth a look.  A look is about all I gave it – I mostly skimmed it.  I don’t think it’s a bad book, but I just found nothing in it that applied to my daughter, or that I didn’t already know.  I guess one thing I learned is that I was right that Samantha’s temperament is pretty average.  She didn’t fit into any of the categories in the book, and in many cases, she had such a mixed set of traits within the category that pegging her down was impossible.  For example, she does not stick with difficult tasks, but she has a really long attention span – these are contradictory elements within the “persistent” temperament.  Is she the persistent type, then?  My answer was “no” to that one, and all the others were similar.  It’s possible things will change when she is older, though, and I would consider reading this book again.

The Great Bridge, by David McCullough.  (Wow, two non-fiction books in a row!)  McCullough is the author of the hugely popular, recent biography of John Adams and other well-respected books.  Adam has been reading this one, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, out loud to me for at least four months.  We are about 50 pages from the end, but I can safely say now that this is a wonderful book.  It reads like a work of fiction, with heroes and villains and even a bit of a climax and resolution (I think).  This book is not good as a straight history; if so, McCullough would need to essentialize more than he does.  But the amount of detail that he includes is what makes it read like a story, with virtual characterization and plot.  Sometimes it is actually too much detail for me, but Adam can’t get enough.  (He tends towards empiricism while I tend towards rationalism, so he is much more comfortable in an ocean of facts than I am.)

McCullough’s translation of facts to story is amazing.  The example that comes to my mind occurs when McCullough was describing the dedication of the bridge builder’s wife.  When the builder became ill and couldn’t write, McCullough tells us how she had to transcribe his dictation onto paper as instructions for building the bridge.  There were massive amounts of these instructions.  The author tells us how she would get so weary that she would forget to sharpen her pencil.  Or maybe the point was that the builder would dictate in such a frenzy that his wife didn’t have time to stop and sharpen her pencil – I don’t recall exactly.  What I do remember is that when I read that, I thought, “how in the world could the author know that, about sharpening the pencil?” and I realized that he must have copies of those transcriptions, and that he must have noted the thicker lines of her writing.  Whatever the implication he drew, I was amazed at that detail that he must have noticed and then considered to write that passage.  The book is full of great things like that.

McCullough also seems to have a great respect for the achievement of the men who built the bridge.  That’s me reading between the lines, but I think it’s there.  I haven’t yet read any of McCullough’s other books but I definitely will now that I’ve tasted his storytelling ability.

The Long Lavender Look and Cinnamon Skin, both by John D. MacDonald.  I’m getting a bit tired of this author.  He has some good plots but the cynicism I noted before is starting to turn me off.  I’ll try at least one more before I give up on him since he has other good qualities.  I don’t recall either of these two books very well; neither made a huge impression.

I tried to read Fletch, by Gregory Mcdonald on the recommendation of a friend, but I couldn’t stand the glib, supposedly witty banter, and gave it up in less than 30 pages.

Straight, In the Frame, and Dead Cert, all by Dick Francis.  I continue to love Dick Francis.  His characters are so admirable and his stories are always interesting.  I actually liked Straight, a more (most?) recent one, the best of all I’ve read so far.  Usually, the quality of an author’s writing deteriorates over time, especially when the author is as prolific as Dick Francis.  But I heard or read somewhere that Francis’ son collaborated with him towards the end of his career, and that might account for my love of Straight.  Or, maybe Dick Francis just remained good up until the end.  I only learned last month that he died earlier this year.  Too bad.

The Targetby Catherine Coulter.  Oh my god, this book was so bad.  I picked it up from the library at my gym.  I should have put it down by page 30, but it tricked me by starting off ok and getting worse and worse.  Seriously, I can’t believe this book was published.  I was constantly confused about who was talking during the dialog, or whether characters had entered or left scenes, and that’s just the technical details.  The story was obvious and trite and corny and the dialog was embarrassing.  When I was telling Adam about how bad it was, he said, “Why do you waste your life reading books like that?  You should have stopped as soon as you hated it.”  I said, “I know.”  But then I went on and kept telling him about how awful it was.  He interrupted and said, “Stop telling me about it right now.  Now you’re wasting my life with a bad book.  Your punishment for reading it is never getting the satisfaction of venting to me about it!”  I thought that was hilarious.  But I guess Adam forgot I have a blog and I can vent to anyone and everyone as much as I want, so there!

