What We're Reading<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What Niki is reading right now.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/awitchsashram\/2015\/06\/18\/what-were-reading-6\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What We're Reading\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What Niki is reading right now.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/awitchsashram\/2015\/06\/18\/what-were-reading-6\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"A Witch's Ashram\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-06-18T17:08:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" 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{"id":2670,"date":"2015-06-18T09:08:00","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T17:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/awitchsashram\/?p=2670"},"modified":"2015-06-18T09:08:00","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T17:08:00","slug":"what-were-reading-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/awitchsashram\/2015\/06\/18\/what-were-reading-6\/","title":{"rendered":"What We’re Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

School is out! Summer has started! And Mama is already exhausted after 4 days! Many Gods West<\/a> is in 6 weeks and we leave for a family vacation to Alaska in 10 days\u2019 time. If I\u2019m not giving you fresh insights, please forgive me. I\u2019ll be posting some older, but awesome posts to tide you over.<\/p>\n

Occasionally I like to share what we\u2019re reading in our house. Here is what we\u2019re reading:<\/p>\n

Kids<\/strong><\/p>\n

$\"IMG_20150618_080655702\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

My 7 year old is engrossed in the Wings of Fire <\/em>series. I don\u2019t find them particularly well-written or compelling, but they are about dragons and he loves them. They are books that he will sit and read for an hour or more at a time, and if that keeps him from harassing his sister, I almost don\u2019t care what he\u2019s reading. Almost.<\/p>\n

Our bedtime reading is Tove Jansson\u2019s Finn Family Moomintroll<\/em>. I found a couple of the Moomintroll novels at Goodwill and thought they would be good, silly fun for the kids. I was right! The novels are Finnish, originally published in 1948 and translated to English from the original Swedish in 1961. I really love this sort of children\u2019s book. I find early to mid-20th century children\u2019s novels to have a wonderful, lyrical form of writing, that is full of nonsense and play, but rarely talking down to kids.<\/p>\n

To my 4 year old (and son as well) I am reading Grimms\u2019 Fairy Tales. In the picture above it is the brown book with the water stain. This book was my mother\u2019s when she was a child. I spent so many hours of my own childhood reading and re-reading this volume and looking at the pictures. We also have the Hans Christian Anderson version, which we\u2019ll likely read next. I\u2019ve read these volumes to the kids before and I suspect we\u2019ll read them many more times.<\/p>\n

The colorful book in the picture is Rad American Women A-Z<\/em>. I recently posted a review of it at Gods & Radicals<\/a>. Check that out for a more comprehensive review. The short version is: it\u2019s excellent!!<\/p>\n

A book we recently finished that I really liked is Dragonwings<\/em> by Laurence Yep. It\u2019s the story of a boy who travels to San Francisco from China in the early 1900s. His father is desperate to fly like the Wright Brothers. The book tells a story about the father and son\u2019s relationship and the boy\u2019s experiences, but the reader learns a little bit about the history and culture of this time and place. The entire perspective is from that of a Chinese immigrant, which is a wonderful change of pace! It was particularly apt since I am trying to read books by and about non-white perspectives.<\/p>\n

Niki<\/strong><\/p>\n

$\"IMG_20150618_080803381\"$ <\/a> I am struggling to get any reading done at all! I am reading a review copy of Broken Gods<\/em>, a book by Christian Patheos blogger Gregory Popcak. Hopefully that will be up for everyone tomorrow.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also been slogging my way through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle<\/em> by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. I have read other of his works, but never this novel, considered by many people whose literary opinions I trust to be his best book and one of their favorite novels. It\u2019s\u2026\u2026. okay. I think I would like it more if I had read it before I had children. It\u2019s a strange, meandering novel \u2013 and those are often the best kind! But with children it can take me months to finish a book this long and that meandering style is hard to sink into. I lose the flow with my stop-start reading style these days. However, I have had this book on my shelf for a decade (or more) and now is the time to read it!<\/p>\n

Because I am committed to reading more writing about and by people of color I have been following closely Crystal Blanton\u2019s 30 Day Real Black History Challenge <\/a>on Facebook. I highly recommend that you follow along for the month of June. As a white person, the posts aren\u2019t comfortable or \u201cfun.\u201d But the site is educational, illuminating, and inspiring. Given the horrific news this morning of the Charleston shootings, now more than ever white people must expand their hearts and minds to the experience of people of color; we must root out racism in our selves and in our communities.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"