10-10-10 Challenge update (again)

Two categories completed, and I think it's a total of 44 books - counting them in more than one category makes it hard to keep track, especially when I don't properly tag the books in LibraryThing.

Overall:
Shakespeare-related (20%)
Poetry (10%)
Biography (30%)
Contemporary YA (100%)
Children's non-fiction (60%)
Science fiction (20%)
History (100%)
Mystery (60%)
Written before 1900 (40%)
Pulitzer winners (40%)

1. Shakespeare-related (2/10)
Shakespeare: The World As a Stage, Bill Bryson
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro

2. Poetry (1/10)
Red Bird, Mary Oliver

3. Biography (3/10)
Shakespeare: The World As a Stage, Bill Bryson
The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom
Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman, Judy Taylor

4. Contemporary young adult (10/10)
Sweet, Hereafter, Angela Johnson
A Wish After Midnight, Zetta Elliott
The Clearing, Heather Davis
The Things a Brother Knows, Dana Reinhardt
The Six Rules of Maybe, Deb Caletti
Extraordinary, Nancy Werlin
Kissing Tennessee, Kathi Appelt
My Most Excellent Year, Steve Kluger
Habibi, Naomi Shihab Nye
Only the Good Spy Young, Ally Carter

5. Children's non-fiction (6/10)
Honeybees: Letters From the Hive, Stephen Buchmann
The Boys' War, Jim Murphy
How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space?, William Pogue
Bloody Scotland, Terry Deary
Math Doesn't Suck, Danica McKellar
The War to End All Wars, Russell Freedman

6. Science fiction (2/10)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Android Karenina, Leo Tolstoy and Ben Winters

7. History (10/10)
Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Melvin Konner
The Boys' War, Jim Murphy
The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Playing the Enemy, John Carlin
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
Helluva Town, Richard Goldstein
Hellhound on his Trail, Hampton Sides
A Nation Rising, Kenneth C. Davis
Farmers Against the Crown, Keith Jones

8. Mystery (6/10)
Poirot Investigates, Agatha Christie
The Seven Dials Mystery, Agatha Christie
The Mapping of Love and Death, Jacqueline Winspear
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, Alan Bradley
A River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters
The God of the Hive, Laurie R. King
Dark Road to Darjeeling, Deanna Raybourn

9. Written before 1900 (4/10)
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Roughing It, Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

10. Pulitzer winners (4/10)
Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
Red Bird, Mary Oliver
War in a Time of Peace, David Halberstam

Note to Self

Do this.

Chapter 5: A Journey for Jane

Really, what's better for a ten-year-old than a fifty-mile coach journey by herself? Over early-nineteenth-century roads? I think Mrs. Reed would say the answer is "nothing."

Jane's just arrived at Lowood School, and while her arrival there doesn't sound like a lot of fun, it's not overly inauspicious:

"I passed from compartment to compartment, from passage to passage, of a large and irregular building; till, emerging from the total and somewhat dreary silence pervading that portion of the house we had traversed, we came upon the hum of many voices...a congregation of girls of every age, from nine or ten to twenty. Seen by the dim light of the dips, their number to me appeared countless, though not in reality exceeding eighty; they were uniformly dressed in brown stuff frocks of quaint fashion, and long holland pinafores."

Now, I've never tasted porridge in any form, let alone burnt. Or rotten potatoes, for that matter. But "burnt porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes" is one of the lines I remember from this book. Ugh.

But Miss Temple, one of the unequivocally good characters here, jumps in to save the day:

"'You had this morning a breakfast which you could not eat; you must be hungry:—I have ordered that a lunch of bread and cheese shall be served to all...It is to be done on my responsibility,' she added, in an explanatory tone to them, and immediately afterwards left the room."

Brave Miss Temple. We'll be returning to this decision in a few pages.

One other important character makes her debut in chapter 5: Helen Burns. But we'll leave her details for next time.

While we're having fun with alliteration, here's another J word for Miss Jane: judgmental. Nothing's stopping this girl from forming opinions, even if she's smart enough not to share:

"none of whom precisely pleased me; for the stout one was a little coarse, the dark one not a little fierce, the foreigner harsh and grotesque, and Miss Miller, poor thing! looked purple, weather-beaten, and over-worked"

And on Helen's choice of reading material:

"a brief examination convinced me that the contents were less taking than the title: 'Rasselas' looked dull to my trifling taste; I saw nothing about fairies, nothing about genii; no bright variety seemed spread over the closely-printed pages."

