Notes from the Reading Nook: July 20
Paying attention; and swapping well-trod, much-loved titles for more recent, more inclusive ones
Hi there! Good morning.
It’s blazing hot here in southern Wisconsin (high of 88 degrees is blazing to me) — I can never decide if late July or mid-August is the height of summer — all I know is that this past weekend I harvested as much bee balm and mountain mint as I could, I’m seeing hummingbirds every day, and we have so much food coming from our CSA we’re struggling to consume it all. It’s fresh pesto season. It’s smoothie season. It’s broth-making-with-all-those-veggie-tops season. The Mulberry fairy is out and about, offering his tiny purple jewels up to my children, who come inside in the evenings with stained fingers and dirty feet and sun-blushed cheeks, ragged with heat and hunger.
I’ve been struggling lately — wobbling terribly through the experience of being back in my office full-time, frustrated with myself, full of doubt — but these small things outside of my brain, these things worth noticing and reveling in, they remind me how much grace there is to be found in the world and how accessible it is to all of us if only we choose it (there’s the rub, though, isn’t it?) I’ve been reading more to my children, I’ve been swimming a lot, I’ve been watching Call the Midwife and darning socks for winter (ever preparing for winter) and if I don’t feel the best, well, I don’t feel the worst either, and that’s not nothing.
Wherever you are, whatever literal or figurative season you’re living through, blazing or not, I hope you find solace (and whatever else you most need) in the small things outside your brain; I hope you find a moment to watch for all those summer fairies out there making mischief and magic. Sometimes the difference between a feeling of scarcity (including not-good-enough-ness) and a feeling of abundance is our attention — I have to ask myself, are you paying attention?
May I, may you, may we all attend to our lives and find the good and blessed things that exist there.
What we’re reading
Raccoon’s Last Race by Joseph Bruchac and James Bruchac (we love all of this father-and-son duo’s titles, including How Chipmunk Got His Stripes and Turtle’s Race With Beaver)
Amy Wu and the Perfect Bao by Kat Zhang
At Night by Jonathan Bean
Pandora’s Box by Mary Pope Osborne
Kitchen Dance by Maurie J. Manning (on repeat right now)
Links of possible interest
One welcome (and long overdue) phenomenon I’ve noticed in the world of children’s books — mostly within the realm of teachers and other educators — is the swapping of well-trod, much-loved titles for more recent, more inclusive ones.
Liz Chavez of @mrschavezreads developed what she calls the “New Read Aloud Canon” for elementary classrooms, which you can find here. (Monique Gray Smith’s You Hold Me Up is a powerful read, especially when you learn via her note at the end that she wrote it as a gesture toward the healing and reconciliation of and for Indigenous children, families, and communities in regards to the impact of Canadian Indian Residential Schools.)
Erica of the blog, What Do We Do All Day? also has a great post, If You Like This Classic Children's Book, You'll Love This Diverse Book, which does a similar swap for chapter books. (I can vouch for Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, which I reviewed in issue No. 32, as well as The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich and Lola Levine is Not Mean by Monica Brown, but I’ve yet to read most of the others. We started Tua and the Elephant by R.P. Harris but it was a little beyond us right now — my 7yo kept saying, “Mom, I don’t know what’s going on,” so we set it aside for the future. The four chapters we read were intriguing, I will say that.)
I also love another list of Erica’s: Children's Books with Characters of Indian and South Asian Descent (which stands out especially because it covers picture books all the way up to middle grade novels), and, if you want to go totally nuts 🙋♀️ do not miss her master booklist of all her recommended reads, which can suck up hours (ask me how I know).
I’d love it if you would become a paid subscriber, but thank you either way
This is the second-to-last Notes From the Reading Nook you’ll receive on a weekly basis (if you missed that announcement you can read about it here) — after August 1, you’ll only get this little digest once a month unless you choose to become a paid subscriber.
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Whatever you decide, I appreciate you and thank you for being here — for wading through the slices of my life, my opinions and digressions and all the rest. I offer these newsletters to you in the spirit of sharing and usefulness, but I’d also be remiss if I didn’t admit how much I get out of it — it’s not always easy for me to write every week (it is, in fact, increasingly tricky if not outright hard) but I have gained so much from showing up, and from the fact that there’s someone on the other end receiving it. When I say thank you every week, that’s what I mean: thank you for receiving. I’m grateful.
Read good books and take good care 😘
Sarah