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I just finished Lamplighter by D.M. Cornish. Very good, but I wish the third book were out already! I’m about to start Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins, sequel to The Hunger Games, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I have too many library books out right now, I need to stop browsing so much when we go, heh.

Zoe was here for a couple of days, then Rebecca left to go spend a couple of days at Zoe’s, so it’s quiet here. Goldy still hasn’t shown up. I don’t want to give up hope, but he’s never been away this long and I just feel sick when I think about him. I’m trying not to beat myself up for not trying harder to keep him in, I know he really wanted to be out, he’d been outside so long, being cooped up made him insane. Still, I wish he were here, curled up on his spot on the couch, where he would purr while I read a book or something.

I got a new mouse. There was all this drama over the mouse situation. I had this old cordless optical mouse that I’d had for ages and loved. One day I took it all apart and blew a bunch of dust and cat hair out of it, put it back together and within a couple of days it had all but stopped working. So I used another optical cordless mouse that we had and it looked almost the same, same brand, same size, just a different finish. Thing was a piece of crap and drove me insane, so I ordered a new one and it’s great, just like the old one except hot hot red. You’re thrilled, I know.

And I’ve been reading a lot lately! I’m always reading, but sometimes I get in a book-crazy mood and it’s like I’m 12 again, finishing books super fast and diving right into the next. I finished The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick and loved it all the way through. I also read Walt Whitman: Words For America, a children’s book written by Barbara Kerley and illustrated by Brian Selznick. Whitman has been one of my favorite poets for a long time and this was a sweet book about him, concentrating mostly on his work with wounded soldiers during the Civil War. Curently I’m reading The Lamplighter by D.M. Cornish, sequel to The Monster Blood Tattoo. I also started another book by Charles Bukowski, Portions From a Wine-stained Notebook (check me out reading a book written for ADULTS!). I’ve read three stories so far and they are great Bukowski pieces, all at once sad, or angry, funny, fierce, beautiful. I think I’ve reached my limit, though, and have too many books going at once.

Today I went grocery shopping and hung out with Ed. I was going to go to Target and the pet store tomorrow, but I think I might put it off a day and just completely vegetate tomorrow, alone all day (it’s Ed’s Monday).

I hate summer! Summer without a car sucks worse than winter without a car, blech. I’m amazed I haven’t been sunburned yet. Chalk that up to actually remembering to put on sunscreen before I leave the house (and, apparently, the sunscreens I bought actually work!).

What we’ve been doing lately: swimming. Well, Rebecca the Fish swims As Much As Possible, and I sit in the shade watching her, glaring at the neighbors, and reading. What else we’ve been doing is reading a lot, playing World of Warcraft, and writing letters. And waiting for Zoe to come home! Rebecca’s Very Very Best Friend, Zoe, has been in Arizona visiting her grandparents, for A WHOLE ENTIRE MONTH and the terrible lonely drama has been… a terrible lonely drama. She’s coming home in a few days, although Becca probably won’t see her until early next week.

I finished The Foundling, and while it wasn’t my favorite of the “kid” books I’ve been reading lately, I did like it and have requested Book 2 from the library. I started The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. I’m only a little into it, but so far I like it a lot and it’s just a lovely lovely book, with beautiful illustrations. It’s just an unusual book. Rebecca and I finished Akiko and the Journey to Toog by Mark Crilley and loved it as much as all the Akiko books. This has been one of our favorites series of books. Now we’ve started reading the Gregor series by Suzanne Collins. I’ve read the first three books, but I guess I’ll stop now, read those to Becca, and continue on together.

Let’s see, lately I’ve read Gregor and the Prophecy of the Bane and Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods. Love the series. And because I’m into books for kids these days, I also read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (loved it!) and started The Foundling by D.M. Cornish. I don’t know what it is about kid books lately. It’s possibly just a proximity thing. Rebecca and I usually go to the library once or twice a week (usually twice, really, sometimes just once). I pick up any holds, and do returns, maybe make a tour through the new books section and then sit down in the kids area and wait for Rebecca. She plays on the computer, picks out DVDs, finds a book to read, wanders around looking for a book to catch her eye, or she’ll hunt down something specific she wants. So I’m sitting there at the table and I’ll just see some book that looks cool and I end up bringing them home. But really, a good story is a good story, regardless of your age, right?

This book by Henrik Lange is really funny. It’s in comic book form, with one page covering most of the great books you can name. Heh. It’s silly and awesome.

