For those of you who read my SmallWorld Reads blog, this is a double-posting as this post seems applicable to both the reading world and the homeschooling world (Of course, the homeschooling world is nearly always also part of the reading world, but the converse isn't necessarily true!)

Anyway, we spent much of Sunday in the Smokies—the perfect Father's Day gift for Dr. H. The day was absolutely perfect in every way. Having these beautiful mountains 20-30 minutes away is amazing. I often forget that the Great Smoky Mountain National Park is the most visited national park in the U.S., with 9 million visitors each year. We used to avoid going to the Smokies on weekends from June-October because the traffic can be bumper-to-bumper, and that is not a pleasant way to spend one's day in the mountains. But we know lots of off-the-beaten path places now that are quick to get to and very quiet, and there is just nothing like being in the mountains by the river on a hot summer day.

If you haven't visited the Smokies, please don't let the 9 million tourists scare you off. Only 1 millions of them actually do more than drive through; the other 8 million spend most of their time doing stuff in Gatlinburg. If you want a serene mountain experience, you may want to consider avoiding the touristy and heavily trafficked Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. There are many other entrances to the park that are quiet and beautiful, including Townsend, the tiny town just south of us.

I'm going to share a few of our favorite books about the Smokies. My favorite kids books are these two written by Lisa Horstman: The Troublesome Cub and The Great Smoky Mountain Salamander Ball. Another must-have if you are visiting the park is Who Pooped in the Park? (These are available for all the national parks, so be sure to get the Smokies-specific one.) I love this beautiful Appalachian ABCs, and Cynthia Rylant's When I Was Young in the Mountains --the story of a childhood in the mountains--is pure poetry. Speaking of poetry, Nikki Giovanni is from Knoxville, and I love the picture book based on her poem "Knoxville, Tennessee."

For young adults (and adult readers, too), Catherine Marshall's Christy is a classic. This is the story of a privileged young society woman who goes to teach school to the mountain kids in the Smokies. For younger readers, there is a good series of chapter books based on the novel Christy; my 10-year-old loves these books. She also loves the Mandie books by Lois Gladys Leppard, which all take place in and around the Smokies.

I've noticed that the Southern Literature challenge is a popular challenge this summer in the book blog community. I am a huge fan of Southern Lit, both classic and contemporary. A few of contemporary authors whose novels take place in and around the Smokies are Sharyn McCrumb, Adriana Trigiani, and Robert Morgan. In She Walks These Hills, McCrumb weaves a modern-day mystery in with a mountain legend. I'm not crazy about McCrumb's Elizabeth MacPherson mystery books, but I absolutely love her Southern mountain novels. Others include If I Ever Return, Pretty Peggy-O; The Ballad of Frankie Silver; The Songcatcher; The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter; and a couple others. While each novel stands on its own, many of the same characters appear in all the novels.

Adriana Trigiani has a collection of three novels--Big Stone Gap, Big Cherry Holler, and Milk Glass Moon--that take place over in Virginia. They're not exactly Smoky Mountain lit, but the characters and dialect would fit right in here. I've just noticed that there is a fourth in the series now, Home to Big Stone Gap, which I'll be adding to my TBR list.

Robert Morgan is one of my favorite Southern writers. He is much more lyrical than Trigiani and McCrumb. I haven't read all his books, including his newest one Boone, but I love what I've read: This Rock, The Truest Pleasure, Gap Creek, and The Hinterlands. His characters, dialect, setting--everything is beautiful and true to the area. You can imagine Morgan as an oral storyteller in each of these books.

One more fascinating novel that takes place in the Smoky Mountains is Francine Rivers' The Last Sin Eater. The story is about the old folk custom of a community "sin eater," who is said to absolve the residents of their sins by "eating them." I had never heard of this odd custom until reading this book, and I found the concept fascinating.

All of the above reading material provides a great introduction to this unique mountain area. I would be remiss if I didn't recommend a couple of great guides for once you are actually in the Smokies. Dr. H. has two favorites. Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains by Kenneth Wise is his favorite for family-type hikes and excursion. For tougher, more backcountry hikes, he recommends Hiking Trails of the Smokies, which is published by the GSMNP service.

Have I whet your appetite for the Great Smoky Mountains? Even if you can't come for a visit, you can get a taste of the Smokies in these books. And for some amazing photographs of where we live, visit my friend Lynn's website here. Unbelievable.

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I've decided to do a little spring cleaning here at SmallWorld. I've felt lately that I'd like to keep my book reviews and book talk a bit more separate from my family life here in SmallWorld. I was nice and comfortable in my own little isolated world, but now that I'm participating in more book talk, somehow it feels better to have a different place for all that. I'll still post link to book reviews here and of course continue double posting on kids' books and curriculum reviews, but I'll be doing the majority of my own book reviews at SmallWorld Reads.

