books

What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved by John Mullan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s hard for me to resist a book about Jane Austen. And this one did not disappoint. Mullan raises all sorts of deceptively simple questions, from what the weather was to when and how the characters blush to how long the bereaved wear mourning. His answers reveal the genius of Austen’s subtle manipulation of the simple everyday happenings of life in 19th century Britain, and how even seemingly insignificant details shape and reveal her plots. Apparently, everything matters in Jane Austen.

Although this book did give me some additional historical insight, what I really enjoyed were the plot analysis and learning about how Austen invented literary devices to make the novel more powerful and greatly influenced later writers.… Read more

When I asked on Facebook for suggestions on organizing my home library, I was amused to find that multiple people suggested organizing the books by color. Now nobody is denying that a bookshelf organized by color is very pretty. But how do you find the books once you’ve organized them?

Maybe I just have too many books. When I got ready to do my organizing overhaul, I thought it might be fun to count. My off-the-cuff estimate was around 500. The grand total, though, after going through every room in the house, was 805 books. Not counting the 100-or-so library books in the house at any given moment.… Read more

A week or so ago I alluded to a major change-up in the way that we are doing homeschool. We recently ditched some books that weren’t working, and added a whole new list of wonderful books that so far seem pretty great.

Another aspect of the change is that we are doing more of our homeschooling together. I had always imagined having a separate stack of books for each child, and only doing the really obvious things like art and composer study together. But that was back in the days when we were having a child every two years or so, and weren’t going to stop until we got to five or six, like our parents.… Read more