Stuff We Like :: 3.8.19

I am so looking forward to a week of catching up on my reading! (And to reading Good Omens for my next book club seminar! Have you seen the trailer?)

WHAT’S HAPPENING AT HOME/SCHOOL/LIFE

• on the blog: You are doing a lot of things right, so give yourself some credit

• on instagram: I love Women’s History Month reading with my kids.

• from the archives: Great epistolary novels and family game night upgrades

LINKS I LIKED

• I find myself hit surprisingly hard by the death this week of Luke Perry. He wasn’t my childhood crush or anything — that was Willem Dafoe; I was a weird kid — but there was something kind of cool about the fact that the show’s heartthrob quoted Keats and talked Kerouac. RIP, Dylan McKay.

• This makes me sad. What are we doing with college and kids right now? Because it just seems like it’s terrible.

• I feel like this question keeps coming up for me: How do we deal with beloved children’s literature (and Little House on the Prairie was absolutely beloved by me as a child) that clearly has Big Problems once we start paying attention? I think it might be okay to acknowledge that we loved what we loved and even to pass it on to our children — knowing that if we’ve done our job right, they will probably pick up on those problems and not love it the way we did. And that’s right — that’s how the evolution of the canon should work. When we know better, we read better.

• This is my pet peeve! I am really picky about editions of classics, and Amazon makes it SO FREAKING HARD to get the one I want. (I usually end up Googling instead of searching inside Amazon because that tends to work a little better for finding the edition I want.)

• Relevant to my interests (which actually makes me sound kinda creepy): Episodes of Eating Children in Ancient Greece, Ranked in Order of Unreasonableness

THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW BUT NOW I DO

• It has been 30 years since “Closer to Fine” came out. Apparently this is the week of things making me feel old. 

• I do not actually know how to spell a surprising number of celebrity names. (Maybe you can do better!)

BOOKS ADDED TO MY TBR LIST THIS WEEK

• The Secret Commonwealth (Lyra Silvertongue all grown up? Sign me up!)

• A People’s Future of the United States (Get on my bookcase!)

WHAT’S MAKING ME HAPPY

It’s spring break! (It’s funny because when I was in school I didn't love spring break, but now that I teach school, I’m in love with spring break!)

(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)

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