Book #31: The Collapse of Parenting by Leonard Sax

I've heard lots of good reviews about this book and really enjoyed reading it. Sax talks about how parents these days are far too concerned with being their kids' best friend instead of actually trying to teach them how to grow up and the expectations and rules of being members of society. They're afraid to make them follow the rules or speak respectfully because then their kids won't love them any more. Unfortunately, this is really negative for kids, because they don't learn how to make responsible choices or to develop any discipline. Sax is arguing that parents need to re-assert their authority and make sure that their kids aren't taking their screens to bed, that they're sleeping normal hours, that they're eating all types of foods, etc. He also is very anti-medication for ADHD and other psychiatric medications and spends a whole chapter on why those are bad. He says that we really need to teach our kids humility--help them realize they're not more important than everyone else around them--and grit--help them to survive failures and other people not liking them--and to strengthen our individual family relationships so that they want to be with us and don't value peer relationships more than parents. (I thought that point was probably very important, but I just don't know how realistic that really is. I feel like almost every teenager spends years caring more about their peers than their parents. How can you really fight that? I don't know.)

The funny thing is--I basically fully agree with everything he said in this book. I already thought these things were true and I totally think that there is too much psychiatric medication, too many kids with too many screens, too much free rein for kids too young. I am all about strict parenting, etc. But half of this book just kept rubbing me the wrong way. I felt like Sax was very one-sided and completely not sympathetic or interested in what other people believe or feel. Particularly when he was talking about medications, he never once even hinted that there might be cases in which the medication might be necessary. He just kept saying that parents give their kids medication instead of bothering to give them expectations and hold them to it, so the medication is basically a substitute for bad parenting. I felt like it was a little harsh--maybe true, but maybe not, and definitely not in all cases. I felt like that throughout the whole book, and that held me back from wanting to recommend it wholeheartedly to other family members who may have been interested.

Book #30: Happy Times in Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren

This is the sequel to The Children of Noisy Village that I read with Dane a few weeks ago. So we moved on to this one after we finished--I loved that one so much that I bought it and this one on Amazon before we'd even finished it. It's the exact same format--each chapter is just a little vignette of something the kids did together and all of their goings-on. I loved the stories about them building caves in their hay barn and making a "cherry company" to sell their cherries. It makes me feel so reminiscent of the pure joy and "flow" that comes from really good play time when kids are just running around outside and being totally creative and unsupervised. I want so badly to give my kids that experience--although, of course, it will be a few years before they can do that. But I would just love for Dane to be able to run around like these kids do--but I don't know how much that would even be allowed in today's society. Maybe when he's 9 or 10 like these kids are? Hopefully.

The only bad thing about this book (literally--the only thing) is that occasionally the kids call each other "brats" or "stupid" and I don't want Dane hearing those words yet! So I just edit them out as I read and it's worked out fine.

I am so happy to have discovered these books. So much fun.

Book #29: The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp

I picked up this book at my aunt and uncle's house while we were there, and since, like everyone in the world, I love The Sound of Music, I thought it would be fun to read, and it was. I don't have a ton to say about this book. It was very interesting to learn more about the real Maria and the family, and I loved reading the story about them in Austria. However, the part covered by the movie is only maybe the first 1/3 of the book, and the rest ends up blending together--all about the years of them touring America giving concerts to make money, and buying their farm up in Vermont and turning it into a music camp for the summers. I did like Maria's writing style and how she would sometimes go off on these artistic tangents (like, "Oh, applause! You could write a book on the different types of applause!" and so on for two paragraphs, in the middle of another story), and honestly, I thought she was a very good writer considering that this wasn't her Thing. It was a fun read, but definitely not something I would feel like I need to re-read someday.

Now I feel the need to re-watch the movie.

