Small is Beautiful -- Book Blog Edition

I'm snurching this idea from Kara at Flowers of Quiet Happiness.  She recently featured three blogs with fewer than 100 followers, and I thought this was a great idea!  I have a lot of blogging friends with not-so-well-known blogs that I wish others would "discover."  So I am doing this tag even though I wasn't tagged with it.  (In fact, I'm doing it twice!  Once here, and once on my other blog.)  Here are five book-related blogs (that Kara didn't already feature) that don't have a ton of followers, but that I am very fond of indeed:

Bookshelves and Daydreams -- Carissa Horton

Carissa turns a sharp eye on books, speaking plainly about what she does and does not like about them.  She digs deeper than a simple "oh, this was enjoyable" sort of review, and often discusses whether something fits with her Christian worldview or not.  And how cool is this?  She did a whole series on Christmas books last year (list of reviews here)!  I'm hoping she'll do that again this year :-)


Holds Upon Happiness -- Jennifer

Jennifer posts book reviews, musings on life, and lots of nifty photos. She likes to travel to England, and often describes her adventures there.  (And by "adventures" I mean things like "how she got lost in the most amazing London bookstores.")  Like me, Jennifer is a mother, and she has a great appreciation not only of children's books for all ages, but also for classics both ancient and modern.  Reading her blog is like hanging out with a friend over steaming mugs of tea or coffee and discussing books.


Mirror with Clouds -- Dale

Dale's reviews are concise and well-focused, and I can generally tell from his posts if I'm going to like the book he's reviewing or not.  He reads a LOT, and such a cool variety!  Classics, modern short stories, and everything in between.


The Once Lost Wanderer -- Joseph

Joseph's reviews amuse me greatly. He has a fairly similar taste to mine when it comes to book choices, and yet, we quiet often have very different reactions to books, which is always fun to explore.  And once in a while, he lets his grandsons "review" books that he's read to them.


On Stories and Words -- Meredith

Meredith reviews books, and sometimes movies too.  She also posts fun musings on life, the occasional game, and other bits of amusingness.  Also, she's met Christopher Paolini, so yeah... you know she's cool ;-)

If you want to do this too, here are the "rules:"

1. Feature 3-5 blogs with fewer than 100 followers.
2. Write 1-3 paragraphs about each blog, including information like what the blog is about, a brief bio of the blogger, and/or why you recommend their blog. Don't forget a link to their blog!
3. Include an image for each blog, whether it's a blog button, profile photo, header, or simply a screenshot of the blog.
4. Thank the blogger who featured you, and include a link to their blog. If you like, you can even include them as one of the blogs that you feature (especially if they joined the tag without having been featured by someone else).
5. Include the tag image somewhere in your post.

Bookworm Gardens

While on vacation this month, we visited Bookworm Gardens in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  We'd never been there before, and I found it utterly enchanting.  So I'm going to share a few photos of it with you.  As well as this map, so you get an idea of what it's like:

(Click on image to make it bigger.)

Basically, they have different areas dedicated to different kinds of children's books, with structures and flowers and hands-on activities that relate to them.  I didn't take photos of nearly all of them, but here are some I captured.

This is "Jack and the Beanstalk," and in the background is the "Hansel and Gretel Learning Cottage" where you could buy souvenirs and lots of books.

Houses for each of the "Three Little Pigs" (and Cowboy inside one to demonstrate scale).

Winnie-the-Pooh's house, where he lives under the name of Sanders, as per A. A. Milne.

You can go in a lot of the structures, and some of them have stuff to do inside.  Pooh's house has stuffed animals and a bit of furniture.

The Little House in the Big Woods display has stools, kitchen sundries, and other things you can load into the wagon.

This is for a book I've never read, A Playhouse for Monster by Virginia Mueller, but it's so cute, I had to include a photo.  (That's my friend ED in the foreground, wearing the cape.  Because she's cool like that.)

The Magic School Bus!!!  You could go inside, raise and lower windows, open and close doors, and pretend to drive.

