12 September 2010

Sunday Salon: A Young Reader's Nightmare

My daughter C1 spent the last week living a reader's nightmare. Well, that may be something of an exaggeration when the situation is viewed from an adult perspective, but it sure felt that way to her. It is the beginning of the school year. In this house that means no TV on weekdays, but the kids also don't have much homework yet. That means the kids fill their evenings with reading, drawing, or the occasional game. C1 carried her reading on into the weekend and ran through every book that I had checked out for her at the library, so by Monday she did have anything to read. ABM wasn't doing the library run until Friday. On top of that, the school library was being used for benchmark testing all week so she couldn't check anything out there. I have a small collection of books left from when I used to homeschool M, but C1 read most of those ages ago. You should have heard that child moan about being bored!

I tried to convince C1 to read one of my books, but she wasn't biting. I guess she wasn't quite desperate enough. When I was a kid, I read and re-read whatever was in the house between library runs, which were only once a month. I'll be quite happy never to see another Reader's Digest condensed version of anything as long as I live. C2 doesn't know how good she has it.

CURRENTLY READING: Well, I didn't trade in my library stack unread, as I was tempted to do last week. I finished off one of the Lauraine Snelling books and am almost done with the other. My children delight in calling them "large-print prairie romances". They aren't necessarily exciting reading, although Snelling has made me sit up straight a time or two. Reading these books is more like visiting old friends.

UPCOMING: C2 wants us to learn to cook with more of an Asian flavor, so I checked out
The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook: 101 Asian Recipes Simple Enough for Tonight's Dinner. To try to make a dent in my TBR list (which currently stands at 223 titles!) I also checked out a book of essays entitled Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd. It has been on my list for 11 months, and my library finally got it in. Perhaps next week I will do a post updating my quest to pare down the section of the list with books that have been on the list for over a year.

1 comment:

Stephanie said...

Oh no! I feel for your daughter. My mom and I have COMPLETELY different taste in books, and while I will read books from her shelves, I'm not happy about it and will only do it out of desperation. She enjoys Nicholas Sparks, I only read him when I'm out of options, lol.

Do you have a good thrift store or used book store nearby? Might not hurt to take your daughter there and let her pick up some emergency books. :) The vast majority of my at-home books came from my favorite IL thrift stores- one in my hometown had adult books for 25 cents, kids books for 10 cents. The other had half-price Mondays, and their selection was AWESOME. I miss them terribly!