Reading with M.

 We've been digging into the Little House series now for almost a month and have read Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie . I would recommend these books for a number of reasons in addition to my own nostalgia from reading most or all of the series as a child (I don't remember if I got to the very last book). The language is beautiful and the description of the natural world is poetic and accessible without being overblown. There is also a sense of excitement in the quotidian, which is something we are struggling with at our house during this age of covid-19. We don't live in the woods, so our everyday is not the same, but it feels invigorating to hear about the things Laura and Mary do to pass the time. In addition, however—and here Little House on the Prairie is different from Little House in the Big Woods —there is sustained narrative engagement with Native peoples. At the beginning of  Little House on the Prairie ,   Pa, Ma, Laura, Mary, an...

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...