Finished reading: The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan 📚
Finished up this series with the kiddo. On to the next!
Posts in "Notes"
Finished reading: Mythos by Stephen Fry 📚🎧
It’s just delightful to hear Stephen Fry read this aloud.
Thanks for the kind birthday wishes, everybody!
I was born 45 years ago today. I’m still here. I’m doing a pretty good job sticking around.
Finished reading: Her Night with the Duke by Diana Quincy 📚
There’s so much to love here. Leela is an amazing heroine fighting to build a writing career in a society that tries to block her at every turn. Her interactions with her Arab family made me curious about my own Levantine relatives, who came to the US in 1902.
🔖📚💬 Read Why “Book-Shaming” Won’t Solve the Children’s Literacy Crisis by Jessica Winter (The New Yorker).
It’s impossible to quantify all that is lost when schools lose librarians. But one place where their guidance and expertise can be pivotal relates to the phenomenon often called the “fourth-grade slump” or “decline by nine,” which refers to the steep drop-off in both reading interest and reading frequency that many children, especially boys, exhibit around age nine. Avoiding this cliff is more likely with the help of a librarian who understands her students’ likes and dislikes, who respects their autonomy and individuality, and who can use this knowledge to guide kids toward the texts they will love, regardless of whether or not they meet a subjective threshold of literary excellence.
🔖📝 Read Will Doing “Morning Pages” for 30 Days Make Me More Creative? by Grace Abbott (The Good Trade).
I love Abbott’s recommendation to follow your energy rather than holding to a rigid externally-imposed structure.
Hanging onto this roundup of the best recent poetry from The Guardian in anticipation of participating in the sealey challenge in August. 📚
💬📚 “The examples of alba amicorum, zibaldoni, Stammbücher and today’s bullet journals show that sometimes we just start writing in notebooks because it’s something the neighbors do.” Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper