September: National Piano Month

Sep5

All eight of my children have attempted to play the piano, taken piano lessons, or at least tried out piano lessons, and although I can’t say that any of them are concert piano material, they do enjoy playing and composing and generally messing about with music, some more than others. I, on the other hand, can’t play a note. Well, maybe one note.

Pianos are wonderful instruments.

“The piano keys are black and white, but they sound like a million colors in your mind.” ~Maria Cristina Mena, The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena.

Nonfiction about pianos and pianists:
Forever Music: A Tribute to the Gift of Creativity by Edith Schaeffer. Mrs. Schaeffer tells the history of her Steinway grand piano, and she also weaves a story about the fallenness of man and the creativity that God built into each of us. This book would be a lovely gift for any musician in your life or for anyone who cares about music.
Piano Lessons: A Memoir by Anna Goldsworthy. This story of a girl and her piano teacher sounds really good. Has anyone read it?
Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventure by Noah Adams. Another memoir, this time about a middle-aged man who decides to pursue his life-long dream of learning to play the piano. I am drawn to the premise.
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier by Thad Carhart. Yet another memoirist returns to the piano and the company of musicians as an adult and an amateur.
Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson by Tricia Tunstall. I might give this one to my favorite piano teacher.
Mr. Langshaw’s Square Piano: The Story of the First Pianos and How They Caused a Cultural Revolution by Madeline Gould. Pianos and history combined. I can’t resist. Reviewed at 5 Minutes for Books.
Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum by Robert Andrew Parker. Reviewed at Becky’s Book Reviews A children’s picture bio of a jazz great.
Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra by Brian Pinkney. Another picture book biography.
Giants of the Keyboard by Victor Chapin. Includes chapter length biographies of Johann Christian Bach, Muzio Clementi, Jan Dussek, Johann Cramer, Johann Hummel, John FIeld, Karl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Louis Gottschalk, Anton Rubinstein, Teresa Carreno, Paderewski, Ferruccio Busoni, and Artur Schnabel.

Piano fiction:
Anatole and the Piano by Eve Titus. Anatole, the conductor of the Mouse Symphony Orchestra, goes down inside a grand piano. Picture book.
Nate the Great and the Musical Note by Marjorie Sharmat. Nate the Great, junior detective, solves a musical mystery.
Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Practicing the Piano by Peggy Gifford. Easy chapter book.
A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban. Zoe dreams of playing the piano at Carnegie Hall—if she can just get her parents to spring for lessons. however, the tricot the music store doesn’t turn out exactly the way Zoe had envisioned. Can she become a star with her new Perfectone D-60 organ?
Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. Bud Caldwell sets out for Grand Rapids, Michigan to find his long-lost father, the great jazz musician Herman Calloway and his band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression. Newbery Award book.
The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr. YA fiction about a teen piano prodigy who confounds her family and the concert world by suddenly quitting piano.
A Small Rain and A Severed Wasp by Madeleine L’Engle. Two of my favorite novels by Ms. L’Engle, about concert pianist Katherine Forrester, first as a teenager, then as an elderly, and quite famous, grande dame. Adult fiction.

The Splintered Light by Ginger Johnson

Sep4

Giving thought to how the world, the universe, we live in was created with so many varied elements of sound, light, taste, smell, invention, and shape is not a bad exercise in gratitude and appreciation for the vibrancy and diversity of our world. Ginger Johnson’s The Splintered Light leads the reader on a journey of pondering the immense creativity and inventiveness of a God who could create this world ex nihilo, out of nothing. And yet it’s a story, not a sermon, as Ishmael, the protagonist of this story, learns more about the Commons, a place where the different halls (schools) of Color, Sound, Gustation, Manufactory, Scent, Shape and Motion work together to create posticums, worlds for the colonization of their creators.

“Posticum means ‘back door.’ It’s a room for creation that opens up in the stone wall of the Commons. Back home is a posticum, too, but you’d never know it. Color Master told me it was one of the first. All the oldest posticums are worn out and run-down and only have oval sheep and round chickens. The sheep and chickens in the newer posticums are more refined. Plus, they have all kinds of other creatures as well. That’s how you know the age of posticums.”

