Moominvalley in November (Tove Jansson)

A slow and moody story, unlike the other books in the series. A small group of misfits, each one for his own personal reason, converge on Moominvalley intent on finding or re-connecting with the Moomin family, but the Moomins are inexplicably absent. Slowly these anti-social creatures get used to living together and by the time they say goodbye, each one has found more or less exactly what they needed to find.

This was the final Moomin book Tove Jansson wrote, and it shows. It was a harder read than the other books so far, but in the end a rewarding one; and it lingers. One of the most poignant things in it is the contrast between the Hemulen's dreams of sailing and the reality of it when he finally does go sailing with Snufkin.

Snufkin is almost like a Zen saint, doing as little as possible, but only just enough to help each one of the others find their way.

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Quotes:

The bridge had always been the place for good-byes. The Hemulen's boots and socks were dry and he was ready to leave. The wind was still blowing and his thin hair was all over the place. He had caught a cold, or perhaps it was just emotion.

Less than a mile east of the valley the Hemulen came down to the river, looked thoughtfully at the dark running water and the thought occurred to him that life was like a river. Some people sailed on it slowly, some quickly, and some capsized. I'll tell that to Moominpappa, the Hemulen thought gravely. I think it must be a completely new thought. Just fancy, thoughts come easily today, and everything has become so straightforward. All you have to do is walk out of the door with your hat on a a jaunty angle! Perhaps I'll take the boat out. I'll sail out to sea. I can feel the firm pressure of the rudder on my paw... The firm pressure of the rudder on my paw, the Hemulen repeated, and now he felt so happy it almost hurt. He fastened his belt round his fat stomach and walked on along the river.

He was frightfully old and forgot things very easily. One dark autumn morning he woke up and had forgotten what his name was. It's a little sad when you forget other people's names but it's lovely to be able to completely forget your own. (Gramdpa-Grumble)

At first light Snufkin went to the beach to fetch his five bars of music. He climbed over the banks of seaweed and driftwood and stood on the sand waiting. They came immediately and they were more beautiful and even simpler than he hoped they would be.

A Wrinkle In Time (Madeleine L'Engle)

This book figures prominently in When You Reach Me, so it was a natural thing to re-read it after i finished that. It's been almost 20 years since i first read A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels. I had forgotten much about it, but there was also much that had stayed with me. It's a scary story!

But it's perhaps more than all a story where people are not what they appear to be, where often the ugly or awkward people have great beauty, and it's in what appears to be perfect that evil lurks. Where love is the ultimate weapon, and this means learning to love oneself with all of one's imperfections, as well as to love the one who needs saving.

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Quotes:

It was a dark and stormy night.

"Wild nights are my glory," Mrs Whatsit said. "I just got caught in a down draft and blown off course."

Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract.

"I do face facts," Meg said. "They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you."

though we travel together, we travel alone

Meg, I give you your faults.

Below them the town was laid out in harsh angular patterns. The houses in the outskirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. Each had a small, rectangular plot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door. Meg had a feeling that if she could count the flowers there would be exactly the same number for each house.

On Camazotz we are all happy because we are all alike. Differences create problems.

Good helps us, the stars help us, perhaps what you would call light helps us, love helps us. Oh, my child, I cannot explain! This is something you just have to know or not know.

When You Reach Me (Rebecca Stead)

Very good time-travelling story, heavily influenced by Madeleine L'Engle.

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Quotes:

When he first showed up on our corner last fall, the laughing man was always mumbling under his breath. “Bookbag, pocketshoe, bookbag, pocketshoe.”

Richard looked at me. “What did the zero say to the eight?” I rolled my eyes. “Nice belt.” He’d been telling me that one for at least a year.

Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore.

It was at that moment, standing next to her, that I figured out the truth. The truth was that Mom saw it too: the peeling paint, the cigarette butts on the stairs, everything.

Bookbag, pocketshoe.

“Well, it’s simple to love someone,” she said. “But it’s hard to know when you need to say it out loud.”

Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis)

On the surface a ferocious "roast" of the Fundamentalist preacher, Elmer Gantry is also a nuanced analysis of the contradictions that inevitably arise when religion becomes a profession. Lewis' characterization of the Protestant minister as "professional good man" may not apply so well anymore, but there is still a lot there that does. What makes the book great is that it includes in its sweeping study not only the successful ministers (such as the bumbling, overbearing and always-falling-on-his-feet Elmer), but also a handful of unsuccessful ones; some who are able to manage the paradoxical nature of their profession, and some who are not, and at least one who is destroyed by it.

