Armchair BEA ~ agenda for 2011

Armchair BEA (May 23-27) is for bloggers who are not attending BEA in New York that week.  Here's the agenda for those of us blogging from home (see the fuller version at Armchair BEA Central):

Monday, May 23 — Who are you, and how do you Armchair?

Introduce yourself to any new visitors, including a bit about how you’re doing Armchair BEA — where you are, what you’re excited about, what you hope will happen this week.  (My post)

Tuesday, May 24 — Best of 2011

Share some of your favorite books so far this year.  (My post)

Wednesday, May 25 — Work the Network

Write a post highlighting some of your favorite book blogs and bloggers.  (My post)

Thursday, May 26 — Nurturing Relationships

Post about a relationship you've formed with a particular publisher, author, blogger, or bookstore; share thoughts and tips about connecting and building those relationships.  (My post)

Friday, May 27 — Blogging about Blogging

How do you keep your blog fresh and interesting to your readers and yourself?  (My post)

Day by day, I'll link my own posts back here, as each appears on this blog.

Cat image on a cat ~ Caturday

This is unbelievable, but I believe it.  Is it a black cat, or a white cat, or a b/w cat, or a walking billboard?  I don't know, but I like it.






Kiki Cat, signing off

Friday Five ~ words

This Friday Five comes from Jan at RevGalBlogPals:

Write about five words you really like. Please explain why you have chosen each word.

Perfect!  I'm a word person.  I even have a separate word blog just for collecting interesting words.  Here are five words that come to mind today, though the list could easily change, if you ask me tomorrow.  Without further ado, my five words:

1 — JOY

I presented a paper on "Joy or Despair?" at the Southeastern Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, the one held at Emory University back in the early 1970s.  I asked why existentialists seemed to focus on despair (Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus come to mind).  If, as they say, we find our own meaning in life, why not choose joy?

One of my favorite phrases from the Bible is "make a joyful noise," so when I started a church newsletter, I named it Joyful Noiseletter.

I was so "into" the meaning of joy during my undergraduate years that my best friend addressed my mail to "Bonnie Joy Jacobs."

When my bank got its first teller machine, telling us to choose four letters or numbers to access it, I considered using B-J-O-Y.  My young daughter said, "But Mom, anybody could figure out that's what you would pick."

2 — MELLIFLUOUS

I like the sound of this word, which is a bit of irony, since the word is about things that are "pleasing to the ear."  This mellifluous mountain stream is currently set as my desktop background.  It's the best illustration of the word, to my way of thinking.  Using the word in another context, I prefer to listen to mellifluous speakers.

3 — QUOTIDIAN

Quotidian is all that everyday stuff I have to do.  The daily drudge work.  The laundry, the dishes, the dusting, the cleaning.  That's the not-fun stuff we all must do.  I may not enjoy the work, but I do like quirky Q words.  And I like the little book Kathleen Norris wrote about The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and Women's Work.  Doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning may seem like dreary domestic rituals to be gotten out of the way. But when we undertake them in a spirit of contemplation, while considering the enormous life-giving importance of feeding and clothing our families, these things can become acts of love that transform us.

4 — EXUBERANT

At the top of my blog about words, I have these words:

"an exuberant newsletter to myself about joyful things, like words, which I enjoy."

One of the first words I wrote about, of course, was exuberant, whose definitions manage to include words like enthusiasm, joy, and vitality.

5 — IN

When asked to name four places I have been, I came up with this list:

1. in hot water
2. in love
3. indisposed
4. in the know

The woman drawn on that ceramic bathtub (Saul Steinberg, 1949) is actually IN hot water, but not the way we usually mean that phrase.  IN is such a tiny little word.  So simple.  Yet it manages to do all sorts of stuff.  I made a list of ways we use the IN word, here.

EXTRA CREDIT:

How many times can you find JOY in this post?  (Don't forget to count this one!)


If you'd like to play Friday Five with me, leave your name in the comments below, along with a link to the post where you write about five words and explain why you have chosen each one.

