March Reading Notes … or Lack Thereof

A recent, very short, moment of reading in the car while one of the girls was at a freezing cold soccer practice.

So. February and March have both passed (or will by the end of the week), and I have very little to say for myself in what I have read of late. Our days have been FULL with school, soccer, softball practices (games haven’t started yet), and other mundane things like laundry and dishes, and reading time has been hard to come by. And when I say hard to come by, I mean that when I sit down with a book in the evening, it is entirely possible that I can’t keep my eyes open after about the second paragraph.

Ahem.

However, I am missing time in books. So this here is my reboot at some kind of plan for the next month on what I want to read! Surely there will be a small moment, in the sunshine, and someone’s soccer practice when I can pull out a book for a moment? : )

First, by way of review, we actually DID get a few things read in February, even though it doesn’t feel like it! (My big plans were here.)

• I finished the Reading to Know Bookclub selection, The Scarlet Letter, in early March, and never got around to really blogging it so there it is. I finished it. There was some skimming near the end, but I can check that one off my list.
• I purchased a used copy of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken on a whim and thought it was very interesting! A quirky mystery that reminded me of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place or The Mysterious Benedict Society. For the very inexpensive price that I paid for the used book, it was totally worth it. I’ll be hunting down book two one of these days.

And that all I have to say for myself for the past eight weeks.

HOWEVER, we have been on fire with reading aloud. I’ve shifted things up and we have been reading in our family room (a room in our house that gets very little use during the day because we’re normally upstairs) and it gets the best after-lunch sunshine. We pile on couches and have been getting in a solid hour of reading aloud after lunch on most days. Of late, we have finished:

• The Railway Children by E. Nesbit. LOVED this book. I was sorely tempted to read ahead of the girls but I didn’t. We’ll be reading more E. Nesbit aloud one of these days. (Or I may read it alone.) : )
• Winona’s Pony Cart by Maud Hart Lovelace. Not my favorite by the author of the wonderful Betsy-Tacy books, but we did enjoy reading it aloud together.
• The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne. I read Winnie the Pooh with N1 as one of if not the first chapter book we read together several years ago. We realized that we read that even before B was born and that meant we HAD to pull it off the shelf. Of note: the boy say in my lap and listened intently to this one. A first for him and a chapter book!

• We are currently reading Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown and it’s been delightful so far. We are reading both this book and Winona in conjunction with the March Reading to Know bookclub selection of any of the works of Maud Hart Lovelace. Betsy-Tacy is redeeming the lackluster Winona in my opinion. : )

• We’ve also started reading aloud as many evenings as we can (when nighttime activities don’t interfere). This is something that we have definitely been more off than on with over the years, but I was tipped off to an interview with Andrew Pudewa who is the director for the Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) by Sarah at Amongst Lovely Things. (N1 will be using his curriculum next year when she moved into the Essentials program (for grades 4-6) of Classical Conversations.) Nurturing Competent Communicators was well worth the $3 I paid for it and it has rekindled the read-aloud fire in this house. Anyway, all that to say … in the evenings we are reading Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by Ian Fleming. I was sent a review copy of this new version from Amazon and since I hadn’t read this (but have managed to see a Bond movie or two written by the same author) I decided we ought to see what his one and only children’s book is like. Three chapters in so far… : )

As far as goals for April, I want to laugh at the thought of making any. I am going to attempt No Name by Wilkie Collins (the Reading to Know March bookclub selection). We are going to finish our current Betsy-Tacy and CCBB and will move on to something else. Past that, I don’t know. I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring the other night and am about two chapters in to that, but that takes some serious time with the book to get any kind of forward movement with it and I just don’t know that I have that to devote to Tolkien right now. Maybe this summer. : )

Lots of reading aloud to the boy right now – thankful that I have two other (N1 and N2) readers that will help me keep up with his request for Mon-ter Tucks! Again!

If Amy hasn’t had a baby this week, I’ll be linking up with Read-Aloud Thursday!

January 2013 Reading Plans
February 2013 Reading Plans