Book #28: A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

I started reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and somehow it made me want so badly to revisit A Room of One's Own, which I read as required reading in English in high school, so I set that one down halfway to finish this one. I don't know why I wanted to read it again, since I didn't like it very much when I originally read it--I remember feeling like I was dragging to get through the few chapters assigned for reading each week and trying so hard to keep my attention. But this time, I think, since I have much more of a background and understanding of feminism and women's rights and Life with a capital L--not that I am well-versed in any of those things, but definitely more so than when I was 16--it was extremely interesting to me to read and I felt thoroughly absorbed in the major points that Woolf was making throughout the book. It's only 113 pages, so its length makes it easy to read and not to be intimidated by, but it includes a very good overview of Woolf's opinion of why women haven't written as much as men, and what women need to do in order to produce art like men have done over the centuries. So much of it seems almost commonplace or obvious now, but I think that is because of Woolf herself and the impact her writing and her thinking--and those of others in her generation--has had on us today.

Basically, Woolf's thesis is this: women must have an independent source of income, and a room of their own, in order to be able to produce good writing. That seems representative to me of the idea that art cannot be produced when the author is slaving away to provide the necessities of life, or when they are being distracted and taken away from their work by the demands of everyday life. So artists must be above those things--but women never have been throughout the ages. Women have been bearing children and taking care of those children and have been traditionally impoverished and at the mercy of their (commonly abusive) husbands for millennia, so it is no wonder that they have been unable to produce art like Shakespeare's in the time of Shakespeare. Because of this reality of women's circumstances, they also have a paucity of female authors as a heritage to trace back to or lean on as they write their own works, which are separate from the tradition of male writers. And many women who do write get caught up and twisted in their anger about their lack of freedom and abilities, which detracts from their finished products because they are writing about their anger instead of about their story. "Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot" (69-70). So women who want to write well--she holds up Jane Austen as one of the only women who has done this successfully--need to write of their stories and not of their grievances, and cannot think about their gender as they write. Writing about your gender (as a male or a female) only brings up anger and the need to justify yourself.

I thought it was interesting how in a few places Woolf makes it very clear that she is not advocating for women to become exactly the same as men--equals, yes, but genderless, no.  "It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education out to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is . . ." (88). This stood out to me because it seems like many people in our society have taken this to the opposite extreme (like the recent law which passed in the Senate to have women sign up for the draft). Woolf celebrates the differences between women's and men's writing and doesn't wish to see the decline of one, rather the increase of another which would complement both--and this applies not just to writing, but to all aspects of both genders. Woolf is not very sympathetic to mothers bearing children--she seems to be of the view that having babies is a necessary evil which is important to populate the earth but which detracts from the ability of women to reach their full potential. At the end of her lecture, she cautions the young women in her audience that they should no longer be having ten or twelve children like previous generations but instead only two or three. I obviously do not agree with her viewpoint on this--that children are just detracting from women reaching their full potential--but I think it is obvious that when women are having lots of babies, they are obviously spending their time elsewhere than being able to write the Next Great American Novel (or British, or whatever).

(I feel the irony of writing about this right now because in the middle of writing this, I had to stop and help clean up a poopy accident, a mothering distraction which Woolf would have despaired of.)

Book #27: The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren

I feel like I saw this book a few different places while I was looking into finding some chapter books I could read aloud with Dane. I figured that he was probably getting to the point where he could handle a longer story and that he doesn't need pictures to keep his attention any more. I saw this recommended as a good book to read with kids, and since it was written by the author of Pippi Longstocking, I knew it would be a fun read for him. I am SO happy that we read it. It was so cute--it reminded me a lot of the Rainbow Valley book from Anne of Green Gables, with each chapter being an individual story about these kids and their adventures they get up to. There are six kids who all live in three houses next to each other, and everyone calls their little row of houses "Noisy Village" because there are so many children who get up to mischief. Each chapter was only 5-6 pages long and had sweet, fun details about what sorts of things Lisa (the narrator) and her brothers and friends got up to.

This was a perfect, super fun book to read aloud with Dane. We laid on the bed and read 2-3 chapters a day, and he stared up at the ceiling listening and picturing what was going on. He totally absorbed it all and has been calling us "draggletail" from one of the chapters. I loved, loved, loved doing this with him and I cannot wait to read more books with him like this. We ordered this and the sequel from Amazon because just borrowing it from the library is not enough. And I decided I am going to write about them here on this blog so that I can remember what chapter books we read together so I can remember for reading with later kids too.

