Zatera Ul

Recently online:

Barbara at Mommy Life has a very good post: As Obama deconstructs, what can we do? 10 ideas. I can’t think of anything to add to the list except, perhaps, to consider the possibility of leaving. While packing up and moving to another country is almost unthinkable to me, I know that most of my great-grandparents came across the Atlantic, to a new country and an unfamiliar language, in search of a better life. Also, plenty of people in my church have gone (or currently are) overseas to serve as missionaries.

MaxedOutMama always has the sanest and most sensible economic analysis (but not without a sense of humor). Fascinating to watch a superior intelligence at work.

As for not-so-recent reading, I was thinking about how little I retain from some books. All I can remember about A Brief History of Time is that Carl Sagan takes a snipe in the foreword, something about how you can be sure now that there is no God, because they looked for him and couldn’t find him. The rest of the book I can only guess about–it’s Stephen Hawking, so there are probably black holes in it, and from the title, it probably also includes the Big Bang…. Beyond that, I have no idea at all, and I know I’ve read the book at least twice.

A Tale of Two Cities: I remember knitting, guillotines, and a guy sacrificing his life at the end. Also I remember that the second time I read it, I was able to follow the plot; in early high school, I read all the words, but didn’t catch the thread of the story. Most of the other stuff I read in high school was science fiction and fantasy from the library; I usually had read everything interesting in the reading/English literature textbook by the end of the first week. (This reminds me that I’m way behind on keeping up with Daniel Pinkwater’s books. I did read Superpuppy recently [nonfiction], and highly recommend it if you’re ever planning on getting a dog.)

Lost book: An old children’s book that my grandma read to me. It had a rooster on the front cover, and the pictures were pretty much solid red, yellow, and blue.

Found book: I remembered very little about Donkey-Donkey, another book of my grandma’s, until I found a copy (of the 1940 edition) at a rummage sale. Maybe the part where he tore his ear on a nail, but that was all. I’ve found a few other books that she had, most of them I remembered just enough about to be able to recognize them when I saw them. Being able to actually read them again was wonderful; it felt like getting my childhood memories back.