Happy Times in Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren

I read this book with Dane when he was three or four, and I just finished reading it separately with Graham. We've been reading another book together with both boys and it is taking us for-e-ver, but this one we got through pretty quickly (although we don't read super regularly just me and Graham). I absolutely love these two Noisy Village books, and would love to read them with each of my kids (and hope that they will re-read them on their own too). I love that Graham's favorite chapters--the ones that he reacted to the most and which he clearly loved--were the ones about baby Kirsten and her cute little antics. I love the chapter about the cherry company where they try to sell their cherries--it seems like such a perfect childhood thing to do.

The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare

Look at me, I'm sooooo cultured, just sitting here on a Sunday reading a Shakespeare play like it's no big deal. Ha! I have meant to re-read some Shakespeare plays for years and years, and now I finally have a good reason to: we are going to England in August and we will be seeing a Shakespeare play at the Globe Theater. THIS Shakespeare play, to be exact. We bought tickets for The Comedy of Errors one of the last nights we will be in London. I have to say that I have spent my whole life imagining London, and hearing about the Globe Theater, so this is the culmination of a whole life of being a book-lover and an English major, and I am so excited. I also was pleasantly surprised that this was a reasonably easy play to read and to follow. I think I had my idea of Shakespeare plays coming from my high school experiences, struggling to read these really complex plays that were too high of a level for me to read, and where I needed to use the explanatory notes for every single line to understand what was being said. But now, as a far more mature reader (ahem), I was able to basically sail through without much problem understanding what the players were saying. I think this will be a funny play to watch, with plenty of hilarious scenes and hopefully it will be easy to understand (although I'm sure there will be plenty of errors as a viewer, as the title suggests). I think a little bit of background helps to ground this play in the necessary suspension of disbelief, to know that it comes from a Greek form and from the Greek playwright Plautus, which helps to explain why neither twin starts to suspect what's going on or why nobody notices any differences in clothing or accent or anything. I actually really enjoyed reading this, and can't wait to see it. (I had a goal to read five Shakespeare plays this year, and this was the first one. I'm going to try and read a few more before we go to England as well.)

The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I absolutely loved this book as a kid. Loved it. And I loved the movie too--I want to re-watch it again after reading it. (I literally cannot watch the movie without crying at the ending--"Papa! Papa!") I love the message and the meaning behind it, and I love the story of how good little Sara is in the face of horrible circumstances. I know it's not the most realistic of stories--nobody, especially not a child, is that good. Nobody is going to give up five of their six rolls when they are starving to death, even if encountering someone more starving. (Maybe one, but not five.) Nobody is that controlled over their emotions to be able to think about acting like a princess when their most important basic needs are not being met--not enough food, no warmth, no human love. But that doesn't detract from the story for me at all. It's a part of the magic of the story, that Sara is above all of those things, and that she's able to stay her good self even in the face of adversity. This is a classic that didn't lose its beauty even after decades since I'd read it the first time. I can't wait to read this with my kids... the problem is just that I have so many books I want to read with them. How will I ever get through them all?

Sorry! The English and their Manners by Henry Hitchings

Another getting-ready-for-England book. This is a study of the history of manners, particularly those of the English (duh, as the title makes clear), and how those manners have originated and morphed over the centuries. Hitchings also makes some broad claims about the English culture and persona as a whole, which I felt was interesting for me to read as an American, and comparing the difference between how we view things. It was really interesting reading about how people wrote about and viewed manners in the previous centuries, and how those manners changed over time, and who were the big contributors to those changes.

I feel like what this book needed was a good editor. This could have been a lot more interesting and well organized. It definitely rambled a bit and I was itching to reorganize things for him, add headers to sections, and shorten it down--because there was a lot of interesting information just thrown together without having much structure. Maybe I've been spoiled by recent non-fiction books, but most of them that I've read lately have had a clear structure, with an obvious progression through the book, different topics for each chapter, and headers dividing up topics within each chapter. This one basically had none of those things. He kind of went through historically, but then had random chapters that were out of the chronological order on specific topics, and went off on tangents within chapters that were never connected in very well. Overall, I skimmed the last half of this book and got what I think was worth it out of it. I feel like I could have summarized this better if it had been written better, because it's hard to even remember what was written in all of it.

The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels by Ree Drummond

This was another random audiobook choice, which I chose because I have liked Pioneer Woman's recipes for years, and I used to read her blog (until I got tired of her blog posts that took 15 minutes to scroll through because she takes pictures of every. single. step. of each recipe). This was her story about how she met her husband, a rancher, and basically how she became the Pioneer Woman. I liked it at first, and thought it was a cute story. But the longer the story went on, the more annoying it got--her obsession with her husband and her descriptions of his huge muscles and how weak her knees got when they were together got really old after a while. Literally every chapter, every time she mentioned his voice or his appearance or anything about him, she gushed on and on about how amazing he was and how she couldn't control herself around him. It got kind of old after a while. She also started to seem like she was really dependent on him, and said things like he was her "savior," and just let him make all the decisions like how many kids they were going to have, etc. She didn't really give Marlboro Man a personality (she never even said his name--he was always Marlboro Man, every time), and it stopped feeling real. It got kind of weird to me and I got kind of bored with it by the end. But the first half was cute, and I think it would be fun to write something similar about our relationship.

Regency Buck by Georgette Heyer

I didn't love this Georgette Heyer as much as I did Sylvester, but it was still a fun read. It's interesting how some of these storylines don't seem appropriate to our modern sensibilities but were perfectly acceptable just sixty or seventy years ago when they were written (not to mention two hundred years ago in the day and age when they are set). In this book, Judith Taverner and her brother are accidentally made wards to an unknown guardian, who, it turns out, is a handsome and fashionable young man. You can guess what's going to happen just from that one-sentence summary, I'm sure, but it's still enjoyable to watch it all happen. The parts that seem a old-fashioned are how even though Judith is a very stubborn and strong-willed woman, she still is controlled by all the men in her life--her guardian, her (younger) brother, and her cousin--and she allows them to do it. And even finds it attractive. This sort of storyline would never happen these days. But it was still a fun Heyer book.

The Letters of Jane Austen by Jane Austen

It's crazy that we are so addicted to Jane Austen's writing that we read her personal letters, even now, 200 years after her death. I listened to this because I've been scrambling to find audiobooks, and it was actually fun to listen to, because the reader had the perfect British accent and acted out what she was saying perfectly. Also, it was only about 2 hours, so I figured there was nothing to lose. I loved getting a little more insight into Jane's character--she was very funny in many of her letters, and sarcastic and witty, just like you'd expect from her books. Definitely a fun, short read.