Books
Finished reading: Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White 📚 — ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Skip and dance, jump and prance! Go down through the orchard and stroll in the woods! The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.
It sure is.
What a hell of an amazing book to relegate to the unjustly dismissed “children’s” shelves. This book gets five stars, no question about it.
White manages to address, in my opinion, so many of The Important Things We All Should Learn About Rather Young If Possible, including misogyny/clueless men, bullies, transactional acquaintances, competition, the joy and sorrow of freedom, the dilemma of the naive but intelligent, parenting (well, let’s be honest, mostly motherhood), the distinction between pathology and an innocent’s rational-from-their-perspective perceptions, the rarity and value of adults who are aware of the immediately preceding concept (like the inimitable Dr. Dorian), evolution, religion, birth and death, and, of course, the intergenerational power of real, no-but-seriously-really-real friendship that reaches out beyond its originators and enriches those who come after, in ways known and unknown, for years or decades to come.
Like I said, just a hell of a book.
Sherlock Holmes giving serious Nardwuar vibes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle📚:
My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don’t know.
This particular quote, for nerds who know, is from adventure number seven, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
📚 Finished: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Yesterday I finished reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams.
️Maybe not as ruthlessly original as, well, the original, but better than a Vogon poem.
Let the naysayers say their nays. Sure, it’s no Hitchhikers, but nothing was before, and nothing will be again. Unless we’re all living in a loop. In that case, Hitchhikers will, eventually, be Hitchhikers, again, er, for the first time.
I read it to my 1- and 3-year-old a little each day or so at bedtime. As I said when I started reading this book, I changed some words and skipped a few bits, but they could tell it was pretty silly, for a more a grown-up book than they’re used to.
Bottom line: It’s worth a read, which is a fair bit better than any of us should be saying about a lot of what’s written these days.
Including book reviews. 🙃
Read about my personal ratings framework for more information on my star ratings.
Currently reading: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams 📚
I’m reading this one with the kids at bedtime. I definitely do a bit of light word replacement here and there, mostly where death or sex are mentioned. But it’s fun, especially with the 3-year-old, who can understand just enough of it to be interested but has sufficient trouble keeping up with the weirdness to make it, eventually, conducive to falling asleep.