Beginning ~ with an enigma

Please Look After Mom ~ by Kyung-sook Shin, 2011, fiction (South Korea)

"It's been one week since Mom went missing."

This sentence drew me in.  I would be frantic if my own mother had been missing a whole day, much less a week.  As a matter of fact, we WERE frantic when Mother "went missing" in the mid-1990s.  I was many hours from home when my sister decided Mom, who lived with me, didn't really have Alzheimer's and was "just being ornery."  She had kept mother for over a month while I was fulfilling my residency requirements that summer at the Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey.  I would be arriving home on Sunday evening, after stopping along the way to visit my seminary friend Nancy in Pennsylvania.

On Saturday evening, however, I found out that Mother was home alone.  I made several phone calls, trying to take care of her long distance.  On Sunday morning, she didn't answer the phone.  I didn't visit Nancy's church and hear her preach, but instead, set out for home, "flying low" on the Interstate, worrying about Mom.  When I crossed from Pennsylvania into West Virginia, I pulled off the Interstate to grab lunch and to call home.  That was before I had a cell phone, but there would have been huge gaps in coverage between cities, anyway.  I was frantic about Mother and angry at my sister for not taking care of her for one more day.  Where was she now?  What had happened?

When I called home, my brother answered, saying Mother was missing.  It didn't occur to me until I was back on the road and speeding south again to wonder how my brother had gotten into my house if Mother wasn't there to let him in.  I learned later that he, also unable to reach Mother by phone, had driven across town ready to break into my house, if necessary.  Instead, he found the front door unlocked.  It turned out that he was one of about six people who had offered to take Mother to church with them, but she had gone with the ones who offered to take her to breakfast, since they showed up first, naturally.  She had apparently forgotten about all the others.

One of my daughters had left her husband at home to tend to their children and was rushing to my house to help in the search, when it occurred to her that perhaps grandmother was at the church on Signal Mountain, where I was the pastor, even though it was not close to the house.  My daughter called home and her husband found the phone number, diverting my daughter to that church where — yes! — Mother was found.  Mom's plaintive question:  "The police are looking for me?  What have I done?"

People from several churches had joined in the search for Mom.  My brother had gone door to door in my neighborhood, asking if anyone had seen her.  She was not missing for a full day, but long enough for me to relate to the family in this book, searching for their Mom in Seoul, South Korea.

===========================================================

a real-life

MISSING MOM

When I clicked the last button on Thursday evening to schedule this Book Beginnings to post itself at 5:20 a.m. on 5/20/11, I checked my email and discovered a missing mom on my neighborhood listserv:

My mom went missing this past Monday, 5/16/11 has not been seen or heard of since.  A photo and description of her is attached.  She was driving a silver Honda Accord.  Please pass this on to anyone and everyone that you may, and help me spread the word.
 

Thank you.

Matt Williams

I can't figure out how to link to the PDF photo or insert it here, but this is the information on the flyer:

MISSING

Nancy Williams

68 Years old 5’4”

Please contact East Ridge Police Department with

any information.

423-622-1725

Last seen in 2002 Silver Honda Accord 4door EX

Tennessee license #NR4RR the vehicle has a large

antenna mounted on rear bumper

===========================================================

This meme is hosted by Katy at A Few More Pages. Share the first sentence or two of the book you are reading. Then, share your impressions of that beginning. Click this link to see what others say about the books they are reading this week.

Reading Roots

Carina of Reading Through Life interviews book bloggers about their reading roots.  This week, it was Reading Roots: Christina from Chrisbookarama, whose blog I read regularly.  Carina asks them about the early influences and experiences that formed them into readers.  How would you answer her questions?

1.  What is your earliest memory involving books or reading? How were books, reading, and literacy approached in your childhood home? Were your parents or other family members readers?

My dad was an artist, and my mother was a poet.  They met when she was a hall monitor in high school and he left his art class to go wash his hands before the next class.  Both of them read to me until I could read for myself.  And they were expressive readers who put a lot of life into how the characters would speak.  My parents told me I would learn to read when I went to school, so I was extremely excited on my first day of first grade (no kindergarten for me back in 1945).  However,  I came home from that first day of school very disappointed that my teacher didn't teach me how to read after all.