Getting Through to People, by Jesse S. Nirenberg.  I accidentally bought two copies of this book because, quite some months apart (which is longer than my memory works) it was recommended by Jean Moroney and then by Dr. Ellen Kenner.  Those are some good creds!  However, I liked this book, but I didn’t love it.  I’m looking for help with assertiveness, and this book was more focused on persuasion and breaking through others’ barriers to listening.  Most of it was really worthwhile stuff but it just wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.  I’m looking forward to reading Asserting Yourself, by Sharon and Gordon Bower, another recommendation from Ellen Kenner, to see if it is what I’m looking for.

The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.  I suppose I’m the last person in the world to have heard of this book.  Was there a movie, too?  I had never heard of it but I picked it up at the gym.  Despite my trepidation about a story set in Afghanistan and a weak ending, I really enjoyed it.  I loved the main character’s father, even though I’m not so sure that was what the author intended.  (As with most modern fiction, all the characters were mixed.)  But, really, I just enjoyed the story of redemption.  It was the book version of a good chick-flick – very emotionally charged.  When it is well done, as this book is, that can be a really good thing.

It’s really not such a mystery – it’s just the pain of setting up a new system, and I know it will be well worth it.  Also, as I’ve been freeing up my mind by offloading things into a better system, I’ve thought of many more new projects that I want to take on, and just getting them all down has been a challenge!  I plan to write more about what I’ve done and why when I’m more settled with it, but I’ll give you a few teasers.

First, I already had a really good system for staying on top of the gazillion Little Things that need to get done in my life on a daily basis.  I had a fairly clean “in and out” system, a calendar, a task list, and project lists for big things like all the home improvement plans we have.  I looked at my calendar and task list daily, and they helped me remember to pay the bills, return the library books, and even to write blog posts.  I recently added my Droid phone to the system, which has allowed me to be truly mobile with these tools.  I had to manually sync my Palm Pilot, which was a real hassle when you are adding literally a dozen or more items to your lists each day, sometimes while at home and sometimes not.  The Droid syncs up automatically and continually.  Plus, it has a handy voice recorder for those 1001 ideas I get while driving and walking the dog each day.

What I’ve learned so far from GTD is that:

1.  I absolutely must get my filing system in order.  I still have not filed a single piece of paper in over 2 years, since we moved from Michigan.  I have stacks and stacks of paper, my passport and birth certificate are missing, and when I do need to find something I have a panic attack.

2.  I’ve been using my task list improperly by setting dates for my tasks.  I need to have clear boundaries about which tasks are day/time sensitive (these go on the calendar) and which are just things I need to get to as soon as possible (these go on the “next actions” or “to do” list.)

3.  I need to get more clear on what the next action is for any particular task or project, so that when I come across something on my list, I don’t have to rethink the whole project to figure out what to do, but just look and start moving.  For example, I’ve had “filing” on my task list for 2 years, and every single day I postpone it.  It has been adding enormous stress to my life, and yet I can’t seem to move on it.  But “filing” is not a task.  I have to buy the supplies first, then figure out a place to work, then move everything to that place, etc. etc.  It is an enormous project and I have to treat it as such.  I’m actually not too bad in this regard – most of my “tasks” are actionable items, but there are a few that I’ve allowed to remain fuzzy in my mind for too long.

So, while I’m in this transition period, blogging might be light.  I wish I could rattle off a “what I’ve been doing lately” post like Rational Jenn is able to do with such humor and interest.  There’s been a lot of fun stuff going on here at Casa Mossoff, but finding a way to make it interesting to anyone but me takes more effort than I have available right now.