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Friday, February 18th, 2005
The Phantom Tollbooth -- tonight we read Chapter 11, "Dynne and Dischord", or rather we read about half of it and Sylvia fell asleep. Funny that Juster worked in two consecutive "Fantasia" references -- the end of Chapter 10 referred (so think I) to the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor segment of the film, and the beginning of Chapter 11 referred (less arguably) to the The Sorcerer's Apprentice segment.
posted evening of February 18th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, February 17th, 2005
The Phantom Tollbooth -- we read Chapter 10 tonight, "The Symphony of Color". It has nice resonances with two other books, "The Philharmonic Gets Dressed", which we read for bedtime story fairly often, and "Zin Zin Zin! A Violin!", which we read less frequently; and with Fantasia, which we watched a few weeks ago -- this last I suspect may have been Juster's source for the chapter, some of his imagery reminded me very strongly of the film.
posted evening of February 17th, 2005: Respond
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Wednesday, February 16th, 2005
The Phantom Tollbooth -- we read Chapter 9 tonight -- Sylvia is really enjoying the characters though I'm not sure how much of the plot she is getting. Details which captivate her: the sisters named Rhyme and Reason, which are not proper names like Sylvia or Emily; the dog mistakenly named Tock even though the sound he makes is tick-tick-tick; the box given by King Azaz to Milo, which contains all the words that will ever be used -- this last reminds me a bit of Borges' Library of Babel and I wonder whether Juster had that in mind.
posted evening of February 16th, 2005: Respond
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Friday, February 11th, 2005
The Phantom Tollbooth: Tonight we will read Chapter 6, the story of Rhyme and Reason as told by Faintly Macabre. Sylvia is maintaining interest in the story and remembers the characters and situations from day to day.
posted afternoon of February 11th, 2005: Respond
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Sunday, February 6th, 2005
Sylvia has recently gotten interested in the idea of reading chapter books. This is good news for me because I am interested in reading chapter books with her. The first one we read, last week, was a not very well-written or thought-out book about two children who discover a magical tree-house that enables them to travel back in time, apparently part of a series, this one has them go back to prehistory and interact with dinosaurs. On Friday I bought Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollboth, which is one of my favorite books from my own childhood. I was not sure whether Sylvia was quite ready for it but figured it was worth a try. And it seems to have been a good choice -- we have read 2 chapters so far and she is paying very close attention. Paying attention is a major topic of the book and I am having the feeling while reading it, that I should have taken it more to heart when I read it as a boy; or that I should have reread it around the time I started to forget it, in my early twenties. Not paying sufficient attention is a big part of what I have been doing wrong in the past ten or so years. Seems like it should be easy enough to change back... Hoping my facility to pay attention has not atrophied from neglect.
posted evening of February 6th, 2005: Respond
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Thursday, January 27th, 2005
Hey, anyone want to talk about Roth? I'm reading American Pastoral right now and really enjoying it.
posted afternoon of January 27th, 2005: Respond
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Tuesday, November 16th, 2004
I'm reading Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert, at Nathaniel's behest -- this is the first I am finally getting around to reading one of the huge spate of books produced by the political events of the past three years. I have a problem with Ruppert's assertion that the human population explosion was caused by the availability of fossil fuel energy. (At least he seems to be making this assertion.) If you look at the graph that he claims shows this, the beginning of the explosion clearly dates back to the time of the industrial revolution. I believe that the availability of fossil fuels postponed the day of reckoning -- they allowed humanity to feed and (mostly) shelter its burgeoning ranks a little longer than Malthus thought we would be able to. With peak oil having passed that reckoning is now looming ever nearer.
posted afternoon of November 16th, 2004: Respond
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Monday, October 18th, 2004
For those of you not yet tired of the Moomin obsession: Here is some more. There are two more moomin books available in English translation; one is The Book About Moomin, Mymble, and Little My, which as near as I can tell is in verse; the other is Who Will Comfort Toffle?, a short book which LiteraryMoose describes as "One of the best love stories I have ever read". Both are in print in the UK. And one more moomin story, previously untranslated, is coming soon! It is the first one Jansson wrote: The Little Trolls and the Great Flood. You can read the translation online here. Additionally, Jansson wrote a number of non-moomin books. I am reading The Summer Book now; I think it is the only one that has been translated. A nice book -- I'll write more about it later.
posted afternoon of October 18th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, October 15th, 2004
So as of today I have read all the Moominfamily books except maybe three of them which are out of print for a long time and hard to locate. I love them. Picking up Finn Family Moomintroll back in July was one of the best things I've done in a long time. These are the books in (as near as I can determine) order by original publication date: - Comet in Moominland (1946)
- Finn Family Moomintroll (1948)
- Moominsummer Madness (1954)
- Moominland Midwinter (1957)
- Tales from Moominvalley (1963)
- Moominpappa at Sea (1963)
- Moominpappa's Memoirs (1968)
- Moominvalley in November (1971?)
The two starting points I would recommend to people are Finn Family Moomintroll, and Moominvalley in November -- I think either one will suck you right in and that it will be impossible not to want to read the entire series. Finn Family Moomintroll is really good for reading aloud to a very young child, the others not so much. The only two that do not stand up so well are Comet in Moominland and Moominpappa's Memoirs -- you will want to read them just to fill in some details of the Moomin world, but they will not demand to be reread. The first five books and Moominpappa's Memoirs are quite suitable for any child old enough to read them; the other three demand a little more sophistication and I would not give them to a child younger than about 9, at least not unless I were reading the book with the child and helping her understand some of the nuance. I have described the style of the later books as "a cross between A. A. Milne and Beckett."
posted evening of October 15th, 2004: Respond
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Today I am reading Moominland Midwinter, so I have now read the whole Moominfamily series though not in order and excluding the first book, The Little Trolls and the Great Flood, which has not been translated into English.* This evening if all goes according to plan I will write up and post my thoughts about the series. Just as a quick note, if you just wanted to read one, Finn Family Moomintroll is an utterly fantastic, magnificent book. Moominvalley in November, Moominpappa at Sea, and Tales from Moominvalley are similarly fantastic but not, I think, well suited for young children. Moominsummer Madness and (tentatively) Moominland Midwinter are good books with moments of greatness but some uneven bits. Comet in Moominland and Moominpappa's Memoirs are fun fluff.
* And I just now saw Jansson has a moomin-related book called "Who Will Comfort Toffle?" which I had not heard of before. Update: Also there is a book called "The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My"; one called "The Summer Book" which is not about Moomins but about a girl and her grandmother; one called "The Coal Man and other stories"; and she has illustrated Swedish editions of "Alice in Wonderland", "The Hobbit", and "The Hunting of the Snark".
posted afternoon of October 15th, 2004: Respond
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