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Saturday, August 07, 2010

Talking Birds & Bees

We have two sons. This makes me outnumbered. Even counting the cat, a very pretty calico named Marnie, I'm outnumbered. So when I'm met with the question, "Mom, if you don't have a penis, what do you have?" (we encourage our boys to use the proper names for ALL parts of their anatomy), I'm kind of at a loss. I mean, my descriptive powers only go so far. I'm not good at drawing pictures, and show & tell is, obviously, out of the question.

So, I went to a friend who is both a fantastic nurse and the mother of a 15-year-old boy to ask her for -- what else? -- book recommendations, and she recommended two fantastic books. The first, geared toward ages 7 and up, is called It's So Amazing!: A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families. The other, for ages 10 and up, is called It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health. 

Both books use very clear, straightforward artwork to convey meaning, with the "younger" book using more of the artwork and cartoon-like panels to give the information. There is no mincing of words, no beating around the bush, and nothing said to make anything seem like it's taboo or titillating or shameful.

Now, instead of trying to explain what Mom has instead of a penis, I can open up It's So Amazing! and show them what Mom, and every other "girl" in the world, has. I've recommended these books so many times to other parents at baseball and soccer games that I figured I would just write a blog post about them and just direct people here from now on. Good luck to everyone raising kids with answering the tough questions!

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Librarians do Gaga

A Twitter friend sent me the link to this video, and I absolutely loved it. You gotta love librarians. Truly. We're wonderful people.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Book update

I figured that I should use this space to update the books I've read. As I think shows in my sidebar, I make note of them in Goodreads, but I could put a little commentary here.

I read the latest in the Black Dagger Brotherhood series, Lover Mine, last week, and it was wonderful. It was about John Matthew, with a healthy dose of Qhuinn and Blay (who collectively broke my heart). We also got the backstory on Xhex, who is much older than I'd thought. Terrific, though. The book had the same tough sexiness of the other books in the series. My quibbles were her overuse of some of the slang, such as "getting verticle" and derivations thereof. Once or twice was fine; after that she could have just said that people sat up.

I also read Water for ElephantsI may have been the last person in the country to read this. It was fantastic. It's being made into a movie, with Rob Pattinson playing young Jacob and Reese Witherspoon as Marlena.  Hal Holbrook will play old Jacob.

The last book club book I read was The Blue Girl, which was an urban fantasy book, and I really enjoyed it. It was about a girl who befriends a ghost boy and has to fend off a bunch of fairies.

I had to flounce on the last book club book, Under the Sabers, because it was so bad. I just couldn't get past the first few chapters. I guess books about army wives just aren't for me. I ended up being sick on the discussion day, anyway, so it must have been a cosmic sort of thing.

This month's selection is The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. I'm listening to the audiobook version. I'm about half way through it, and I'm loving it so far.

Update: June 2, 2010:

I finished Deliverance Dane a while ago, I just forgot to update here. It turns out that I continued loving the book, though that sentiment wasn't shared by my book group colleagues, interestingly. I thought it was a nice, fun story that went back and forth from the 1990s to the late 17th/early 18th centuries. Others in the book group thought that it was lacking in scholarship and dumbed down for the reader. But, that's what makes for a good book group discussion. It's a boring book group in which everyone agrees. 

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Moral Disorder by Margaret Atwood

I just finished this book for the University Libraries book club. I can't say that I liked it. I didn't like the disjointedness of it. I think it was the "an other stories" part of it that bothered me. For the most part it was the story of one woman and her life, with its trials and tribulations (and a lot of both). Then the last few chapters were where the "other stories" came in, completely without any warning that they were the other stories, that we were no longer hearing about protagonist of the other 80% of the book. So I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out where this fit with the rest of the book, only to realize that it really didn't fit at all. Kind of frustrating.


This is the first Margaret Atwood book I've read, and I can't say that it was a good introduction to her work. I'm not sure that I'd want to read any more by her, based on this book. I found it very frustrating, and I had to force myself to read it. Never a good sign.