“It may interest you gentlemen to know”

by Carol13 Comments
"It may interest you gentlemen to know," said Foley, speaking with the ponderous dignity of one who is trying to conceal his emotions, "that the object of her affections, the man who has supplanted me in her life, is none other than the gentleman who lived next door—our esteemed contemporary, Mr. Arthur Cartright, the man who made all of the hullabaloo about the howling dog, in order to get me before the police authorities, so that he could carry out his scheme of running away with my wife." Perry Mason said in an undertone to Pemberton: "Well, that shows the man isn't crazy; he's crazy like a fox." (pg. 44, The Case of the Howling Dog by Erle Stanley Gardner) I actually wasn't planning on reading this one yet, but when I finished Bayou Vol 1 by Jeremy Love last night while waiting for Amber to be done with her piano lesson, this was the only other book I had in my...
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Nobody Has Time for Me by Vladimr Skutina

by Carol2 Comments
Nobody Has Time for Me by Vladimír Škutina, illustrated by Marie-José Sacré, translated by Dagmar Herrmann (Suggested reading level: Kindergarten- Grade 2) Skutina called his story a modern fairy tale, a comment on our hurried lives. Karin is a sad little girl. No one in her family has time to play with her or talk to her. So she heads out into the snowy late afternoon to find Time on her own, sure he must live in the clock tower. She bravely enters the tower through the heavy wooden doors and climbs the old winding stairway. At the top she meets Father Time, actually the clockmaker, who explains that while time never stops, people can make time. When she hurries home right at curfew, her parents ask where she's been and she responds, "In a fairy tale." When Karin was almost ready for bed, her parents asked to hear the fairy tale. "It's about Time," Karin said, "and I'll tell you ... if you...
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National Punctuation Day

by Carol17 Comments
Celebrate! It's National Punctuation Day! Yes I'm a geek, and yes I have a favorite: the semi-colon. I was always afraid of them until recently, never knowing how to use them so just avoiding it altogether. After all, it's not a necessary punctuation, like a question mark or a period, but I've come to love it. It's a wink of a break, a stop but not a full-out period. Amber and I were discussing National Punctuation Day at dinner yesterday and I mentioned that the semi-colon was my favorite, and she tried to make me pick another. The semi-colon actually happens to be her favorite too. She likes the way "semi-colon" sounds apparently. “Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semi-colon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment,...
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Ice Road by Joan Lennon

by Carol5 Comments
Ice Road by Joan Lennon (Suggested reading level: Grades 4-6) Last time we visited medieval England and the Wickit Monastery in Fen Gold (below) it was summer, but now winter has come to the Fens with a vengeance, the harshest winter anyone can remember. While everyone in the monastery is sick and confined to bed except young Pip, Perfect the dragon gargoyle, and Brother John, not normally the most relied on monk. "And you know," and Brother John leaned close and lowered his voice, as if about to tell [Pip] a deep dark secret, "you don't need to worry so much, because it's really astonishing how much a silly person can achieve if he has to." Then he nodded sagely a few times and even tried to wink. (pg. 78) And Pip has to leave Brother John alone at the monastery tending to all the sick. The winter has transformed the vast waterways of the Fens to a solid Ice Road, a situation King...
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Fen Gold by Joan Lennon

by Carol6 Comments
Fen Gold by Joan Lennon (Suggested reading level: Grades 4-6) This is Pip and Perfect's second adventure, following Ely Plot. Pip is a young orphaned boy who lives at Wicket Monastery deep in the fens of medieval England. Perfect, his companion, is a small, talking, swimming, flying dragon gargoyle, and they make a great pair, lively, adventurous true friends. It's a sweltering summer when two strangers arrive at the monastery in need of medical help. The first is a man from the King's court, the second is older Norseman who is accompanied by two brawny young men and a girl, the Lady Rane. The Lady Rane was different: exotic, unlikely, a breath of fresh air, wild like the open sea ... golden. In their minds, the Brothers looked for the right words, and often found, instead, memories of things long forgotten, from childhood, or stories of faraway places that had stirred them once, emotions and dreams from the time before the habit of Wickit...
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