What we're reading now

Faith has read All-of-a-Kind Family since my last bibliographical update and will soon be finished with Betsy-Tacy and Tib. Eric has been working his way through the suggested books in the back of his reading text: Have You Seen My Cat?, Look What I Can Do, I Love You, Dear Dragon, Blue Sea, Hop on Pop, Inside Outside Upside Down, Green Eggs and Ham, Go, Dog, Go!, The Carrot Seed, Whose Mouse Are You?, Home for a Bunny, Who Took the Farmer's Hat?, and A Kiss for Little Bear. (I have very warm memories of Faith first reading Home for a Bunny; she sounded so cute saying, "A ... home ... for ... a ... bunny ... A ... home ... of ... his ... own.") The next books in the list are Henry and Mudge, Nate the Great, and the first Magic Tree House book, but the complexity of those stories is a bit much for a four-year-old so we're digressing into some other beginner books before getting back to the more school-age books. Right now, we're starting the stories in this book, which I liked when I was little. It's sadly out of print, and the stories in it don't seem to be available elsewhere so when my ancient copy gives out, that'll be it for "Tony and His Friends," "Too Many Bozos," and "Come On, Play Ball."

As for me, I'm still working my way through a backlog of magazines. I recently read an interesting behind-the-scenes-of-the-Deepwater-Horizon in Fortune that reminded me of the old disaster stories I used to read in 1980's-era Reader's Digests, of the ilk that told you Joe Doomed was eating breakfast and Vivaca Victim was driving to work at the exact moment two storm fronts were meeting 50 miles to the northwest. I always enjoyed trying to divine who was going to live and who was going to die from the way they wrote the story. The giveaway was if they told you what someone was thinking, as there was no way to find out what someone had been thinking if they had in fact died in the disaster. It's cheating of the deepest kind to make up what someone might have been thinking; some of the later stories did this, as I recall, and met with my disgust. Don't claim to be nonfiction and then make stuff up.