Book #26: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

I have loved Elizabeth Gaskell ever since I discovered her five years ago, but I don't think I've re-read this book since then (I liked Wives and Daughters more, which I think I'm going to re-read soon too!). North and South tells the story of Margaret Hale, who is uprooted by her father's crisis of conscience, when he leaves his profession as a pastor and they move from rural southern England to the industrial town of Milton in the north. At first, Margaret is prejudiced against the tradespeople of their new town and hates their new hometown, but the more she gets to know the people, both rich and poor, and the more she learns about their town and the way things work, the more she learns to appreciate it. She meets Mr. Thornton, one of the owners of a cotton factory, and he naturally falls in love with her despite her initial disdain and they have an up and down relationship that lasts throughout the book--until the final resolution in the last two pages.

This book is clearly a social commentary on the change and upheaval going on in their time during the Industrial Revolution in England, but it is also a great romance--two genres that don't seem to be readily mixed. Obviously most readers are probably more interested in the romantic aspects of the story, and I felt like a lot of the discoursing on the different classes and the differences between masters and men could have been condensed and still kept its value. I skimmed a lot of the seriously long paragraphs where it was clear they were only going on more and more about the economy of Milton or arguing about strikes--I felt like I got the gist of it, but I wanted to get to the good stuff. I loved Margaret as a character--the book uses a lot of words like "haughty" to describe her, but I don't get that sense at all. She seems clear-headed and brave and not afraid of people's opinions, all of which I like. Mr. Thornton is an awesome romantic hero--he loves Margaret, proposes to her, she rejects him, and he vows to continue loving her despite knowing she doesn't like him. (It's seriously the same love story as Pride and Prejudice, just with the added social commentary and socialist viewpoints thrown in.) The moments we get from his perspective are definitely heart-throbbing in his love for Margaret. I actually watched the BBC version of the book before re-reading it this week, and it was fun to compare the book-character with what I remembered from the movie; the endings are completely different and both very romantic and satisfying to me as the reader/viewer.

I don't have any more deep thoughts about this right now--I'm trying to finish this fast before Skyping with my family. But it was the perfect book to read this week while Tommy was gone. I love it.

Book #25: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

Well, I hit 25 books before halfway through the year, so at least maybe I'll read 50 books this year! Haha. I don't know if I will ever make it up to 100 books again. But I feel like my reading less is perhaps an example of me living the "essentialist" lifestyle that McKeown is espousing in this book. Basically the book is promoting a lifestyle where we get rid of all the nonessential distractions that are making us too busy, and focus on living and working in a way towards our most important and beloved goals and purpose. McKeown spends some time detailing what being an "essentialist" really means, what are some of the things an essentialist must do/value, and what processes we can use to focus on only doing what we truly want. These are some of the most important points that stood out to me:

- Almost everything is nonessential. I think this is very true.
- If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. He tells some excellent stories that exemplify this. You need to decide what your boundaries and priorities are, and stick to them.
- You cannot do it all. There are trade-offs for everything. If you want to add a new opportunity, something else will suffer.
- "If it isn't a clear yes, then it's a clear no." If you can't say with 100% certainty that you want to do something, then you shouldn't be doing it. Learn to say no gracefully if you're being asked to do something you don't want to do.

I read this book feeling the whole time like, "Yes, mmhmm, yep, I agree." They all seemed like great points, but none of it felt all that earth-shattering to me. Maybe that means I am already living a pretty essentialist lifestyle--which I think may be true. Being a parent of small children has meant that I have learned to remove the temptations to do things which sound like they may be fun (a day-long outing to downtown Dallas?) which would not make my life easier, and I have learned to consciously thrust aside many of the voices which say I should be doing lots of other things and trying to cause me mom-guilt. Like McKeown says, almost everything is nonessential. On any given day, I don't have to do anything other than keeping my boys happy and me sane. Of course, I have other things I want to do--projects for me, learning for the boys--but if they don't happen or if it's going to cause me stress, then we won't do it. I think there are probably lots of ways I could be more focused on prioritizing, and this book and How Will You Measure Your Life? have both made me want to actually verbalize those priorities and start taking steps to deliberately be working on them.