The Tyranny of Socks

Actually currently reading some articles and an undergraduate essay. But aside from those...

On the tablet: Adrian Goldsworthy, Vindolanda, which is one of those historical novels aimed at men who like stories about fighting. There are a lot of these around to do with Rome. This one is OK, even though you can kind of see all the plot developments coming. But Goldsworthy knows his stuff and has used a lot of evidence from Vindolanda and the rest of the region to structure the story he's telling, so the more you know the more "easter eggs" you find in it. It's not a genre I seek out, particularly, because the extended descriptions of battle and single combat get boring after a while, but every now and then one of them holds my attention. This is a pretty good example of the genre.

On paper: Richard Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian, which I came back to after putting it down for a while because I was so upset about Beckendorf! I'm enjoying it, but not as much as I enjoyed the Magnus Chase and Kane Chronicles books. I'm not sure whether or not I will go on to the Heroes of Olympus series after this; they sound a bit like more of the same, which is the kind of thing Spartacus likes, but which might be a bit too much for me.

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And now, internet, I turn to you for help. I need recommendations for books for Spartacus, ideally at the Richard Riordan reading level, and ideally with funny and fantastic elements. They need to fulfil the following criteria:

1. have a Jewish main or major secondary character. Extra points for a male character; I'm not sure Spartacus really wants to read All of a Kind Family, although I loved those books.

2. not be set in the Second World War, about the Holocaust, or a Very Special Lesson about anti-semitism.

2a. For books set in the ancient world, for the Jewish characters not to turn out to be secretly Christian. I'm looking at you, Caroline Lawrence.

3. [hard level] be available in print in the United Kingdom.

4. [deity level] be set in the United Kingdom.

I know that there are some very well-read people in my DW circle, but feel free to link this request elsewhere -- many of you get many more eyes on your posts than I do.

But not mine. Spartacus' friends are all reading Harry Potter -- although everyone seems to be at different points in the series, so they all know how it ends. He is about 2/3 of the way through Order of the Phoenix; we'd earlier read up to Goblet of Fire but the end was really scary so we stopped there. But somehow being able to talk to other people about the book has made him willing to continue even through the scary bits, or the parts that make him angry (like everything Umbridge does). Today on the way in to school one of his friends told him that there was a chapter in Deathly Hallows called "The Battle of Hogwarts".

In some ways it is quite fun seeing the books through his eyes (we still read to him at night, and then he reads for about half an hour himself, so I am getting about 10% of the book) -- he HATES Snape, which is fair enough because Snape is an absolutely terrible teacher, and can't understand why Dumbledore insists on having so many bad teachers at Hogwarts. Umbridge is also THE WORST. But he also loves all the silly bits -- the jokes and pratfalls -- and it is a bit of a relief not to have to worry about all the ways the worldbuilding doesn't really add up.

In a development that will surprise exactly no one who knew me in real life as a child, we have doing The Lord of the Rings with Spartacus -- half reading them to him at bedtime, half watching the movies. We finished (watching) The Return of the King today, and I think will have to find something new to read, because he has not been totally charmed by the books, especially -- they are long on descriptions of scenery, and short on epic battle sequences. Also, it takes everybody a very long time to get anywhere; I feel like I now know where GRRM got his "wandering at length through the countryside without anything much happening" bug. As a love letter first to the English countryside and then to the landscape of Tolkien's imagination they are perfect -- but I think that I will not be totally sad to move on to something else, and maybe S will come back to them at some later date. (I read them at his age, but I had a high tolerance for reading things I don't understand.)

Reading long chinks of them aloud was also interesting -- Tolkien is not the greatest prose stylist, especially at the start. Towards the end the epic rhythms take over, but when he wants to write poetry he writes actual poetry, and his prose is just prose. Of the authors I've read aloud the one which really struck me was Sutcliffe, when we read The Eagle of the Ninth -- she also goes in for long descriptions of the scenery, but my mouth doesn't stumble over her words the way it did over the Lord of the Rings at points. Richard Adams, also, in Watership Down, was a smooth read. I was surprised, really, that Tolkien proved so difficult. Even so, I have a strong preference for the books over the movies.

The problem now is what to read next. S has chicken pox so we are stuck at home together for the next few days and will have to rely on something we have at home. (Other things we have read to Spartacus: Rowling, Shakespeare, and Plutarch -- don't judge us! -- but I would like something which is not hundreds and hundreds of pages.)

If I'm going to start posting more, then I should definitely post on February 29! Our tiny local paper ran a story about a guy who was 72 years old and just having his 18th birthday. (Our tiny local paper is pretty good, considering its size, but it can be hard for them to get more than about 8 pages of news, not counting sports. And that's using the term news loosely.)

It is possible that my awareness the date is a side effect of having a seven-year-old. Further side effects to follow, because Spartacus is really interested in animals in general, and dinosaurs and evolution in particular, so we have been reading a lot of books about these topics. Since he is hardly the only child to be interested in this kind of thing, here are some notes on what we've been reading.