Pagoda from Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr:

Display for The Tin Forest by Helen Ward:

Some books just had a little statue or small display, like this tiny duck for one of my favorite books, The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Weise:

Scattered throughout are these pillars with a little metal door marked "books."  When you opened them, you would find laminated copies of books brought to life nearby, or of selections from the books if they were too long to include all of.  That way, if you weren't familiar with some of the books and wanted to read them, you could!

There are a LOT more displays at Bookworm Gardens, but this at least gives you a taste of what it's like.  If you're ever in eastern Wisconsin, and you love children's books (or have some kids along), definitely check this place out!  It's free (with a request for a free-will donation), and you can spend a couple of hours there without getting bored.

Also, they have a Little Free Library :-)  We saw three of these on our vacation, and I find them enchanting!  I donated books to two of them, and Cowboy took one book.  I kind of want one of these in my neighborhood, don't you?

Jane Eyre Read-Along: Chapter 27

Um, yeah, so I went on vacation for a two-week whirlwind tour of friends and family in the midwest, and hosted a blog party at the same time, and poor Jane Eyre got neglected.  I will do better now!  Even though, now that I'm home and not going anywhere for a looooooong time and can focus on the book, we're heading into one of my less-favorite sections.  But that's okay.  We can finish this book.  We can!!!

So, off Jane goes, "cracking my heart-strings in rending them from Mr. Rocheter's" (p. 349).  Er, I mean, her heart-strings.  And mine too, fictionally.  I haaaaate leaving Mr. Rochester behind :-b  It means I have to put up with snuffy St. John now, and I'm frowning at the thought.  (I'm very hard on St. John.  Because he deserves it.  But who knows, maybe I'll like him better on this reading?)(You know what "fat chance" means, St. John?)

I find it so interesting that Jane admits she "wanted to be weak" (p. 347) so she could avoid leaving the man she loves.  Not only leaving him, but hurting him by leaving him, perhaps driving him to desperation.  He tells her he once contemplated suicide, and she obviously suspects he may try that again if she leaves.  But she knows it would be wrong to stay.  She knows it will be hard to leave.  She doesn't want to do the hard thing.  But she does it anyway.  Jane Eyre, ladies and gentlemen, is made of steel.  She knows no one will help her do the right thing, so she does it herself because it needs to be done.

And that, folks, is why Jane Eyre is my favorite novel.  Because of this small, indomitable woman who does very hard things even though she doesn't want to.  She is superbly stubborn in all the best ways, and since I'm very stubborn myself, I admire that she puts her stubbornness to the best possible use.  She insists on doing what is right, she refuses to be cajoled into doing wrong, and wow... I admire her so very much.

But, in her stubbornness, she is not mean or cruel or hard-hearted.  She forgives Mr. Rochester.  She still loves him.  She doesn't take the easy way out by hating him or being angry with him -- and how much easier it would be to leave if she could call him a skulduggerous seducer and say good riddance to bad rubbish.  But no, she loves him and forgives him, and then leaves him anyway.  With much pain and sorrow, since although she is steely, she isn't stony.  It's not easy for her, and that's what makes her so believable, even in her indomitability.

(I'm making up words today.  Blame my head cold.)

But anyway, isn't it nice to learn that Mrs. Fairfax and the other servants didn't really know that Bertha was Mrs. Rochester?  They haven't all been conspiring to corrupt Jane.  Whew.

And Jane stands up for Bertha -- she says that Rochester's hatred of her is cruel because "she cannot help being mad" (p. 351).  I think Jane sympathizes with Bertha, don't you?  Bertha has been locked up for years and years, and Jane knows what it's like to be trapped and imprisoned.  

Speaking of which, we get not one but two moments in this chapter that remind me of that moment in chapter 23 when she insisted, "I am no bird, and no net ensnares me" (p. 297).  First, Mr. Rochester says, "Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it, the savage, beautiful creature!" (p. 370).  He's referring to her body, that no threats of violence to her body would make Jane's spirit submit to him, but it's an interesting choice of words.  And then second, when Jane steals away in the early morning, "[b]irds began to sing in brake and copse; birds were faithful to their mates; birds were emblems of love.  What was I?" (p. 374).  She realizes that, in leaving Mr. Rochester and her life at Thornfield, she is changing herself, not just her location.  Although she protested otherwise, she basically was a bird in a cage there.  But now, as she said herself earlier in the chapter, "All is changed about me, sir; I must change too" (p. 350).

