Spring Reading Challenge

Katrina at Callipider Days is hosting a spring reading challenge. Like so many other good things, I learned about it from my faithful commenter, Susanne at Living to Tell the Story.

I am up for anything that can tame my terrifying book pile. You can visit Katrina's blog to see what everybody is reading. I am planning on posting my progress now and then and some book reviews as well.

So here is what I'll be reading over the next three months. I also always find more at the library, so hopefully more goodies will join these:

1. The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease

2. Dwelling Places by Vanita Hampton Wright

3. Taking Care of the Me in Mommy by Lisa Whelchel

4. My Heart's in the Lowlands by Liz Curtis Higgs

5. Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld

I am looking at this list and it is totally weighted toward non-fiction. So I am sure I will mix in some fun light fiction as I go.

Also, so inspired by by buddy Nina at Painted Rainbows, I am going to be sharing the best of the children's books we bring home from the library over the next few months. I have been so blessed by the thoughtful reviews and recommendations of other moms who want to find the very best literature for their children. So when we find a treasure, I'll be sharing.

My love of words is one of my earliest loves--- it came before I discovered photography, before I became a wife and mother, before I had a home to care for, it stretches like a silver thread all the way back to a little girl, reading Anne of Green Gables until the cover fell off, traveling in a wagon across the prairies with Laura Ingalls, devouring Alcott and Bronte and Nancy Drew, greedy with feasting on poems and paragraphs and stories. The characters I discovered in Teribithia and Portland and New York City gave me the most priceless gift, a home in my own skin. All schoolday I was surrounded by peers with whom I felt so utterly wrong-- wrongness and otherness seemed to follow me like a fragrance. But coming home to books was like skimming out of a scratchy ill-fitting skin, and into a velvet cocoon which could transform me into anything.

And I know now that those long afternoons between the pages made me, me.

So come along. Read some good stuff, and talk about it.

It's a good thing.

(Now, can anybody invent something so I can read, embroider, build a soldier fort with Sam and watch Ina Garten roast a chicken simultaneously?)