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Quotes:

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.

He had almost as much satisfaction out of denouncing liquor as other collegians had out of drinking it.

"There wasn't any fake about it! I really did repent all these darn' fool sins. Even smoking--I'm going to cut it out. I did feel the--the peace of God.

They say it's all this gab that gets 'em going and drags in the sinners, but don't you believe it--it's the music. Say, I can get more damn' sinners weeping on a E-flat cornet than nine gospel-artists all shooting off their faces at once!

Cecil Aylston was a good deal of a mystic, a good deal of a ritualist, a bit of a rogue, something of a scholar, frequently a drunkard, more frequently an ascetic, always a gentleman, and always an adventurer.

"Yes-sir, like the hymn says, the hell of our fathers is good enough for me."

Suddenly he was kneeling at the window, and for the first time since he had forsaken Jim Lefferts and football and joyous ribaldry, his soul was free of all the wickedness which had daubed it--oratorical ambitions, emotional orgasm, dead sayings of dull seers, dogmas, and piety. The golden winding river drew him, the sky uplifted him, and with outflung arms he prayed for deliverance from prayer.

People were tired of eloquence; and the whole evangelist business was limited, since even the most ardent were not likely to be saved more than three or four times. But they could be healed constantly, and of the same disease.

Sharon christened it "The Waters of Jordan Tabernacle," added more and redder paint, more golden gold, and erected an enormous revolving cross, lighted at night with yellow and ruby electric bulbs.

He prayed briefly--he was weary of prayers in which the priest ramblingly explained to God that God really was God.

He could hear ten thousand Methodist elders croaking, "Avoid the vurry appearance of evil."

They were not all of them leonine and actor-like, these staff officers. No few were gaunt, or small, wiry, spectacled, and earnest; but they were all admirable politicians, long in memory of names, quick to find flattering answers. They believed that the Lord rules everything, but that it was only friendly to help him out; and that the enrollment of political allies helped almost as much as prayer in becoming known as suitable material for lucrative pastorates.

"Now that's what I'd vote for," said Rigg. "That's what gets 'em. Nothing like a good juicy vice sermon to bring in the crowds. Yes, sir! Fearless attack on all this drinking and this awful sex immorality that's getting so prevalent."

He had made one discovery superb in its simple genius--the best way to get money was to ask for it, hard enough and often enough.

The new Ku Klux Klan, an organization of the fathers, younger brothers, and employees of the men who had succeeded and became Rotarians

"Mr. Gantry," said Andrew Pengilly, "why don't you believe in God?"

What a joke that a minister, who's supposed to have such divine authority that he can threaten people with hell, is also supposed to be such an office-boy that he can be cussed out and fired if he dares to criticize capitalists or his fellow ministers!

"Oh, tut, tut, Frank; trouble with you is," Philip McGarry yawned, "trouble with you is, you like arguing more than you do patiently working out the spiritual problems of some poor, dumb, infinitely piteous human being that comes to you for help, and that doesn't care a hoot whether you advocate Zoroastrianism or Seventh-day Adventism, so long as he feels that you love him and that you can bring him strength from a power higher than himself.

I know that if you could lose your intellectual pride, if you could forget that you have to make a new world, better'n the Creator's, right away tonight--you and Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis (Lord, how that book of Lewis', 'Main Street,' did bore me, as much of it as I read; it just rambled on forever, and all he could see was that some of the Gopher Prairie hicks didn't go to literary teas quite as often as he does!--that was all he could see among those splendid heroic pioneers)! Well, as I was saying, if instead of starting in where your congregation has left off, because they never had your chance, you could draw them along with you--"

For over a year now I've never addressed a prayer to any definite deity. I say something like 'Let us in meditation, forgetting the worries of daily life, join our spirits in longing for the coming of perpetual peace'--something like that." "Well, it sounds like a pretty punk prayer to me, Frankie! The only trouble with you is, you feel you're called on to rewrite the Lord's Prayer for him!"

A meeting of the church body had been called to decide on Frank's worthiness, and the members had been informed by Styles that Frank was attacking all religion. Instantly a number of the adherents who had been quite unalarmed by what they themselves had heard in the pulpit perceived that Frank was a dangerous fellow and more than likely to injure omnipotent God.