Come and say howdy to me there! I'm still in the getting organized and transferring phase, but I put out my welcome mat today. Be sure to find the subscribe button at SmallWorld Reads, too!

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This isn't something that happens to me very often: I was browsing the "new arrivals" shelves at the library a couple of weeks ago while the kids had a snack in the cafe, and I pulled out this book by Susan Breen. I almost stuck it back on the shelf, thinking about the stack of to-be-read books already by my bed, but I was intrigued.

And then I was so happy when I finished reading the mentally taxing Jayber Crow and started in with The Fiction Class. What an excellent book this turned out to be! The story centers on Arabella, a struggling writer who teaches an evening writing class to adults; the writing class itself; and on Arabella and her mother. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of writing: character, plot, theme, etc. and how this relates to Arabella, her class, and her mother. Breen's writing is concise and matter-of-fact, and I like that. The characters are well-rounded and somehow quite familiar, and I like that. Sometimes, being a small-town girl, I find it difficult to relate to novels that feature New York City-types; but Breen's characters could have been transported to anywhere and still made sense to me. (And here I need to clarify that, although I did indeed grow up in New York, I grew up in a small town upstate, which has little if no similarity to New York City except perhaps in the abundance of excellent pizza and wings.)

I loved that the actual writing assignments are included at the end of each chapter. For example, the writing assignment for point of view:

Think about a family gathering: a holiday, a birthday, a funeral. Write about that gathering in the first person from the point of view of a child.

I wished for chunks of time to do each assignment myself. Perhaps I will make that time soon. I did a little searching about the book because I wondered if somewhere in the blogosphere there might be a place where people are doing Breen's exercises on their blogs. I haven't found that yet, but I did find Susan Breen's blog and was inspired to see the tagline on her blog: "publishing a first novel after 25 years of marriage, 4 children, and hundreds of rejections." (Couldn't I at least turn out my poetry chapbook in the next 6 years?)

Turns out that Breen has a monthly contest at her website  where she asks for submissions on a certain topic. For the April/May contest, she asks: Write a story using this as the first sentence:  “Why are you wearing that?” The winner  receives a free autographed copy of her book. Will I submit an entry to this or any future contests on Breen's website? Perhaps. And if a book can pull me out of my writing stupor and inspire me to actually write more than a daily blog, well. That says a lot.

But the books isn't just for writers or writing teachers. This is just a great book, and I hope to see more by Susan Breen.

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Yes, I am celebrating: I finally finished reading Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow. I am pretty sure that I deserve something: a bag of caramels, some Marble Slab ice cream, or a check for $1000.

Honestly, I am stumped as to how to review this book. I mean, check out this introduction to the book on Amazon.com:

The questions who and what and how and why are no doubt useful and occasionally even noble in their place. But for Wendell Berry, whose spare and elegant prose has long testified to the rural American values of thrift and frugality, four interrogatives must seem a waste, when one will do. Where is the ultimate qualifier, the sine qua non, for both the author and his characters. Place shapes them and defines them; the winding Kentucky River and the gentle curves of the Kentucky hills find an echo in their lilting speech and brusque affections.

I don't even know what that means. First of all, I would not use the adjective "spare" to describe Wendell Berry's writing. Elegant, yes. Spare, no. Hemingway is spare. Faulkner is expansive. Berry lies closer to Faulkner on that scale.  Berry's writing is carefully, beautifully, even majestically crafted; this is the ultimate poetic novel. One reviewer on amazon.com writes: "This book is about many things, but should be read mostly for the sake of experiencing Berry's really fine writing." I absolutely second that assessment. Berry offers profound insights and wisdom wrapped in exquisite language. Really, the character of Jayber Crow himself, former barber of the tiny Port William, is tertiary.

The story itself, on the basic plot level, is about the life of Jayber Crow and the rural town of Port William. But overriding this is the theme of what is lost with progress, and what is found in community. Living in an area that is forever being eaten by machinery, I know the ache of losing quiet beauty to big houses and faster ways of getting places. When you see the countryside bleeding red soil from its great gashes around here, you know how this is:

More than television, the interstate brought the modern world into Port William. More even than The Economy and The War, it carried the people of Port William into the modern world. It was a thing of unimaginable influence. People in Port William would find it handy to drive to work or to shop in Louisville. And Louisville would find it handy to grow farther out into the countryside. City lots would be carved out of farms, raising of course the price of farmland, so that urban people could enjoy the spaciousness of rural life while looking evening and morning at the rear ends of one another's automobiles.