I finished Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama by Tim Wise, and loved it. I read Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins (author of The Hunger Games) and started Gregor and the Prophecy of the Bane today. I am enjoying the series, and am really loving “youth” fiction in general this year. Also, it may be dorky, but I’ve been reading Classical Music for Dummies, and also have Opera for Dummies, both by David Pogue. I know some people don’t like the “dummies” books, but I’ve been pretty happy with all the ones I’ve read and these, so far, are pretty good. I like them as introductions to things I’m unsure about, so I can decide if I want to delve further into a subject or not, or just have a “dummy” exposure. I like the classical music book so far. I really just wanted to know a little more about terminology and maybe a little guidance for choosing music I might like.

I just finished reading, well, maybe a thorough skimming is more accurate, Unicorns Are Real: A Right-Brained Approach to Learning, by Barbara Meister Vitale. Ultimately, this wasn’t very useful to us because it’s basically filled with ways to teach right-brain kids, ways to help them learn to read and do math. I’m not all that interested in “teaching” Rebecca those things at this point, so we just don’t have a need for a book like this. However, if I were in the market, this book does have some pretty nifty ideas, little tricks and ideas to make learning easier, ways to overcome specific issues. There was one thing I thought was cool, addition of multiple digit numbers, like 45 + 97. Apparently right-brain kids can have trouble with the concept of carrying, so the trick is to add from left to right. There were several other ideas like that, but again, we just don’t need it and I think by the time we might, Rebecca will have outgrown the concepts. If we were not unschoolers, I bet this book would be gold for us.

I finished Operation Storm City, the last of the Guild of Specialists books, which I enjoyed very much. And I started another book by Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama, which is very good so far, I’m about 15 pages. I’m also reading Slouching Toward Nirvana by Charles Bukowski and it’s just fantastic. I’ve also been noodling with Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg. I read her book Writing Down the Bones, ages ago when it first came out, and have been a fan ever since. This new book is good, I like her writing prompts and her not-at-all-annoying pep talks.

I just finished The Hunger Games, which I loved, very exciting! I requested the second book. I screwed up and had a bunch of requested books come in at once, I had to return The Girl Who Played With Fire about 50 pages in, after I was on the waiting list for more than two months! Doh! It should have been the first book I read, but it got lost in my pile of library books and there it is, gone. Pfft. I finally got the third and final Guild of Specialists book, another damn waiting list, Operation Storm City, and you can bet I’m reading that right away. Rebecca and I are still deep in the Akiko books, but I’ve started hunting for what we’ll read next. We like series books like Akiko, we get attached to characters.

I’ve often thought genealogy is a privilege not afforded to people who are adopted. But I’m reading White Like Me by Tim Wise and he has this to say:

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.

I was interested in what he wrote about school desegregation.

It would be 1974, the year I began first grade, before busing [integration] would filter down to the elementary level. This means that the class of 1986, my graduation class, was the first that had been truly desegregated throughout its entire educational experience.

I was born the same year as Wise, 1968, a big year for tragedy in America, with the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. And it’s funny, but I never thought about my education as having been shaped by the civil rights movement. Starting in third grade, I was bused to a school waaaay across town from my home. Although my family was never rich, we were white and always lived in quiet, clean, white neighborhoods. Instead of going to the elementary school down the street, I was bused to a much different sort of neighborhood, where the people were poorer and darker-skinned. The stupid part is that I was also part of the GATE program, and, basically, a bunch of rich and middle class “smart” white kids were bused to a poor neighborhood with mostly black and hispanic families, but we were pretty much isolated from the other kids in the school anyway. Our teachers were also transplanted, they were “smart” teachers brought in special for the “smart” kids. There may have been one or two kids in our class that actually lived in that neighborhood, but maybe not, it might have just been us bused kids. And of the whole class, maybe 3 or 4 were not white. We had our classes together and the only time we saw the “other” kids was at lunch and at recess, but we never mingled with them. And we obviously had a more interesting education going on, we did all sorts of cool things that the other classes did not. We did this project where we created a civilization and then made “artifacts” that were supposed to tell about our society. We then buried the artifacts in the sand outside, and the other “smart” class dug them up and tried to figure us out, and vice-versa. It was pretty fun and I’m pretty sure only our classes were doing special projects like that. So we got bused out there to that school, but we were far from “integrated.”