Ishmael only left home to find his brother Luc and bring him back to help Mam and the family on the farm, but when he does find Luc in the Commons, Luc is unwilling to leave. And Ishmael himself is fascinated by the new sights and possibilities he glimpses in the many halls and schools of the Commons. The Hall of Hue, where Luc lives and works, also welcomes Ishmael as an apprentice of exceptional promise, but Ishmael is determined to return home and to bring Luc with him, after just one more day, and then another, and then another . . .

It’s hardly an insult to say of this debut novel that when I reached the end I was disappointed that there wasn’t more. I really would like to know what happened to Ishmael and his friends after the posticum closed and the stones rested. Maybe I should use my own creativity and imagine it for myself.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to whatever might come next from this talented new writer, and I really like the fact that she sprinkles lines from one of my favorite poems throughout this book about the diverse and variegated world(s) in which we live and breathe and move and have our being:

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manly Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

And this TED talk that I saw the other day seems to serendipitously belong alongside The Splintered Light:

Oh, today is the official publication date for The Splintered Light.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Born on This Day: Joan Aiken

Sep4

Joan Aiken, b.September 4, 1924, d.January 4, 2004.

She was the daughter of American poet, Conrad Aiken, and her mother was Canadian, later married to yet another famous writer, Martin Armstrong. Her older sister was also an author, so the writing gene seems to have run in the family.

Joan Aiken was homeschooled by her mother until she was twelve years old. Then, she attended a girls’ school for about four years, and then she began to write. She finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen. She never attended university. She published over a hundred books in many different genres. Homeschool success story, anyone?

Her books are quite well-written, intriguing, and imaginative. The children’s books that she is most famous for, the Wolves Chronicles, are not going to be to everyone’s taste. They’re rather Dickensian, alternate history, with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe.

Take, for instance, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. It’s creepy and perilous. It’s set in a sort of alternate Georgian England in which there are dangerous wolves everywhere, and everyone knows how to shoot them for self-protection, even children. Add in a villainous governess, a duplicitous lawyer, an orphan sent to a Dickensian school, and a ship lost at sea, and you’ve got Gothic for children. Just scary enough to be fun, but everything works out in the end. The other books in the series are Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966), The Whispering Mountain (1968), The Stolen Lake (1981), Dangerous Games (1999), The Cuckoo Tree (1971), Dido and Pa (1986), Is Underground (1992), Cold Shoulder Road (1995), Midwinter Nightingale (2003), and The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005).

Then, there’s second series for children, the Arabel and Mortimer books, which begins with Arabel’s Raven and continues on with twelve more volumes. (Ms. Aiken was obviously a fan of long series of books with the same fantastic setting.) I’ll read that one someday, after I finish all of the Wolves Chronicles.

Ms. Aiken was also a Janeite, and she wrote several books that were sequels to or take-offs on Jane Austen’s novels. I’d like to read one of those one day.

More about Joan Aiken:
Happy Birthday, Celebrating Joan Aiken.
Review of Mansfield Park Revisited by Joan Aiken at the blog Diary of an Eccentric.
Joan Aiken’s website.

Saturday Review of Books: August 25, 2018

Aug24

“It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.” ~~Vincent Van Gogh

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read.

Saturday Review of Books Participants

1. Glynn (Hear the Echo)
2. Glynn (Murder in the Cathedral)
3. Glynn (What Can We Know About God?)
4. Glynn (Fire in the Thatch)
5. Sick Heart River by John Buchan
6. Foxes and Fairy Tales (Not Your Villian)
7. Foxes and Fairy Tales (The Hero’s Guide…)
8. Foxes and Fairy Tales (Spinning Silver/)
9. Michele – Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, Chapter 8

10. Michele – The Child from the Sea by Elizabeth Goudge
11. Michele – In His Image by Jen Wilkin
12. Barbara H. (Full Assurance)
13. Barbara H. (Reshaping It All)
14. Barbara H. (Before We Were Yours)
15. Soulful Lemonade (Falling for You/True to You by Becky Wade)
16. Becky (Rocket Men)
17. Becky (The Hazel Wood)
18. Barbara H. (The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place: The Long-Lost Home)

19. Susanne@LivingToTell (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry)
20. Reading World (1876)
21. Susanne@LivingToTell (The Lost Art of Mixing )
22. Beckie@ByTheBook (The House at Saltwater Point)
23. Beckie@ByTheBook (Darkwater Secrets)
24. Ari @ Books. Libraries. Also, cats.
25. Elizabeth @ Silver’s Reviews (SOLD ON A MONDAY)
26. Elizabeth @ Silver’s Reviews (THE DAISY CHILDREN)

Learn more about Saturday Review of Books here.