And Berry surprised me with his insights into Christianity. I knew he advocated stewardship of the earth; I didn't know that he was tagged as a contemporary Christian writer. It was in the last half of this novel that Jayber Crow's spiritual journey becomes more pronounced, and I began folding down pages. Like Harper Lee in the magnificent To Kill a Mockingbird, Berry disposes of religious legalism and emphasizes the relational qualities taught by   Christ: take care of one another. Love your neighbor. Breathe deeply.

On Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don't attend altogether for religious reasons. I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream. I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don't want to argue with anybody about religious. I wouldn't want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I'm a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up here, over a cobble of quibbles. I am, I suppose a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.

Brilliant. And the exquisite poetry: cobble of quibbles!  Berry is remarkable, and yet  I can't say I truly enjoyed this novel. My personal assessment is I need Berry in smaller does than a 360-page novel. I need to read Berry more as a poet and an essayist, and perhaps as a short story writer, before I tackle another of his novels. He's too enormous for this season of my life, in which my reading is limited to an hour in the evening, when I often can scarcely stay awake. He deserves a more careful audience.

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Today' Heart of the Matter meme asks for our favorite books. I just happen to have a few lists handy. First, my all-time favorite book, here. Books I have never reviewed on my blog but are in the top tier included Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, RIchard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, John Steinbeck's East of Eden, and John Irving's The World According to Garp. I say "include" because I know I could walk to any bookshelf in my house, scan a few spines and hit myself for not including a certain book in that list.

For my Top 10 books read in 2007, click here. That was an exceptional year of books. I would add The Glass Castle and The Kite Runner to my Top 10 ever list.

For my Top 10 books read in 2006, click  here.  Again, 2006 was another great year, but I don't think I'd add any of the titles to my Top 10 list. Still, I'd read most of them again if I were a person who re-read books with frequency.

For my 2008-in-progress reading list, check out my sidebar about mid-way down. So far (well, besides To Kill a Mockingbird, of course), Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders and Stephanie Kallos' Broken for You are my favorites. But it's only the first of May, so I have several months of luxurious reading yet to come in this year.

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A commenter asked me a couple of weeks ago for suggestions for poetry to read to children. Before I list my favorite books written specifically for children, let me emphasize that you don't have to stick with "kids' poetry" when reading to your children. In other words, some poets write specifically for a younger audience--much of Jack Prelutsky, for example. But poetry doesn't have to rhyme and be about cute kitties or dog poop to appeal to children (although rhyming bodily functions certainly can heighten a child's appreciation of poetry).

Along those lines, I highly recommend A Treasury of Poetry for Young People. This contains poems selected with a younger audience (5th grade and up)  in mind by some of the best-known poets: Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  There is a two or three page introduction of each author before his/her section of poetry. The illustrations are simple and beautiful. Notes at the bottom of each page give a very brief commentary on each poem. For example, at the end of the familiar Frost poem "The Road Not Taken," the note simply states: "We all know the feel of a cool autumn day, when we can shuffle our feet through fallen leaves and kick up the smells of the season. This is a poem about such a walk, about coming to a fork in the path, and about making choices in our lives."

For a wider variety of poets, I recommend the Poetry for Young People Series. These books are also published by Sterling Publishing, like the one above, but each books features a different poet. Scholastic often has these titles in their monthly sale fliers for home or school. Featured authors include: Robert Browning, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and all the ones mentioned above.

One more collection I really love for kids: The Oxford Illustrated Book of American Children's Poems, edited by Donald Hall. This one takes a chronological approach to American poetry, beginning with the Native American cradle song, "Chant to the Fire-Fly" and ending with the contemporary poetry of Sandra Cisneros and Janet S. Wong. I love the diversity offered in this collection: poetry isn't all written by white guys and reclusive women. And one of my personal favorites is included here: Nikki Giovanni's "Knoxville, Tennessee." Even if you don't live around these parts, you and your children can surely relate to Giovanni's ode to the pure bliss of summertime.

Of course, you can get out your old copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and just pick out age-appropriate poems from some of the world's best poets of all time. What? You don't have an old Norton's Anthology? Run to your nearest used bookstore or Goodwill and pick one up. Please. You never know when you might need to read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

 I grow old. . . .  I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trouser rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.

But I digress. Moving on to poetry written specifically for children, I must present my four favorites: Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Eve Merriam, and Valerie Worth. Does anyone not know Shel Silverstein's works? Silverstein, who died in 1999, is the king of children's poetry. His website is great fun, and you can read all about his works there. You local library will have every book; better yet, buy at least a couple. No family library can possibly be complete with A Light in the Attic or Where the Sidewalk Ends. If your kids hear the word "poetry" and cover their ears, try reading "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out' to them. They will want to hear more.

