Ten Titles on Tuesday: 6/1/21
Good morning! Welcome to another Tuesday on this spinning blue planet.
I am on the eve of driving 400+ miles with two small children, a feat we undertake multiple times a year yet still requires almost superhuman physical, mental, emotional, (even metaphysical!) preparation. I have an archive of packing lists going back six years (all of you who know me IRL are shaking your heads because of course I have an archive of packing lists going back six years; I even have a procedure list for making the packing list), and those are helpful, to be sure, but no matter how many times I’ve taken this specific trip (at least 50 — I did the math) and how many lists I’ve made (31 since I started keeping track) I still somehow act as if I am in the beginning stage of decoding the Rosetta Stone.
(If there is a children’s book about neurotic behavior related to traveling, packing, doing things normal people do to a degree that is perhaps not normal, I would read it.)
Whatever your week is looking like, I hope you find order, if not calm — and maybe gratitude, if not order or calm. You’re not alone. We can do this!
👯♀️
This week’s Ten Titles, never in any particular order:
Early in the Morning: A Collection of New Poems by Charles Causley
Marguerite, Go Wash Your Feet by Wallace Tripp
The Man with the Violin by Kathy Stinson
Hand in Hand: An American History Through Poetry by Lee Bennett Hopkins
Mii maanda ezhi-gkendmaanh/This is How I Know by Brittany Luby
Galápagos Girl / Galapagueña by Marsha Diane Arnold
The Rainbow Tulip by Pat Mora
The Three Golden Oranges by Alma Flor Ada
Maya’s Blanket by Monica Brown
Manjhi Moves a Mountain by Nancy Churnin
I’ve written for a while (and many times) about one of our most beloved reading routines: Morning Time — for more on what it is and how we do it, see the February issue of (How) Can we read? — so when I came across this rich, wonderful tidbit from Naomi Shihab Nye in a book I read a few weeks ago, it resonated, and I had to share…
“Delicious Rhythms, Enduring Words” by Naomi Shihab Nye
When a man I met recently told me that his grandfather awakened him as a boy by reciting poetry, giving him a lifelong appetite for delicious rhythms in his ears, I changed my method of waking our son, Madison, up. No more chipper greetings, no more buzzing clocks. Now I sit at his bedside for ten minutes every school day before he needs to rise, reading Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, even Wallace Stevens (whom I am finally beginning to understand).
I like imagining what filters down into Madison’s deep consciousness. We don’t discuss the poems at breakfast, but after a few weeks of my reading them, he began saying, “I really liked those poems today. Could you read them again soon?” Or “All day that poem came into my mind.”
I feel gratified and strongly suggest to other parents this simple method of helping children “wake up with literature” as well as go to sleep with it. It is our happy task to find as many comfortable ways we can to make enduring words an essential part of all our lives.
From A Family of Readers: The Book Lover’s Guide to Children’s and Young Adult Literature by Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano, editors of The Horn Book Magazine
What an idea!
Read good books and take good care 😘
Sarah
@can_we_read