Favorite Lines:

Reader! -- I forgave him at the moment, and on the spot (p. 348).

"Now for the hitch in Jane's character... Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!" (p. 352).

"You are my sympathy -- my better self -- my good angel; I am bound to you with a strong attachment (p. 367).

I shook, I feared -- but I resolved (p. 368).

"I care for myself.  The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained, I am, the more I will respect myself" (p. 369).

Possible Discussion Questions:

Do you think Mr. Rochester would come to despise Jane if she became his mistress, like he despises Celine Varens and the others?

Why couldn't Mr. Rochester divorce Bertha because she was mad?  Does anyone know?

Mr. Rochester says, "I tried dissipation -- never debauchery; that I hated, and hate" (p. 362).  What's the difference between the two?

"The Outsiders" by S. E. Hinton

I first read The Outsiders when I was fourteen, same age as the protagonist, Ponyboy.  I had known that I led a safe, sheltered life, but it wasn't until I read this book that I truly realized how different my life was from what it could be.  It's one of the first books I can remember reading that felt very real to me, not like a made-up story.   I didn't learn until many years later that this was inspired by actual events, but somehow it has always felt real, right from the first reading.

Ponyboy Curtis lives with his older brothers Soda and Darry -- their parents died in an accident eight months earlier.  They live on the poor side of town (Tulsa, Oklahoma, though the book never explicitly states that) and are called "greasers" because they grease their hair back.  Basically, they're hoods, only they don't consider themselves to be.  They and their friends look out for each other, but don't have an actual gang.  But they constantly battle the "socs," who are the rich kids from the other side of town.  

Late one night, a bunch of socs jump Ponyboy and his friend Johnny.  They try to drown Ponyboy, and Johnny knifes a soc to save his friend.  The two boys run away so Johnny won't have to go to jail and so the social workers won't make Ponyboy go live in a foster home instead of staying with his older brothers.  They end up labeled heroes for rescuing some children, and then there's all this tragedy, and... yeah, it's an emotional rollercoaster.  Eva called it "breathtaking," and it is all of that.

Even now, reading this for the umpteenth time, I'm amazed by how realistic these characters feel.  I've read a lot of YA novels, a lot of books about juvenile delinquents, and a lot of books written by fairly young writers, but none of them have matched this book for capturing how teens think and feel.   I am perpetually fascinated by the way it presents a gritty, raw world without using shocking language or rubbing our noses in filth.  And yet, it also doesn't try to idealize the characters -- none of them are innocent or to be pitied.   Hinton doesn't want us to feel sorry for Ponyboy, or for Johnny or Dally, either.  She wants us to try to understand them. And that's what I love best about The Outsiders -- that it helps me understand a little bit about how people live and think, people who are very different from myself and live in very different circumstances. I may never meet someone who has lived a life as hard and painful as Ponyboy's, but this book helps me understand him a little bit even so.

I've probably read The Outsiders close to twenty times in the past twenty years.  I remember I read it three times in a row when I first discovered it.  I still have that same copy, which someone had given to me after they were through reading it for high school.  It had their name on the sides in black marker, and after I finished my first reading of it, I found a black marker and made all the edges of the pages black so that their name was completely obliterated.  I had a great need to make my copy mine alone.  Then I censored out the three (very tame) bad words in it and read it over and over.  When my brother was old enough, I let him read it too.  Every time we had a birthday, we'd talk about which character we were the same age as.  When I turned twenty-one and was older than Darry, I was glum.  My gift to my brother when he turned fourteen was his very own copy of the book.  We also watched the excellent 1983 film adaptation many, many times, and I recently replaced my almost-worn-out VHS copy with a DVD.  

So, um, yeah, this is one of my favorite books ever, and I expect it always will be.


Particularly Good Bits:

I lie to myself all the time.  But I never believe me (p. 19).

"You greasers have a different set of values.  You're more emotional.  We're sophisticated -- cool to the point of not feeling anything.  Nothing is for real with us (p. 35).

Tow-headed and shifty-eyed, Dally was anything but handsome.  Yet in his hard face there was character, pride, and a savage defiance of the world (p. 54).

