What I've Been Reading Lately

I thought I'd report on the books I've finished so far in April.

From Colonies to Country by Joy Hakim

This is the third book in a series called The History of US. It is written for teenagers, but I think adults who want a broad look at American history would enjoy it as well. Hakim includes lots of primary sources, has a balanced outlook (neither liberal nor conservative bias, as far as I can see), and writes in a readable and enjoyable story-like way. I learned A LOT from the first three of these books, but I was fairly ignorant about American history to start with. I plan on finishing the whole series.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

This was my second Roald Dahl book (I also read Matlilda.), and I liked it just as much as the first. Dahl paints the most vivid images; you can just see what is going on perfectly in your head. He is so clever at making up interesting kinds of candy, and I love the characters! My favorite thing about this book is how just it is. Good people get good things, and bad people end up stretched or turned blue or sucked up pipes. Awesome! And he is so over the top. Nothing just happens. Everything explodes or dances across the page. I'm going to read all of his books for sure.

Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes by Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

These two books are about the family of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, the inventors of motion study and process engineering. They had 12 kids, who were all raised using lots of their efficiency studies, as well as a ton of love and fun and free-range parenting. The stories are funny, heart-warming, and interesting from an efficiency point of view as well.

Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I've read this one a million times before (and loved it every time), but this time I read it out loud to Livy. She like it a lot, but some of the stories about animals made her sad (like when they had to trade in their horses for ones better suited for the prairie). She also cried A LOT when they had to leave Indian Territory after a year of building a life there. This book was an emotional roller coaster for her, but all in all we enjoyed it. We had also read Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy before. We've decided we are done with this series for a while, and we've started Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. She's seen all the movies, and now she is enjoying finding all the places where the movie changed the book.

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

Gatto is a former New York State Teacher of the Year and a huge advocate for privatizing education. He says that we need to stop talking about how to fix the public schools; they are not broken. They succeed incredibly well at what they were designed to do - homogenize the values of the population and teach us to be good little automatons. He is very honest about the terrible lessons he felt he taught to his students; he calls these lessons the hidden curriculum and says that he spent much of his time teaching them, not the surface curriculum. I don't agree with everything he says (for one thing, he espouse altruism), but his answer to the educational crisis is my answer - free market! Let parents decide the kind of education they want for their children.

Have you read any of these books? What are you reading now?