Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 199

Poetry Friday, But This Is Prose

A passage for the copybook:

I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent o

Scenes From a Backyard

This fine crop of sunflowers sprang up beneath our bird feeder. Thanks, birds!

One of the sunflowers has nine blossoms on one stalk. I’ve never seen this before. It’s very cool.

We’re spending a lot of time in the backyard these days. This morning I packed a bag full of sketchbooks, colored pencils, watercolors, stuff I found around the house. A set of Sandra Dodd’s Thinking Sticks I bought a couple of years ago, some Trivial Pursuit cards, a pencil sharpener. Borrowed Jenn’s BRILLIANT idea of cut

Michelin Baby

Bookspotting

Stuff I’ve seen my kids reading recently:

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge

The Saturdays and other Melendy books by Elizabeth Enright.

175 Amazing Nature Experiments by G. Morgan. (Oh that’s just freaky. I went to Amazon to check on the exact title of this book; Beanie’s been carrying it around all week. I knew it was called something about nature experiments. When I found the right one and clicked on its page, Amazon informed me that “you purchased this item on July 13, 1999.” I don’t kn

I Found the Dirt

From Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, that is. It turned out to be a biography of Mötley Crüe. And so, there in the title of his collection of a year’s worth of literary columns, Nick Hornby has given a nod to what seems to be the high and low points of his year’s reading. Marilynne Robinson’s The Housekeeping vs. Mötley Crüe: The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band.

I just took a look at my 2008 book log to see what my own high and low of last year would be, and it can’t be done!

These Days, When I’m Not Reading

…I am glued to Turtlemama’s baby hamster posts. (Scroll down to the bottom and work your way up.) Her daughters’ dwarf hamsters surprised the family with six pink, hairless little babies. Turtlemama is posting daily updates and observations as they grow. Fascinating.

Mid-April Reading Notes: Tey and Collins

Well, it hasn’t all been Nick Hornby this month. Last week I read two of the books from my March TBR stack and both of them were the kind of book you fall into headfirst and feel dazed when, hours later, you come up for air. That’s about the only thing they have in common. The first was Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. I bought a copy last year when Jane was reading a lot of books from the Ambleside Year 7 list. We don’t do formal/structured Ambleside but we mine those booklists for all we’

Housekeeping vs. Sludge

“I have always prized the accessible over the obscure, but after reading Housekeeping [by Marilynne Robinson:] I can see that in some ways the easy, accessible novel is working at a disadvantage (not that Housekeeping is inaccessible, but it is deep and dark and rich): it’s possible to whiz through it without allowing it even to touch the sides, and a bit of side-touching has to happen if a book is going to be properly transformative. If you are so gripped by a book that you want to read it in th

The Trouble Is, I Fancy Too Much

Ah, now we’re coming to it. I’ve reached the essay in which Nick Hornby includes a novel called Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson in his list of books he purchased that month. This is bound to be the Housekeeping that takes on The Dirt in the title of his essay collection. But I don’t know anything more about it yet because he didn’t actually read the book that month. We’ll have to live in suspense a while longer.

The “Books I Bought This Month” lists are one of the things I love about these ess

I Hope He Likes Pepperoni

So I’m halfway through Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, my new collection of Nick Hornby’s essays on books and reading. I haven’t yet come to the bit I assume will be there, a passage or series of passages illuminating the title—you know, the name that made everyone think my husband was taking his life into his hands by leaving the book on my pillow as a sort of gentle hint. (NB: Scott would be the last man on earth to do such a thing. He was a stay-at-home dad for eight years: he knows what it takes