"But," he pondered, "isn't it possible that the whole thing is so gorgeous a fairy-tale that to criticize it would be like trying to prove that Jack did not kill the giant? No sane priest could expect a man of some education to think that saying masses had any effect on souls in Purgatory; they'd expect him to take the whole thing as one takes a symphony. And, oh, I am lonely for the fellowship of the church!"

The building was of cheerful brick, trimmed with limestone. It had Gothic windows, a carillon in the square stone tower, dozens of Sunday School rooms, a gymnasium, a social room with a stage and a motion-picture booth, an electric range in the kitchen, and over it all a revolving electric cross and a debt.

Dear Lord, thy work is but begun! We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!"

The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande)

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Quotes:

Such failures carry an emotional valence that seems to cloud how we think about them. Failures of ignorance we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have people simply make their best effort. But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated.What do you mean half of heart attack patients don’t get their treatment on time?

That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. And there is such a strategy— though it will seem almost ridiculous in its simplicity, maybe even crazy to those of us who have spent years carefully developing ever more advanced skills and technologies. It is a checklist.

For every drowned and pulseless child rescued, there are scores more who don’t make it—and not just because their bodies are too far gone. Machines break down; a team can’t get moving fast enough; someone fails to wash his hands and an infection takes hold. Such cases don’t get written up in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, but they are the norm, though people may not realize it.

One of the most common diagnoses, it turned out, was “Other.”

These checklists accomplished what checklists elsewhere have done, Pronovost observed. They helped with memory recall and clearly set out the minimum necessary steps in a process.

All were amenable, as a result, to what engineers call “forcing functions”: relatively straightforward solutions that force the necessary behavior... You want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right.

the major advance in the science of construction over the last few decades has been the perfection of tracking and communication

Surgery has, essentially, four big killers wherever it is done in the world: infection, bleeding, unsafe anesthesia, and what can only be called the unexpected.

Each one was remarkably brief, usually just a few lines on a page in big, easy-to-read type. And each applied to a different situation. Taken together, they covered a vast range of flight scenarios.

There are good checklists and bad, Boorman explained. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on. Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items... after about sixty to ninety seconds at a given pause point, the checklist often becomes a distraction from other things.

the look of the checklist matters. Ideally, it should fit on one page. It should be free of clutter and unnecessary colors. It should use both uppercase and lowercase text for ease of reading. (He went so far as to recommend using a sans serif type like Helvetica

a checklist has to be tested in the real world

The final WHO safe surgery checklist spelled out nineteen checks in all.

I saw a gallbladder operation in which the surgeon inadvertently contaminated his glove while adjusting the operating lights. He hadn’t noticed. But the nurse had. “You have to change your glove,” the nurse told him in Arabic. (Someone translated for me.) “It’s fine,” the surgeon said. “No, it’s not,” the nurse said. “Don’t be stupid.” Then she made him change his glove.

Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is.

Discipline is hard—harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness.

The Book Whisperer (Donalyn Miller)

Awakening the inner reader in every child.

What a great teacher she is. I hope many teachers read this book and get moved by it.

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Quotes:

As often happens to well-intentioned teachers, my plans fell apart when my students showed up. ... he unit was a work of art, a culmination of everything I had learned about good teaching, and I was proud of it. It was a disaster.

If you ever think you have all the answers, it’s time to retire.

Instead of standing on stage each day, dispensing knowledge to my young charges, I should guide them as they approach their own understandings.

Reading is both a cognitive and an emotional journey. I discovered that it was my job as a teacher to equip the travelers, teach them how to read a map, and show them what to do when they get lost, but ultimately, the journey is theirs alone.

I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters—the saints and sinners, real or imagined—reading shows you how to be a better human being.

Mark Twain reminds us, “The man who does not read great books is no better than the man who can’t.”

I try to take every chance I get to read in school because mostly school is quite boring. When I read in class it fills up the little hole in my heart (JUST KIDDING!!!). —Jon

talking about books is vital to a reading community

THE RIGHTS OF THE READER BY DANIEL PENNAC 1. The right to not read. 2. The right to skip pages. 3. The right to not finish. 4. The right to reread. 5. The right to read anything. 6. The right to escapism. 7. The right to read anywhere. 8. The right to browse. 9. The right to read out loud. 10. The right not to defend your tastes.

