Reading with M.

We recently jumped forward in the Moomins series to read Moominpappa at Sea   by Tove Jansson. We have only read three of the Moomin books thus far ( Finn Family Moomintroll , Comet in Moominland,  and Moominpappa at Sea ) but I have already noticed that each translator's text has its own feel. Picking up Moominpappa at Sea was in part colored by our recent abandonment of Moominpappa's Memoirs , which M. and I found dense and a bit hard to follow at the sentence level. I wasn't sure whether this was a fault of the original text or that of the translator. In any case, Moominpappa at Sea is translated by Kingsley Hart, and the combination of original and translation is a winning one. M. was with me on every page as we followed the Moomin family's journey from Moominvalley to an island, uninhabited but for a lone fisherman who (spoiler alert) turns out to be the lighthouse keeper. Moominpappa is having a bit of a midlife crisis, Moominmamma feels homesick and paints a gard...

 Last April M's Nonna sent us a copy of Dory Fantasmagory: The Real True Friend, and it sent us down the exciting new path of reading novels together. I knew that Max loved plot driven books with a lot of text, such as One Morning in Maine . What I didn't know was that he had the patience to sit through a novel. (And during the height of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order in our state, this was truly an amazing discovery, as we spent hours every day reading.) Here are ten of the first chapter books that we read and that we have returned to over and over again: 1. Dory Fantasmagory: The Real True Friend  by Abby Hanlon I have a soft spot for Dory , as this and the other books in the series were the books that introduced us to chapter books. Dory  and her world are both wacky in the best sense of the word. These books are about five and six year olds, so will appeal to that age group and slightly younger kids. The Real True Friend is the second book in the series, but they can...