10-10-10 Challenge update

Well, none of the categories are 0/10 any longer:

1. Shakespeare-related (2/10)
Shakespeare: The World As a Stage, Bill Bryson
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro

2. Poetry (1/10)
Red Bird, Mary Oliver

3. Biography (1/10)
Shakespeare: The World As a Stage, Bill Bryson

4. Contemporary young adult (9/10)
Sweet, Hereafter, Angela Johnson
A Wish After Midnight, Zetta Elliott
The Clearing, Heather Davis
The Things a Brother Knows, Dana Reinhardt
The Six Rules of Maybe, Deb Caletti
Extraordinary, Nancy Werlin
Kissing Tennessee, Kathi Appelt
My Most Excellent Year, Steve Kluger
Habibi, Naomi Shihab Nye

5. Children's non-fiction (4/10)
Honeybees: Letters From the Hive, Stephen Buchmann
The Boys' War, Jim Murphy
How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space?, William Pogue
Bloody Scotland, Terry Deary

6. Science fiction (1/10)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

7. History (9/10)
Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Melvin Konner
The Boys' War, Jim Murphy
The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Playing the Enemy, John Carlin
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
Helluva Town, Richard Goldstein
Hellhound on his Trail, Hampton Sides
A Nation Rising, Kenneth C. Davis

8. Mystery (5/10)
Poirot Investigates, Agatha Christie
The Seven Dials Mystery, Agatha Christie
The Mapping of Love and Death, Jacqueline Winspear
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, Alan Bradley
A River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters
The God of the Hive, Laurie R. King

9. Written before 1900 (3/10)
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Roughing It, Mark Twain

10. Pulitzer winners (3/10)
Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
Red Bird, Mary Oliver

(Post pic from my collection; location unknown but probably Yosemite.)

Sacred Mountain Everest

Sacred Mountain Everest, by Christine Taylor-Butler (Lee & Low)

This is a long-overdue Cybils review, but let's start with the important question: how did I not know that Edmund Hillary was a beekeeper until I read this book?

Sacred Mountain Everest is a very cool book, covering some of the familiar history while giving full credit to the Sherpas who made the climbs alongside the famous names.

Seeing the author tweet this, six months after I read the book? Also very cool:

10-10-10 Challenge update

As of this week. Clearly I've got some work to do.

1. Shakespeare-related (2/10)
Shakespeare: The World As a Stage, Bill Bryson
Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro

2. Poetry (0/10)

3. Biography (1/10)
Shakespeare: The World As a Stage, Bill Bryson

4. Contemporary young adult (8/10)
Sweet, Hereafter, Angela Johnson
A Wish After Midnight, Zetta Elliott
The Clearing, Heather Davis
The Things a Brother Knows, Dana Reinhardt
The Six Rules of Maybe, Deb Caletti
Extraordinary, Nancy Werlin
Kissing Tennessee, Kathi Appelt
My Most Excellent Year, Steve Kluger

5. Children's non-fiction (3/10)
Honeybees: Letters From the Hive, Stephen Buchmann
The Boys' War, Jim Murphy
How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space?, William Pogue

6. Science fiction (1/10)
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

7. History (9/10)
Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Melvin Konner
The Boys' War, Jim Murphy
The Imperial Cruise, James Bradley
Blood and Thunder, Hampton Sides
Playing the Enemy, John Carlin
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
Helluva Town, Richard Goldstein
Hellhound on his Trail, Hampton Sides
A Nation Rising, Kenneth C. Davis

8. Mystery (5/10)
Poirot Investigates, Agatha Christie
The Seven Dials Mystery, Agatha Christie
The Mapping of Love and Death, Jacqueline Winspear
The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, Alan Bradley
A River in the Sky, Elizabeth Peters
The God of the Hive, Laurie R. King

9. Written before 1900 (2/10)
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne

10. Pulitzer winners (2/10)
Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman

You though I forgot about Jane, didn't you?

Forgot, no. Lazy? I plead the fifth.

We've reached the fourth chapter of Miss Eyre's autobiography, in which the Black Pillar is introduced. That would be Mr. Brocklehurst, of course, and if this were Rocky Horror, now would be the time to throw stuff at the screen -

Mrs. Reed has summoned Mr. Brocklehurst to Gateshead because she's decided she must get the Eyre child away from her little darlings. ("They are not fit to associate with me," our girl snaps one day.) Jane spends two and a half months in a sort of limbo - deliberate religious reference, courtesy of the pretty sharp satire in this chapter - before the villain appears.

(And as Bronte sets the stage for his appearance, she breaks into a delightfully snarky portrait of Eliza Reed:

"She had a turn for traffic, and a marked propensity for saving; shown not only in the vending of eggs and chickens, but also in driving hard bargains with the gardener about flower-roots, seeds, and slips of plants...Eliza would have sold the hair off her head if she could have made a handsome profit thereby. As to her money...Eliza, fearful of one day losing her valued treasure, consented to intrust it to her mother, at a usurious rate of interest—fifty or sixty per cent.; which interest she exacted every quarter, keeping her accounts in a little book with anxious accuracy."

Just in case you thought she was meant to be a sympathetic character.)

Okay, back to the Big Bad Wolf.

You laugh? Look at how he's described, and tell me that "Grandmother, what big teeth you have" doesn't complete the series:

"What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level with mine! what a great nose! and what a mouth! and what large prominent teeth!"

And he, charming man, proceeds to quiz Jane on why she's such a wicked girl, and what happens to disobedient children, and other cheerful topics, making reference to the "Child's Guide" and its tales of awful things that happen to bad children. The "Child's Guide" was a play on the "Children's Friend," a periodical published by the real-life inspiration for Mr. Brocklehurst.

Bronte gets in one more dig at the distinguished clergyman before the scene closes: "Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties," he says. Uh huh. Matthew 22:38 says something a little different, and Bronte's readers were no doubt familiar with that verse.