Historical Impulse" - Having recently read Damon Galgut's The Promise, I especially appreciate these reminiscences of the first 9 years of Levy's life spent in South Africa, especially the 4+ years during the period her father was a political prisoner. Apartheid, racism, and sexism are more of the things that Levy wishes she doesn't know about. And yet these are the meat of many histories with which societies are grappling. If this is a memoir intended to communicate why Levy writes, I don’t think it is entirely successful. It feels incomplete, the work of someone trying to find herself, which perhaps is the point. It is more a book about being “on the run from the lies concealed in the language of politics, from myths about our character and our purpose in life.” Show your own enjoyment with it. Make it real short and real light. You don’t want to be heavy-handed about it, especially if your child is being turned off at school.

I’ve been working to declutter my house for the last six years, ever since the death of a loved one made me see the burden we leave behind for others to deal with. It’s been a painful process, examining one's feelings about each item and deciding what to keep, for practical or sentimental reasons, and what to get rid of. And it’s definitely easier to trash than donate, but I just can’t send useful things to a landfill. It’s a big job after a lifetime of thoughtless accumulation. Ajay lit her cigarette and then he lit his cigarette and they both made O’s of smoke in the air. Their O’s were the most beautiful thing in the world. Sometimes they floated towards each other and just as they were about to touch they melted in the air. The air smelt of rice. And spices. The O’s and the rice and the spices and the space between Melissa and Ajay whose shoes were made from snake and Melissa whose eyelashes were sooty with mascara and the way her little finger was touching the cuff of Ajay’s shirt seemed to me how life could be when it was going well.”Does your child show symptoms that something’s wrong? If kids complain of stomachaches, don’t like going to school, or don’t like reading anything, then they’re probably struggling.

It came to me when I read Anne Frank's diary as a very young teenager and became obsessed with the nightmare of her life and death. I DID NOT want to know, and yet I read everything my local library in the middle of nowhere in Sweden in the late 80s had to offer. And I have not stopped thinking about not wanting to know, while now even teaching it myself, to the next generation of readers and thinkers and feelers. Setting the stage with some other sentences or, better yet, creating a little drama for its context makes it perfectly understandable to a 5-year-old and the five "prepositions" may even go unnoticed - in context. chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn't really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain."The remainder of the books touches on her early life in South Africa, a time in which her ANC supporting father was one day arrested and taken away – she wouldn’t see him again for four years. Then there’s a section when, as a teenager living in a North London suburb, she reflects on her time as a rebellious would be writer living ‘in exile’. These anecdotes paint vivid pictures of both time and place, and show something of what her early life must have comprised. Nature and nurture systematically conspire to make life miserable for half the world’s population. Awareness of the depths of this oppression only increases the intensity of the pain suffered. Writing is a form of therapy, not because it improves the situation or reduces the pain but because it’s an escape, and even sometimes an acceptable form of revenge against those who do bad things to other people, particularly to women.

In this interview from the Family Education Network, Dr. Carbo answered the following questions about how you can encourage reading at home. How well are kids reading these days? Trapped by hormones. Trapped by children and familial affections. Trapped by pervasive patriarchy. Trapped by social expectations and professional barriers. Trapped by the vagaries of the time, place and circumstances of birth. Trapped by legal injustice. Trapped by misogyny. Trapped (sometimes) by being Jewish. And trapped (if you’re English) by Brillo pads and West Finchley. It’s a jungle out there for every woman. My first foray into the world of Deborah Levy, into the first volume of her infamous Living Autobiography, seemed to me how literature could be when it is dizzying and profound.To speak up is not about speaking louder, it is about feeling entitled to voice a wish." This speaks to me personally. This book was amiable enough until it reached a scene at Yankee Stadium. The Yanks are playing the Indians, all well and good, except all the Yankees the author writes about are real and the only Indians player is made up. I could live with that because the scene created around the fake Indians player is funny and couldn't happen with any real Indians player. My real problem was that the real Yankees players in the scene -- Derek Jeter, Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui, Jason Giambi -- didn't play together on the Yankeee in the year (2009) this takes place. Sure, it's a small detail, but the reason such tidbits are included in books are to make it real in a time and place. Getting that detail wrong didn't change the book. It just diminished it for me because something like that could have easily been fixed. I can also appreciate what you are saying. You can overdo things both ways. What I try to teach my students is - I hope - modern, everyday English. I needn't encourage them to put their prepositions at the end a phrase - they do that naturally, anyway (not necessarily five in a row, though ). I very much prefer them to say things like "This is just the thing I have asked for." rather than "This is just the thing for which I have asked."

This is a book about a young writer struggling to find a voice and an older writer struggling to find a room of her own where she can raise that voice above a murmur.There are some excellent character studies here and many of the chapters are vignettes that could stand alone as short stories. Miles is incredibly insightful and observant of human motivation, behavior and speech so his characters really come alive (even if I would’ve liked to know more about the outcome for a couple of them). Again, ask a librarian to recommend some high-interest, age-appropriate stuff and share some fun parts of it. If your kid likes a movie, bring home the book. Really get down to their interests. What should parents not do when they’re reading with their kids?