This Dear-Bought Land by Jean Latham

Aug23

“This dear bought land with so much blood and cost, hath only made some few rich, and all the rest losers.” ~John Smith, Virginia Colony, 1624

In 1607 fifteen year old Davy Warren joins the sailors “before the mast” as the expedition sails to found a colony in Virginia. As Davy’s father says, Davy’s participation in the expedition is inevitable since “every ship that ever sailed for the glory of England has carried a Warren.”

However, when young David meets the bold and bellowing Captain John Smith, and when Davy finds out what a sailor’s life is really like, he has a choice: grow up and face danger and hardship like a man or give up and go home. In fact, the choice presents itself over and over again as the founding of Jamestown becomes an exercise in survival punctuated by Indian attacks, starvation, disease, and violence and thievery among the settlers themselves. David goes back and forth from hero-worship to hatred for the man who manages, by hook or by crook, to hold the colony together, Captain John Smith.

John Smith was an enigmatic character: was he a born leader or a blustering liar? Or both? Many of the stories that he wrote down about his own life seem a little too big and heroic to be true, but some of those seemingly inflated stories turn out to have been very little, if at all, embellished. As a young man, John Smith was a mercenary, captured by the Ottoman Turks, sold into slavery, and somehow escaped. He became a leader among the Jamestown settlers who trusted him enough to elect him “president” of the colony in 1608. Smith did require all of the settlers, even the gentlemen, to work, saying “He that will not work, shall not eat.”

This work of historical fiction by Newbery award winning author Jean Latham takes a charitable and admiring view of Captain John Smith and a mostly disparaging view of the other leaders of the Jamestown colony. Davy learns to be a man who can be depended upon. And the Jamestown colony itself survives in spite of sword, sickness, and famine. It’s a heroic, violent, tragic, and inspiring story, and this fictionalized version of true events is well worth reading for adults and for children ages ten and up.

“We called it a free land, didn’t we? It was not free. It was dear-bought. But we have paid the price.” ~Captain John Smith, This Dear-Bought Land.

Oh, by the way, this book is selling for $40.00 or $50.00, used, on Amazon and other used book selling sites. I am told that BJU Press is currently working to obtain the rights to reprint the book, so the price may go down. In the meantime, it is well worth the time and effort to at least borrow the book from your local library, if they have a copy, or via interlibrary loan. You can also borrow a digital copy at Internet Archive.

Charlotte Mason ideas in Children’s Sunday School and Bible Study

Aug17

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Charlotte Mason and her ideas about education as they apply to modern Sunday School or Bible study groups. These are some of the articles I’ve read. If you have any ideas on the subject or books to refer me to, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Ambleside Online: Sunday Schools

Beyond Dust Particles: AN Experiment in Sunday School by Amy Fiedler.

Living Charlotte Mason’s Ideas at VBS by Tammy Glaser.

The Science of Relations by Tammy Glaser.

Towards Sunday School with Charlotte Mason.

Code Word Courage by Kirby Larson

Aug16

First of all, if your middle grade reader wants to read a story about the Navajo code talkers of World War II, I would suggest Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two by Joseph Bruchac. In that book, a Navajo boy, Ned Begay, hears about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, disguises his age, and joins the Marines. Because of his ethnic background and fluency in the Navajo language, Ned is given a special assignment that tests his commitment, patriotism, and endurance.

Not that this new book by Kirby Larson, in her Dogs of World War II series, is bad. I just liked the Bruchac book better. Code Word Courage links a young girl, Billie, whose brother Leo is in the Marines, with Leo’s friend, Denny, who is Navajo and becomes a code talker. The link is a stray dog that Denny finds and brings to Billie to take care of. The dog named Bear manages to save the lives of both Denny and Billie’s new friend, Tito, in an eerie sort of out-of-body or teleportation mechanism that I didn’t totally understand or buy.