2.  Did you enjoy language arts/English classes as a kid, or were you more of a reluctant reader? When did you first consider yourself a reader?

I was never reluctant about reading.  One day my mother saw me reading to my baby brother when we were both preschoolers.  She soon realized I wasn't exactly reading, but had memorized the whole book.  Is that a reader, or not?  I was about six when I wrote the earliest "poem" I still have — I wrote it for my daddy. (Was I trying to be a poet like my mother?) I continued to write and even joined the writer's club in high school.  My English teacher liked one of my stories, written for an assignment, and had me read it at a meeting of English teachers. Even though everything I've published has been nonfiction, I've considered writing a novel.  My friend Donna got me a tee-shirt with this across the front:

3.  Did you have any interesting reading habits when you were growing up? Do you still have them now?

Habits?  I was in the habit of reading everything, even the backs of cereal boxes.  Books have always been like friends, and I can't imagine not taking care of them.  I never, ever dog-ear a page.  I underlined and wrote in the margins of college and graduate school textbooks, and I do that still when I'm teaching from a book — simply because it's easier to use that way.  On the other hand, if I don't plan to keep and re-read a book, I keep it unmarked and in good shape so I can exchange it at a used-book store for some other book I want to read.

I'm not rich enough to buy all the books I read, so visiting the library is a lifelong habit.  Starting in my elementary school years, I'd wait every Thursday for the bookmobile to arrive in our neighborhood.  I'd be among the first in line so I could find and check out the three-book limit; then I'd rush home, read one of the books in less than two hours, and rush back to the bookmobile to exchange it for another, my FOURTH library book of the week.

I habitually read several books at a time, usually two or three or four nonfiction books that require thinking on a deeper level and taking notes — I should probably call it studying, which I do for my own edification or in order to teach a class — but I usually read only one novel at a time.  Unless books of fiction have greatly different stories, it's too easy to confuse them when read simultaneously, and I'd rather be immersed in only one.

Even so, I continue to read a lot.  So far this year, I've completed 93 books, averaging 21 books a month.

4.  Where was your favourite spot to read as a kid? Are there any books you distinctly remember from your childhood? Why?

Someone snapped a photo of me in my early teens, sprawled on the sofa reading, with my legs over the back of the sofa, my feet up the wall, and my hair hanging off the edge of the sofa.

As for the actual books, at a very young age, I loved Epaminondas, who was even more literal in his understanding of the language than I was, and Little Black Sambo, who was such a smart little boy that he convinced wild tigers they would really rather wear his bright clothing than eat him.

From my elementary school years, I distinctly remember a series of biographies about famous people, including Abe Lincoln: Pioneer Boy and John Paul Jones: Naval Hero, which made me want to grow up to be a sailor climbing a ship's rigging.  In the sixth grade, I fell in love with the book Little Women when I was chosen for the part of Marmee in our class's two-hour play, performed in period costumes (the girl who played "my" oldest daughter Meg is still a close friend, and we're now 71).

5.  How have your reading tastes developed from childhood until now? What were the phases that you went through along the way?

I read books I found on the shelves at home, both as a child and when I was first married — when the only books we had were college texts, mine and my husband's.  He was studying engineering, so I once read and studied a third of the way through his trigonometry textbook in two days.  (Honestly, I read anything!)  Since I am curious about everything, numbers as well as words, I have gobbled up books like cookies my whole life — books about people, places, things, ideas, and anything I'm curious about.  I read fiction mostly for the ideas.

I keep broadening my interests, then reining myself in to focus long enough to get another degree.  I've been known to tell people I had to hurry and graduate so I could to pursue a line of inquiry about something that I never had time to do while studying what the professors gave tests on.  When I became an adjunct professor, I could read as widely as I liked — and assign some of those really good books to my students.

6.  If you have children, how did you encourage them (or how are you encouraging them) to become readers? If you do not have children of your own, what do you think is the most important thing to focus on in order to promote reading in the coming generations?