Jack Prelutsky also has a gift for luring children in with the absurd. He knows how to engage children with the silly, absurd, and irresistibly disgusting:

Slime, slime,
Savory slime,
you're luscious and succulent
any old time,
there's hardly a thing
that is nearly as grand
as a dollop of slime
in the palm of my hand.

Prelutsky also has a great website,  where you can read all about him and his books and get teaching ideas, too.

The poet Eve Merriam loved language--loved the sound of words alone and in combination with other words. When I read her poetry, I imagine how carefully she chose each word. From her widely anthologized "Lullaby":

Purple as a king's cape
Purple as a grape.
Purple for the evening
When daylight is leaving.
Soft and purry,
Gentle and furry,
Velvet evening-time.

I have a cassette tape of Merriam reading some of her poetry; when my oldest was little, this was one of his favorites. Check out your local library or amazon.com for poetry by Eve Merriam, including You Be Good and I'll Be Night and A Sky Full of Poems.

One last poet who might be less familiar but who also takes great care in crafting poetry: Valerie Worth.  In the wonderful All the Small Poems and Fourteen More,  Worth turns every day things--animal, vegetable and mineral--into exquisite works of art. This is a fantastic collection for teaching personification, metaphor and simile, and for emphasizing the power of observation and the craft of language.

The sun
is a leaping fire
too hot
to go near,
But it will still
lie down
in warm yellow squares
on the floor
lie a flat
quilt, where
the cat can curl
and purr.

This is just a tiny taste of the wonderful feast that is the world of poetry. Surf the internet and shuffle through the library bookshelves. If you had a bad experience with poetry in  your own schooling, try again--with your child. I promise, you'll both find something you love.

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Barefoot Books is a relatively new publisher, started in 1993 by moms Nancy Traversy and Tessa Strickland.  They describe their story and vision:

When you start out, no one has heard of you, and you wonder if anyone is going to listen to what you have to say. No one was publishing books quite like ours—would anyone buy them? We believed they would; we just had to find our way to parents and educators who shared our values. This is what we care about: first, we're convinced that it's never too early to introduce children to other cultures. We believe too that children can appreciate high-quality art, and enjoy the music as well as the meaning of language from a very early age.

I love books that feature different cultures, and Barefoot Books does this well. My first-grader loves three "travel" books: We're Sailing to Galapagos, We All Went on Safari, and We're Sailing Down the Nile. First of all, the books are gorgeous. The illustrations are bright and colorful without being too chaotic and cluttered. Each book gives geographical and cultural details in  fun, sing-song verses.

We're Sailing to Galapagos: A Week in the Pacific, is our favorite. The rhyming text introduced the wildlife of the Galapagos Islands, from albatrosses to lava crabs. Duncan loves the repeated chorus:
This book made me want to do a unit study on the Galapagos! The last several pages of the book give more detail about the Islands and its animal inhabitants.

We All Went on Safari: A Counting Journey Through Tanzania, is  beautiful counting/language/ culture/wildlife book. A group of Maasai people journey over Tanzanian grasslands and past acacia trees, counting various African animals--in both English and Swahili. Like the Galapagos book, this one devotes several pages at the end to information about the Maasai people, the Swahili language, and facts about Tanzania. This would be a great supplement to any study of African countries.

We're Sailing Down the Nile: A Journey Through Egypt is the least engaging of the three for us. Somehow the rhythm doesn't flow as well as the other two, and the illustrations weren't as engaging. I guess also, there is so much great material out there already about Egypt but not much about Tanzania and the Galapagos, so the first two books really stood out for me.

I think Barefoot Books will be a solid contender in the children's book market. The books are reminiscent of Usborne Books but with more of a cultural rather than historical focus--and the illustrations are more vibrant. I see on their site that, like Usborne, one can run a home-based business by selling Barefoot Books. I used to sell Usborne in this way and accumulated a wonderful library; if my children were younger, I'd consider selling Barefoot! They also have an affiliate program like Amazon. Don't be surprised if you see an affiliate button on my blog in a few days!
 

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Here in our own small world, we have been immersed in the Revolutionary War era for several weeks now. This  fabulous picture book written by Pamela Duncan Edwards and illustrated by Henry Cole really ties it all together in a way that was perfect for both my 1st and 5th graders. The story is actually told in imitation of the nursery rhyme "This is the house that Jack built," which sounds really silly, but it was incredibly effective. The narrative opens with "These are the leaves that grew on a bush in a far off land and became part of the Boston Tea Party" and builds from there, to ultimately lead to "These are Americans, independent and free..." In between the story of the prelude to the Revolutionary War is told. At the bottom of each page, a chorus of mice spout off more details about this time period. Sounds weird, I know, but those are smart little mice. And the illustrations are absolutely gorgeous. This is a book that needs to start being on all of the lists of "recommended reading for the Revolutionary War."

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