If children can keep their wits about them and are brave,
they can always help in some way, my dear.
We don’t have such dreadful wars now; but the
dear God knows we have troubles enough,
and need all our courage and faith to be patient
in times like these.
In Trudel’s Siege
I can hear modern objections to this story: Why isn’t this girl in school? No child should have the burden of providing for the family! Where were social services?
I actually find the self-reliance, tempered with faith in God’s provision, very refreshing. So it’s a twinge too earnest. Trudel struggles with her sacrifices…for one minute. Such selflessness is usually only found in books. But Trudel’s satisfaction—her compensation—comes as she sees her parents and grandmother’s hunger abated. Alcott improves with age: who can forget Jo March’s satisfaction/sorrow when she sells her hair?
Carol Ryrie Brink’s book Baby Island
When I was a small girl, it was the fashion in our circle
to borrow the neighbors’ babies. I myself was never a
very accomplished nursemaid, although I had many happy
hours pushing the perambulator of a young cousin; but
some of my friends had a positive genius for taking care
of and amusing babies. They never thought of receiving
pay for this delightful pastime. Minding a baby was its own reward.
When the ocean liner is sinking, twelve year old Mary Wallace’s first thought is to save the babies she has made friends with. She wakes her sister Jean, ten, and they find the twin toddlers and three-month old baby unattended. After scooping them up and getting in a lifeboat, a father gives them another toddler to hold while he returns for his wife. Suddenly they are cast off and adrift on the ocean.
Mary is certain they will reach a little island.
Why the public library at home is just full of books about
shipwrecked people who landed on tropical islands. And
did you ever see a book written by a person who was
drowned at sea? I never did.
Whenever Jean gives way to tears, Mary rallies the troops:
Remember who you are.
Remember you are a Wallace.
Sing ‘Scots, Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled!’
and you’ll be all right.
The supplies, especially the canned milk, in the lifeboat sustain them until they land on a island. They build a shelter, find more food, build a pram and a playpen, while the baby gets a tooth, the toddler learns to walk and the twins start talking. They learn very practical knowledge of tides, “more today than I ever learned in school.” Mr. Peterkin, an old curmudgeon, lives on the other side of the island with his goat and parrot.
It’s a whimsical book. Diapers—the need for or the stink or the cleaning of—are never mentioned. And yet I find parts of it plausible. When I was twelve, another twelve-year-old and I ran a day care center for the counselors’ kids at a summer camp. I marvel now to think of the responsibility we had, but at the end of the week all was well.
What I loved about this book was the way Mary Wallace thought of the needs of others and how that kept her occupied and how her occupation kept her form sniffling and whining. Carol Ryrie Brink writes that her grandmother is in every book. Caddie Woodlawn
It strikes me that in both titles the girls are fortified by stories from books. We must never stop reading good stories to our kids.
(1917) P. G. Wodehouse’s descriptions delight: a comfortable stoutness, a face that had been “edited and re-edited” by a boxing career, affected imitation geniuses, the art of raising eyebrows, dazzled by the glamour of incivility. And my favorite from this book: 
; the kidnappers are ready at the end of the book to pay the family to take this son of a millionaire back. In Picadilly Jim there is another scheme by family members to get him kidnapped again. The main character pretends to be someone else who is pretending to be himself. Five stars, pure joy.
(1851) I read my husband to sleep every night with Herman Melville’s classic, in preparation for seeing Jake Heggie’s opera, Moby Dick, in San Francisco. We have officially abandoned Moby as a read aloud together. I plan to continue reading about cetology, or study of whales, and the story of Ahab’s vengeance. I keep thinking this is a re-read, but I can’t be sure. There are gems, but the pace is slow.
(1931) Ethel Romig Fuller, poetry editor for The Oregonian and Oregon’s third poet laureate, writes poetry that glorifies the common things of life. She sees cleaning as creating beauty. Fuller sees poetry in hanging the wash on a clothesline, beauty in canning, tidied calm in ironing, and a happy heart in washing windows. She glorifies the common stuff of life. 
(1952) Ethel Romig Fuller — The poet turns her eye to nature: the rivers, the mountains, the sea, the seasons of life in the Pacific Northwest. Infused with joy and sorrow, she writes of the surgery of grief, a fugutive beauty, of “binning” the summer. 
(2007) Simon Drew — A Collection of Cryptic Nonsense and Pointless Hidden Meanings. A fun puzzle book, so visual that it is hard to describe using only words. Here’s an example under “The Plays of Williams Shakespeare”: comma + pot of tea + o + carousel + oars. There is no page at the end of the book with answers. If you must have a puzzle solved, you send a check to Drew’s charity. He explains, “This is not a payment: it is a fine for giving up.” 
(2010) Pat Conroy — He reads, he writes, he journals, he talks, he listens. From the time I could talk I took an immense pleasure in running down words, shagging them like fly balls in some spacious field. He honors the mother who hungered for art, for illumination, for some path to lead her to a shining way to call her own. She lit signal fires in the hills for her son to feel and follow. 
(1993, posthumously), Carol Ryrie Brink — Ironic, on the last day of Daylight Savings Time, with the gripes about the change, to read this phrase: day-by-day 
(2008) Maggie Jackson The premise of this book is simple. The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention — the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress. Jackson writes about a culture of skimming, new ways to disconnect from others, attention splicing, the dangers of multitasking, detachment, untethering, outsourcing memory to gadgets. The structure of the book did not make sense to me, but I found much to ponder.
(2011) David Mamet — Conversions fascinate me. “I used to think…” is my favorite dinner party prompt. Mamet, former voice of Liberals, becomes the voice of Conservatives. The chapters don’t appear to build on one another; it feels like reading a collection of essays. Mamet’s Judaism informs his perspective and sits under every page of the book. He is blunt, articulate, and controversial. And he quotes Anthony Trollope.
. This section made me snort in laughter.
(1916), Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, an eminent critic, anthologist, and adventure novelist, handed down a guideline for writers that people are still handing down. Usually people attribute it to Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Noël Coward, W.H. Auden, Oscar Wilde, or someone else whose fame has lasted longer than Sir Arthur’s. Here is that guideline in its original form: “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press: Murder your darlings.”
describes her Gram, who, she says “has crept into nearly every book that I have written. Sometimes she is the chief character, sometimes she has a minor part; sometimes she is young, sometimes she is old.” I have enjoyed getting to know Carol’s Gram, whom I first met in the delightful Wisconsin frontier book, 
and a food dehydrator. It is easy to mix and easy to chew. You can make it in the oven, in a smoker, even in the sun if you live in a very hot climate. It sounds obscene to say, but we make jerky to use up leftover burger in our freezer. You know, that hunting thing.
A Living Pencil 