Blah. Reading slump has taken hold again. Since my last post I've finished
So Many Books, So Little Time,
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke--interesting, but none of the characters seemed fully realized, and neither did the modern setting--a re-read of
Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville (it only took an hour--it's a short, simple, uncomplicated book, and I adored it when I was nine years old. It hasn't lost its charm, but I knew even then that it wasn't great literature),
Belles on Their Toes by two of the Gilbereth children (I can never remember which)--the sequal to
Cheaper by the Dozen, the story of a very large and unique family. These books are particularly appealing to us because we
are a very large and unique family (though less than half as large as the Gilbereths were/are--I think most of the Gilbereth children are still living, and the mother may be too), and the writing is very warm and humorous.
I've also gotten halfway through
The Silmarillion (much farther than my two previous attempts), but I've come to a standstill because the second volume of CDs has been checked out and hasn't come back in. I finally figured out that my problem with the Sil has always been that I read too fast, and sometimes I fail to absorb important information that who is the father of who, or didn't mentally sort out which name belonged to which group, and I rapidly got lost and repeatedly had to go back and figure things out. Listening to the audiobook forced me to slow down, while simultaneously reading the text forced me to absorb and retain.
In the meantime, I've just started reading
The Road to Somwhere: Travels with a Young Boy through an Old World by James Dodson, a memoir about the author's two-month trip around the world with his ten-year old son (I did not get a world tour when I was ten, though when I was twelve we were shipped off to Japan for three years). So far (page thirty-nine) it's good-natured and humorous and interesting, as long as the author doesn't get sidetracked into pondering the meaning of life (a bad habit of memoir writers).