book report IX

Trying to catch up with my rising stack of read books! (Sadly, it's not rising as fast as the to-be-read stack ... must read more.)

Recently finished:

The Portable Coleridge. I love Coleridge. So dark, so gloomy, such rich details. I'm not sure he makes the best bedside reading! As a side note, my mother used to call me her "friendly albatross", after the bird from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which you should read. Really. Even if you read it in high school.). Which always made me wonder whether she completely misread the poem ... or if I should be really insulted.

The Atlas of Languages. A glossy, much-illustrated overview of the world's language families. It had quite a few problems. For one thing, many of the illustrations were placed on the wrong page, so you would read a picture's caption which had nothing to do with the text, then read the same thing in the text on the next page. (So not only were the illustrations misplaced, the captions were the same as the text, which is pretty lazy.) It also suffered from the "too much information to deliver" difficulty. It was often hard to follow, trying to fill in too many gaps at once. Not a keeper.

Uncle Wiggily and the Sugar Cookie. By Howard Garis. I rescued this from my mom's house, as it really stuck in my head over the years. It's a hardcover oversized children's book, and the images are hard to forget. I read this one to the kids—I think Greyson found it hard to follow (I know the other two weren't listening!). But I'll hang onto it in hopes they enjoy it later.

A Little House of Their Own. Some intelligent person at Harper came up with the idea, about 10 years ago now, I think, of writing series based on the lives of Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Mostly, they're pretty good. Not as good as the original Little House books, but those are great works of literature. Hard to live up to. This one was the end book in the series on Caroline Quiner Ingalls (L.I.W.'s mother, for those of you who don't know). As she and Charles Ingalls, as drawn by their daughter, were very intelligent, very interesting people, the book left me wondering what more was left out—how it was that a conservative, quiet, bookish young woman who wanted to live her life in one place and a restless, active man with a terminal case of wanderlust came together and lived what appears to have been a pretty happy life together.

And A Little House Reader. A collection of L.I.W.'s writings over the years. Most of which I had read in other places, but it was nice to have them collected. She was a woman of strong opinions with the writing skill to express them well.