It was the ghost dog part that I didn’t like. I’m not opposed to ghost stories, but there was something about this one that just didn’t grab me. I thought I was reading straightforward historical fiction, and then Ms. Larson threw me for a loop by having the dog be able to travel, in some spiritual or supernatural way, from Billie’s home to Iwo Jima and back again. I wanted realistic, and I got telepathic or teleporting dog connection.

However, if you know that up front and if you want a World War II middle grade novel about Navajo code talkers, Marines, Iwo Jima, the homefront, Mexican Americans, prejudice, a dog, and an eleven year old girl, Code Word Courage is well written (Kirby Larson is a great writer) and compelling. I just wasn’t a fan of the denouement.

Other books in the Dogs of World War II series are: Dash, Liberty and Duke. I haven’t read them, but for those who are fascinated by both dogs and World War II, they would seem to be quite enticing.

The Day the Cowboys Quit by Elmer Kelton

Aug15

Management versus labor in the Texas Panhandle ranching country, c.1883. Mr. Kelton’s novel is a fresh and fictionalized take on the story of the labor movement, but it is grounded in a real event, the Canadian River cowboy strike of 1883.

Hugh Hitchcock, the protagonist and viewpoint character of the novel, is a trail boss of sorts for a comparatively small rancher trying to move into the big leagues, Charlie Waide. Hugh is a man caught in the middle. He and Charlie are old friends, but Hitchcock is also a working man, friends with many of the cowboys who work under him and sympathetic to their troubles and aspirations. When the big ranchers insist that Charlie Waide join them in imposing order, their order, on the wild and loose customs and laws of the north Texas ranching country, Hugh Hitchcock can see their side. Ranchers can’t afford to let rustlers, even from among their own cowboys, steal and re-brand their cattle. The big ranchers, many of them from the East, are in it for the money, and they don’t intend to pay the cowboys any more than they must. The cowboys themselves are a feisty lot, and many of them are much more loyal to their own interests than to that of their employers.

However, Hugh himself is trying, like many of the other cowboys, to build up his own small herd of cattle. And he sees that the cowboys are only trying to better themselves as they brand mavericks, cows that are orphaned and belong to whatever man can burn a brand on them first. Hugh also believes that the cowboys and the ranch owners are in this business together and that they owe each other loyalty and trust, that they should share in whatever profits are made. When push comes to shove, Hitchcock must decide where his loyalties lie and what to do about his own inner conflicts and indecision.

Hugh Hitchcock is such a good character, a peacemaker with an inner core of ethics and responsibility. And as the Dallas Morning News reviewer Walter B. Moore wrote, “Texas cowboys think, act and talk like Texas cowboys in this novel.” (There is some cursing in the novel, but not that much, certainly not more than would be probable given the characters and setting.)I have read three or four novels by Kelton now, and I definitely plan to read more. His novels are my kind of Western, not at all formulaic or ridiculous in their portrayal of Texas and its history. Kelton’s cowboys have their own cowboy slang, but they are people just like people anywhere else in the world. I can’t say the same for another highly praised and best-selling Texas novel.

My next Elmer Kelton novel will be Good Old Boys, another story about dealing with change in the ranching country of West Texas. My favorite Kelton novel so far is The Time It Never Rained, but The Day the Cowboys Quit is a close second.

Coot Club by Arthur Ransome

Aug14

This book is Swallows and Amazons, Book #5, but it contains none of the original Swallows or the Amazons. So, if you’re looking for Swallows John, Susan, Titty, and Roger or for Amazons Nancy and Peggy Blackett, you’ll have to skip this book. But don’t.

In Coot Club, The D’s, Dick and Dot learn to sail. In Winter Holiday the D’s were introduced, and they were able to have some grand adventures on the ice, but no sailing. In this book, Dick and Dot go to visit a family friend, Mrs. Barrable, on her boat in the north of England, downriver from Wroxham on the River Bure.

“Arthur Ransome visited Wroxham in the 1930s. In his book Coot Club (1934) he describes the busy scene on the river at Wroxham Bridge with numerous boats – a wherry, punts, motor cruisers and sailing yachts – jostling for a mooring.” ~Wikipedia, Wroxham.