Peter S. Dickinson, The Kin. This is somewhere between fantasy and historical fiction, I think, since it's about a group of early homo sapiens, and so D. has had to invent their culture more or less from whole cloth. He clearly draws on his knowledge of Africa in doing so, which sometimes works well and sometimes makes me wonder whether he overestimates the willingness of hunter-gatherer groups which aren't being pressured by agriculturalists to inhabit marginal land. The novel is made up of four shorter novels, each told from the point of view of one of the children in the core group -- they have survived the destruction of their tribal network by an invading group, and the novel follows their adventures as they try to survive and to create a new social group. There are actually five children in the core group, three girls and two boys, but one of them, Tinu, doesn't get her own novella, although she is central to the plot of each of the others. ( further notes below )

Spartacus also has been reading the Dinosaur Cove series by Rex Stone; these are aimed pretty squarely at his exact age bracket and interests, so he mostly reads them to himself now. They're about two boys who discover a portal through time in the back of a cave, and go on to have adventures in various different periods and encounter various kinds of extinct animals -- mostly dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles. They have a faithful pet, a wannanosaurus, who somehow turns up no matter when they go. Overall these are pretty fun for what they are. My attempt to suggest to Spartacus that he could dress up as one of the boys for World Book Day fell on deaf ears, however, so now I have to figure out how to make a pterosaur costume. (Because of Nosy, the pterosaur in Dinosaur Trouble, by Dick King-Smith, which Spartacus also enjoyed. At one point he suggested going as the lynx from White Fang, which I should have agreed to since I already have a lynx costume from dress-up-as-an-endangered-animal day, but it seemed like such a weird idea, especially because we didn't finish White Fang; I thought it was too gory and violent.)

Our patterns now is that we read him a chapter or two at bedtime, and then he reads for another half-hour or so before turning out the lights; the result is that I often have no idea what is going on overall. But I went back and reread the end of The Abominables, by Eva Ibbotsen, to find out how it all worked out (look, this book totally belongs to the theme if you assume that Yeti are not-actually-extinct giant apes.) It is just charming, about two children who have to rescue a family of Yeti by bringing them to England, to live on the estate of their previous guardian. One thing I found very odd, though, was that although it was published only after Ibbotsen's death, it was very clearly set in the 1970s. Maybe. Or maybe all children's books actually happen in the 1970s?

Also noted: the series of Willard Price sequels (we are currently re-reading Shark Adventure). Spartacus likes these a lot, as they have to do with rescuing endangered animals. They do run to comedy foreigners, so may not be to everyone's taste (although the comedy foreigners are not always comedy foreigner villains, if that makes sense.) These also feature a boy-girl pair of cousins. The original series, about the fathers of these two children, is being reissued and I am tempted to pick them up for Spartacus to look at.

And now: teaching.

Last night at dinner Spartacus told me how Gaius Marcius captured the town of Corioli* with his electric fire-y lightsaber, and then we spent a while talking about whether Marcius was better at using a sword than Westley or Inigo Montoya.

*On the map he drew, it's spelled Cory-owly.

Some of you may know that I call my son Spartacus here in part because A. lobbied hard for us to actually name him Spartacus (for variants of "lobbying hard" that involve knowing that I would never let that happen). Somehow this came out at dinner the other night, and now Spartacus is demanding to be called Spartacus in real life.

You can imagine my attempts to explain this to his nursery school teacher, after he told her that he had a different name now.

For the record, I still have lots of Dreamwidth invite codes, if anyone wants one.

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In other news, Spartacus has now realized that if he wants something he can't reach, he can move a chair over on his own, climb up onto the chair and get it. So much for all that child-proofing!

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I made meatloaf the other night. I don't usually like meatloaf, so I've never made it before, but this was delicious! I will do it again!

( recipe under here )

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I have finished A Dance With Dragons and will post on it later -- but in the meantime, has anyone else commented on it? I've seen sophia_helix's post, but that's the only one.

The background: Spartacus is really good* at playing with and especially kicking around a ball (any ball -- tennis ball, football, really anything that will roll). His footballing skills are something of a family joke, actually, and so, perhaps inevitably after the way England v Algeria went last night and Spartacus' who-cares-about-the-puppy-where's-my-ball act this morning, we have the following:

BH: Are you going to be England's great hope? Are you going to save the England team from humiliation someday?
me: Will you be a striker...
BH: or a midfielder?
me: Or will you play defense and headbutt people?
Spartacus, cheerfully: Headbutt people!

*Good for a 21-month-old, anyway. So, you know, perfectly plausible for England these days.

Recently things have been very stressful, but here are two things that amuse me:

Spartacus continues to babble to himself lots and lots, and one of his current favorites is something that sounds suspiciously like "ogi-ogi-ogi-ogi." And I haven't even told him about SurveyFail!

Also, while we were away he finally started to get teeth. Now he has four, two at the bottom and two at the top -- but the two at the top are the ones next to the front teeth. I have taken to calling him my little vampire baby!

Hi everyone! This is vaznetti, finally with a spare moment to update LJ to let you all know that I had my baby, a boy, 7 lbs 13 oz, on the 19th of September. He's absolutely beautiful, and given how much he wriggles around and how strong his grip is, I think I might as well keep calling him Spartacus on here!

We're both doing well -- we all are -- although of course I'm very tired and sleep is an issue!