When my principal interviews candidates for a teaching position at my school, regardless of whether it’s a language arts position, he always asks them to discuss the last book they read.

Every student that moves through our classes is not destined to become an English literature major, and we cannot gear our teaching as if they were.

The reality is that you can never mandate or monitor how much reading your students are doing at home.

They are in sixth grade! What about having an enriching, powerful, glorious year in sixth grade? The purpose of school should not be to prepare students for more school. We should be seeking to have fully engaged students now.

It is hard to fight the culture even when what you see in your classroom every day tells you that you are getting it right.

Hands down, the students who read the most are the best at every part of school—reading, writing, researching, content-specific knowledge, all of it (Krashen, 2004). They are the best test takers, too.

Instead of leaving these students to simmer on the back burner while we struggle to educate our poor readers, why not teach all of our students to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of the best readers?

This is how I show my students that I love them—by putting books in their hands, by noticing what they are about, and finding books that tell them, “I know. I know. I know how it is. I know who you are, and even though we may never speak of it, read this book, and know that I understand you.” We speak in this language of books passing back and forth, books that say, “You are a dreamer; read this.” “You are hurting inside; read this.” “You need a good laugh; read this.”

I have purchased every book in our class library with my own money.

Gifted readers should read fiction close to their age level and nonfiction at their advanced reading level (Halsted, 2002).

Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (Beverly Cleary)

Nice! I was interested in reading this because Lemony Snicket is fond of the scene between Ramona and the lonely old gentleman in the burger place. But this was a pleasant surprise, a well-written book that shows great insight into the mind of a 8-year-old and a loving but stressed-out family.

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Quotes:

when the tune came to an end, she turned around and found herself face to face with an old man with neatly trimmed gray hair and a moustache that turned up at the ends. He was dressed as if everything he wore -- a flowered shirt, striped tie, tweed coat, and plaid slacks -- had come from different stores or from a rummage sale, except that the crease in his trousers was sharp and his shoes were shined.
The old man, whose back was very straight, saluted Ramona as if she were a soldier and said, "Well, young lady, have you been good to your mother?"

Moominpappa's Memoires (Tove Jansson)

This is my favorite Moomin book so far, although Moominpappa's language tends to be harder to read than the other books. Moominpappa retells his young years and how they shaped his philosophy.

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Quotes:

A Hemulen has terribly large feet and no sense of humour. She has a protruding, slightly depressed snout, and her hair grows in indefinite tufts. A Hemulen does nothing because it would be fun to do it, but only because it must be done, and she tells one all the time what one ought to have done. (Moominpappa)

"Don't let him smoke!" cried Sniff. "The Hemulen Aunt says smokers get shaky paws, a yellow nose, and a bald tail!"
"I'm not so sure," said Moominmamma. "He's smoked all his life, and he's not shaky, yellow, or bald. All nice things are good for you."

"Well," said Hodgkins, "perhaps he is really interested in everything, only he doesn't overdo it. For ourselves there is always one single interest. You want to become. I want to do. My nephew wants too have. But the Joxter just lives."

Can you win anything better than the useless rewards of a fantastical imagination! Is there any greater honor? (Moominpappa)

I cannot stress enough the perils of your friends marrying or becoming court inventors. One day you are all a society of outlaws, adventurous comrades and companions who will be pushing off somewhere or other when things become tiresome; you have all the world to choose from, just by looking at the map... And then, suddenty, they're not interested anymore. They want to keep warm. They're afraid of rain. They start collecting big things that can't fit in a rucksack. They talk only of small things. They don't like to make sudden decisions and do something contrariwise. Formerly, they hoisted sail; now they carpenter little shelves for porcelain mugs. Oh, who can speak of such matters without shedding tears? (Moominpappa)

And in the foggy dawn they all tumbled out into the garden. The eastern sky was clearing, waiting for the sun to rise. It was at the ready, in a few minutes the night would be over, and everything could start anew from the beginning.
A new door to the Unbelievable, to the Possible. A new day when everything may happen if you have no objection to it.

The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)

The first of the Hunger Games trilogy, it was a fast and exciting read, though i thought it fizzled out a little by the end. It reminded me of the 80s movie "Running Man".

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Quotes:

She holds out the circular gold pin that was on her dress earlier. I hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but now I see it’s a small bird in flight.