I liked my books and clouds and sunsets.  Dally was so real he scared me (p. 68).

I wish I could say that everything went back to normal, but it didn't.  Especially me (p. 146).


If This a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for violence, teen drinking and smoking, and three minor curse words.

This is my 46th book read and reviewed for the Classics Club, and my 15th for the Women's Classic Literature Event.

Tolkien Giveaway Winners!

Good morning!  (And yes, I mean it is a morning to be good on, a morning on which I feel good, and a morning that is good in and of itself, etc.)  Thank you, everyone, for making this party so much fun :-)  Even though I only managed two games, I think it went really well, and this is such a relief to me -- now I know that even if I'm horribly busy next year again, I can still host this for a fifth time!

So, now it's time to reveal the winners of the bookmark giveaway.  Thank you all for your sweet compliments on these!  I'd never tried making thong bookmarks before, but I think they turned out fairly well.  And here's who they now belong to:

#1 -- Phyl
#2 -- Mary Horton
#3 -- Meredith J.
#4 -- Art3mis Took
#5 -- Miss Meg

Congratulations!

I will be emailing you this morning to ask for your mailing address so I can get these sent off to you :-)

Answers to the Tolkien or Not? Quotation Quiz

Here are the answers to the quotation quiz, and everyone's scores!

Answers:

#1 All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Tolkien!

#2  All that is gold does not glitter.
Tolkien!

#3  The better part of valor is discretion.
Not! (It's from Henry IV Part One by William Shakespeare.)

#4  Short cuts make long delays.
Tolkien!

#5  Though this be madness, yet there is a method in it.
Not!  (Also from Hamlet by William Shakespeare.)

#6  Happy is the man who finds wisdom.
Not!  (It's from the book of Proverbs.)

#7  The hands of a king are the hands of a healer.
Tolkien!

#8  Stolen water is sweet, and food eaten in secret is delicious.
Not!  (Also from the book of Proverbs.)

#9  Twice blessed is help unlooked-for.
Tolkien!

#10  Courage is found in unlikely places.
Tolkien!

Scores:

10 -- Cordy
10 -- Miss Meg
10 -- RM Lutz
9 -- DKoren
9 -- Ekaterina Egorova
9 -- Erudessa Aranduriel
8 -- Art3mis Took
8 -- Meredith
8 -- Savannah
7 -- Livia Rachelle
7 -- The Elf
3 -- MovieCritic

I'm so glad you enjoyed this game, as it's one I totally made up, and so different from the kinds I've done in the past.  Y'all were great at this!

Answers to the Tolkien Family Relationships Quiz

Here are the answers and scores for the Tolkien Family Relationships Quiz I posted earlier this week!  Well done, everyone.  Thanks for playing!

Answers:

#1  Which of these pairs are NOT father and son?
     c.  Bilbo and Frodo

#2  Which of these pairs are NOT siblings?
     d.  Bifor and Bofur
(but they are cousins)

#3  How are Merry and Pippin related?
     b.  they are cousins

#4  How are Elrond and Galadriel related?
     c.  they are in-laws
(Elrond married Galadriel's daughter)

#5  What is Theoden's son named?
     a.  Theodred

#6  What are Arwen's brothers named?
     b.  Elrohir and Elladan

#7  Eowyn is Theoden's __________.
     c.  niece

#8  Which of these pairs are NOT married to each other?
     a.  Ioreth and Imrahil

#9  Sam Gamgee and Rosie Cotton named their first child __________.
     d.  Elanor

#10  Bilbo Baggins' parents were named ____________.
     a.  Bungo and Belladonna

Scores:

10 -- Erudessa Aranduriel
10 -- Manette
9 -- Cordy
9 -- DKoren
9 -- Miranda Jo
9 -- Savannah Grace
8 -- Fawnabelle Baggins
8 -- Livia Rachelle
7 -- Ekaterina Egorova
7 -- Elizabeth Anne D.
7 -- Miss Meg
6 -- E
6 -- Mary Horton
5 -- Phyl
4 -- Meredith
4 -- The Elf
3 -- MovieCritic

Thanks for playing!