Not only did I read to my three children, I took them to the library twice a week.  As soon as they were able to write their own names, they got their own library cards.  The children's books were on the lowest level, and my kids would browse until they found the limit they were allowed to check out, then come find me.  They knew where in the stacks upstairs I could be found — in the 100s and 200s of the Dewey decimal system — as I was teaching myself philosophy and religion, even before I went back to college and got my first degree in (what else?) philosophy and religion, with English thrown in as a second major.

As I wrote recently about age-appropriate books, my children were allowed to read anything that interested them. I regularly bought them books, like at school book fairs.  Once while we were on vacation, I took them shopping in an unfamiliar mall and they started trying to distract me by pointing to things over to the left.  Suspicious, I looked to the right — and saw a bookstore.  They didn't want to spend their whole vacation in a bookstore, but I bribed them ... uh, I mean I persuaded them ... by promising to buy a book for each of them, in exchange for fifteen minutes in that store.

When a new library was opened near our home, my son happened by on his bicycle and came home to tell me, "Mom, you have more books than the library." It was true. I went to check on the veracity of his report and could see the library had a long way to go to be very useful to my family.

For the record, they are all still readers.  And so are all my grandchildren, except one who prefers to spend her time drawing.  Could that relate back to my father, the artist?

Library Loot ~ May 18-24

31 Hours ~ by Masha Hamilton, 2009, fiction (large print)

"Jonas has not called or spoken to his mother or girlfriend in several weeks. His mother has a bad feeling and Vic is worried, although she also has her sister to watch out for. As the two women search for Jonas, he is staying in a safe-house, preparing for an act of unspeakable violence. Gripping and well-written, but the real impact of the book lies in the depth of its everyday characters, like a homeless man, who will undoubtedly die if the terrorists succeed."  (Bookfool's review)

There Once Was a Puffin ~ by Florence Page Jaques, 1995, children's, 8/10.  (I reviewed this children's book yesterday.)

"Boldly colored pictures complement a rollicking story in rhyme about a little puffin whose fondness for fishes (he has them for supper and tea) sets the stage for an unusual friendship."

Please Look After Mom ~ by Kyung-sook Shin, 2011, fiction

"On a family visit to the city, Mom is right behind her husband when the train pulls out of Seoul Station without her, and she is lost, possibly forever.  As her children argue over how to find her and her husband returns to their countryside home to wait for her, they each recall their lives with her, their memories often more surprising than comforting.  Have they lived up to her expectations?  Was she happy?"

Library Loot is a weekly meme co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.  Marg has the Mister Linky this week, if you'd like to share a list of the loot you brought home.

There Once Was a Puffin ~ by Florence Page Jaques

There Once Was a Puffin ~ by Florence Page Jaques, 1995, children's, 8/10

There Once Was a Puffin

by Florence Page Jaques

Oh, there once was a Puffin
Just the shape of a muffin,
And he lived on an island
In the bright blue sea!

He ate little fishes,
That were most delicious,
And he had them for supper
And he had them for tea.

But this poor little Puffin,
He couldn't play nothin',
For he hadn't anybody
To play with at all.

So he sat on his island,
And he cried for awhile, and
He felt very lonely,
And he felt very small.

Then along came the fishes,
And they said, "If you wishes,
You can have us for playmates,
Instead of for tea!"

So they now play together,
In all sorts of weather,
And the Puffin eats pancakes,
Like you and like me.

The words of this fun little book were apparently written decades ago.  The summary is all about the art work:  "Boldly colored pictures complement a rollicking story in rhyme about a little puffin whose fondness for fishes (he has them for supper and tea) sets the stage for an unusual friendship."  Click on YouTube video to see a two-year-old boy who knows the words after only two days.  While his daddy reads, the boy darts back and forth from his bed to another part of his room, tossing out the proper responses.  I rate this book 8 of 10, a very good and obviously memorable book.



This is the first of three YouTube videos.  I like the second one best, but the code to embed is for the first one.  Have fun with these children playing along with the song.  I love their teacher!