Day Two Hundred and Forty Eight
A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson Page: 147 Finished
Daddy Long Legs by Jean Webster Page: 223 Finished
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Page: 151
I’m a bit tired tonight but I wanted to post a bit about books since I haven’t been doing that very much lately.
I loved Jean Webster’s little novel. It was fun, sweet, charming and engaging. It just felt so fresh and light and airy. Exactly like the kind of novels my mom used to read to us that ended happily and satisfyingly but kept you interested until the end. Not high literary challenge but joyous and fun. I highly recommend it for a quiet hour or two.
Robert Louis Stevenson was wonderful too, of course. I read most of the Garden of Verses yesterday while taking the boys for a walk (and highly entertaining it was to read it out loud as we walked by my curious neighbors) and finished it this morning while doing the same. Alex seemed to enjoy it and I thought that it was very read-aloud-able. I really enjoy the range of styles and age-levels available in the Everyman’s Children’s collection. The little books of verses are great for reading to short attention spans while I forsee the longer works being enjoyed up through the boys’ early teen years.
Unfortunately I’m not enjoying Mann as much. I loved Joseph and His Brothers but so far The Magic Mountain doesn’t feel so much magical as it does depressing. The store is slow moving (even for Mann) and other than some mild philosophizing (and it really is very mild) lacks any point of interest. Hopefully it starts to engage my attention one way or another soon as I still have 700 pages to go…