When they arrive at Mrs. Barrable’s boat, the Teasel, the D’s, who were expecting to spend their visit sailing up and down the river, find out that Mrs. Barrable has invited them strictly to keep her company, not enough crew for sailing a boat the size of the Teasel. The disappointment is crushing, especially since Dorothy and Dick were hoping to return to the Lake District and the Swallows and Amazons as seasoned sailors. Nevertheless, Dick and Dot determine to make the best of their visit, and DIck is particularly interested in bird-watching. At the beginning of the story, on the train, they meet a local boy, Tom Dudgeon, and they soon find that he is the key to all sorts of adventures. Tom has a small boat of his own, the Titmouse, and even more importantly, Tom is a member of the Bird Protection Society aka the Coot Club, and he and his friends Port and Starboard, along with three boys nicknamed “The Death and Glories”, are particularly concerned with the birds called coots who are nesting along the river.

When Tom and the twins Port and Starboard and the Death and Glories all get together with Dick and Dot and Mrs. Barrable, sailing becomes not only possible but absolutely necessary since Tom has gotten into trouble while protecting the coots nest from a bunch of Hullabaloos, rude and careless holiday boaters, reminiscent of characters out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The Hullabaloos are searching for the boy who cast their boat adrift in the night. Tom is in hiding from the Hullabloos and their noisy boat with its incessant phonograph playing pop hits of the 1930’s. Dick and Dot simply want to learn to sail. And Mrs. Barrable turns out to have an adventurous spirit, too, despite her age.

If you’ve read other Swallows and Amazons adventures and if what appeals is the sailing and the “simply messing about in boats”, then Coot Club has that aspect in spades. It’s also got Port and Starboard to stand in for the Blackett girls, Dick with his knack for coming up with inventive ideas, Dot and her stories, and a new hero, Tom, who’s the classic plucky English schoolboy adventurer.

I’ve already read number six in this series of books, Pigeon Post, which features Dick and Dot together again with the Swallows and Amazons, but again no sailing. So, my next book is #7, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.

The Summer of Broken Things by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Aug13

I can’t really talk about this book without spoilers, so be warned. This review will reveal at least some of the secrets that the book itself reveals slowly and carefully.

I also don’t believe in surrogacy, which is what the book is about in the final analysis. Surrogate mothers, hired wombs, remind me of Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, and of Rachel’s and Leah’s maidservants having children for Rachel and Leah and Jacob. It was a bad idea then, and it remains a procedure fraught with pitfalls and possible physical and psychological harm to both the surrogate mother and to the “recipients’ of the fruit of her womb. I think The Summer of Broken Things is meant to paint a sympathetic picture of both the woman who chooses to become a surrogate and the parents, father and mother, who benefit from or take advantage of the surrogate mother’s ability to carry a pregnancy to term. However, coming from my own place of conviction about this practice, I found myself reading the book as a cautionary tale. Finding out about one’s birth story as a teenager and finding that that birth story includes surrogacy is a difficult and perhaps mind-shattering discovery.

So, to return to the beginning of the book, Avery’s father is taking her to Spain for the summer. Many things about this trip of a lifetime seem a little off: Avery doesn’t want to go. She would rather spend the summer at soccer camp. Avery’s mother is acting strangely about the trip. Avery’s dad hires a paid companion for Avery, a girl named Kayla whom Avery knows, but not well. Kayla and Avery have very little in common. Avery is rich; Kayla is poor. Avery is a city girl and well-traveled; Kayla is from a small town, and she’s never travelled. Avery is spoiled and entitled; Kayla is altruistic and self-effacing.

Margaret Peterson Haddix’s books are a bit hit or miss with me. I read her Shadow Children series several years ago, and although it became somewhat repetitious around about the third or fourth book in the series, I liked the premise very much. I enjoyed The Shadow Children series, The Missing series, and her stand alone novels such as Leaving Fishers or Double Identity. However, her Under Their Skin series about robots and artificial intelligence was poorly written, unbelievable, and ridiculous. Even in the books that I liked, her characters tend to edge towards the borders of stock and predictable. Avery and Kayla are interesting characters, and there is some growth in each of them as they confront the secrets from their shared past.

I would recommend the book for teens who like to think about current ethical issues and family dynamics. It’s a decent story, but not great or enduring.