What I'm reading today: The Child that Books Built, by Francis Spufford
Interesting, although it's on sudden death due to two profanities I've encountered; I've decided to give Spufford three strikes. :-)
Anyway, it's a rather odd psychological explanation of why the author reads books obsessively. Ought to be interesting since I read books obsessively. At the moment I'm wandering through a rather tedious chapter full of "forests as myth" and Piaget. Hmm. However, a few interesting things caught my eye in the first chapter, called "Confessions of an English Fiction Eater." LOL
"Reading catatonically wasn't something I chose to do, it just happened, and if it could be my funny characteristic in the family . . . that was great. Though I never framed the thought on the surface of my mind, stopping my ears with fiction was non-negotiable. There were things to block out."
He says he's been reading for 26 years. (Ha, I have him beat--34 and counting here!)
"Twenty-six years since the furze of black marks between the covers of The Hobbit grew lucid, and released a dragon." I love that! For me, 34 years since those black marks coalesced and aligned themselves and released . . . Laura, a friend and playmate, and her sisters.
Spufford writes, "I have a cultural sanction for my addiction. Books get cited over and over as the virtuous term of a contrast whose wicked other half is Nintendo, or MTV, or the Web. The villian varies but it's always some cathode-ray entertainment that jitters on the retina, where printed words are supposed to rest calmly. It doesn't matter that my eyes track across the breakfast table for the wafer of text on the cornflake box just as avidly as any channel hopper squeezing the remote, both of us eager for the mere brush of our chosen medium going by. The difference of the forms is enough."
I love this quote as well:
"Story's lucidating way with experience rushes into the primary fashioning of a self, the very first construction of a person out of the materials of environment, and family, and reading silence."
"We can remember readings that acted like transformations. There were times when a particular book, like a seed crystal, dropped into our minds when they were exactly ready for it, like a supersaturated solution, and suddenly we changed. Suddenly a thousand crystals of perception of our own formed, the original insight of the story ordering whole arrays of discoveries inside us, into winking accuracy." What a description of Charlotte Mason's "animating idea"
He included a William Hazlitt quote that I did not have in my "book files":
"Books alone teach us to judge of truth and good in the abstract: without a knowledge of things at a distance from us, we judge like savages or animals from our senses and appetites alone; but by the aid of books and of an intercourse with the world of ideas, we are purified, raised, ennobled from savages into intellectual and rational beings." Ignoring the spiritual here, as well, but I think the force of Hazlitt's thought holds still.

So, that was the serious thought for the day. The Funny Thought for the Day:
My 5yo, PMM, has begun a very low-key state-by-state unit study sort of thing. Picture books from each state, stickers for the state bird, a recipe. Yesterday we read about Missouri, and learned the state nickname. I asked him to tell Daddy what Missouri's state nickname was when he got home last night. PMM proudly announced "The CALL ME STATE"