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For some reason, I’ve been reading books when it’s not summer vacation. Rather than wait until my annual summer book review and write an interminably-long post, I decided to write about them now.

Here they are, approximately in the order that I read them.

• 20 and Counting by The Duggar Family
  This is their life story, telling how Jim Bob and Michelle each grew up and met and everything. I don’t know what I expected before I started, but this book was more interesting than I thought it would be.

  If you have small kids, this book might give you some good ideas on ways to run things.

• The Closer by Mariano Rivera
  This was actually the youth version, not the full version. Beta picked it out at the bookstore. This also was more interesting than I expected it would be, although I did skip a bunch of about the last third of the book. The first part of the book was about his growing up in Panama and getting to the major leagues (not his plan, but he went along with it). Fine for all ages.
• Order of the Unicorn by Suzanne Selfors
  Beta was reading this through school. I forget if it was from the school library or a free-reading assignment or what. But I read it just to keep up with what is going into their minds. This is part of the imaginary veterinary series. The book wasn’t that memorable, but I suppose that’s okay because that means there’s nothing controversial in it.
• Wicked by Gregory Maguire
  Over 1 Million Sold!

  But not 1 million read.

  I doubt that many of the people who bought the book made it through that mess. We had tickets to go see the musical, so I thought I would get a head start and read the book. I started reading it but gave up. It was very crass. I thought it might get better, but about 10% of the way through it, my wife noticed I was reading it and said her friend told her not to bother with the book. So apparently it doesn’t get any better.

  If you’re thinking about reading the book: don’t do it.

  The musical is fine on its own, and does a fine job of removing the bad parts of the book. The currently-popular theme of villains not really being bad, just misunderstood, is still there. But there’s nothing you would censor for your kids, like you would for a lot of the book.

• Holes by Louis Sachar
  Good. One bad word. Interesting storylines.
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
  Not for kids. No reason for them to read it. What age is appropriate? Once they’ve had a government class in middle or high school, probably.
• Reclaiming the Sufficiency of Scripture by Rob Rienow
  Great book. I liked it so much I bought a few copies and mailed them to people. If you’re not going to watch his DVD series on marriage or his DVD series on parenting, at least read this book.
• A Reader’s Manifesto by B. R. Myers
  I thought this might be interesting, given a positive review I read.

  But it wasn’t.

  And the passages of bad writing that it critiques (or condemns) are not necessarily clean. I’d say avoid this book.

My wife looks forward to Christmas music. I used to try to hold out until after Thanksgiving, but she would turn to that one radio station that switches to all Christmas music the first week of November.

This year, I stopped resisting. But it seems to me that the radio station song selection is awful. If you want to hear the same few songs that aren’t really about Christmas, then go ahead and listen to the radio. Sure, they might have the word “Christmas” in them, but that doesn’t make them Christmas songs.

Anyway, disillusioned with the radio, I turned to our CD collection. Then, unable to find our CD collection, I turned to Amazon. (Amazon’s process for buying music digitally is way better than iTunes’ process, in case you want my opinion on that.)

All that to say this: I got to assess a number of Christmas albums and am giving you my favorites.

Top 3 Albums

• Evie – Come on, Ring Those Bells
  A classic. If you don’t know these songs then I am sorry for your sad childhood.
• Reliant K – Let It Snow, Baby… Let It Reindeer
  I was unfamiliar with this album before this year. But now this is my kids’ favorite album. I burned them a CD that has the slower angsty songs removed.
• Various Artists – Handel’s Young Messiah
  The one from the early 1990s. This is a very good way to be introduced to Handel’s Messiah. I hope you already have this CD, because it is out of print and you can’t buy digital copies of it. Not legally, anyway.

  I realize the whole Messiah composition is more appropriate at Easter time than Christmas, but it is not out of place at Christmas, so we’ll stick with tradition and allow it here.

Honorable Mention

• Mannheim Steamroller – Mannheim Steamroller Christmas
• MercyMe – The Christmas Sessions
• Sixpence None the Richer – The Dawn of Grace

Also, slightly related – if you’re looking for a recording of the Lord’s Prayer, I recommend Susan Boyle‘s version.

I don’t go through a lot of music, so I’m sure I missed or forgot some good ones. Any other recommendations?

You know what video is not going viral right now?

The one of you sitting around, watching videos on your phone.

Get out and do something.

Similarly to how the arguments against incandescent bulbs do not apply to me, arguments for water conservation also do not apply to me.

I let the water run while I shave. I run the water while I’m brushing my teeth. And I run the water while I’m loading the dishwasher.

Why don’t I care? Because my house has well and septic.

Not only is water essentially free, but it also follows the law of the conservation of mass: water can neither be created nor destroyed.

How do I “use up” water by letting it run? Answer: I don’t. All I do is move it around.

Here’s a well-and-septic system:

Water gets pumped out of the ground, up to my sink. Then it flows down the drain and back into the ground. What is the problem with that? It’s a zero-sum game – the water travelled a little bit, but its amount and location didn’t change.

“Turn off the water while you brush your teeth, and it could save you 5 gallons of water a day.”
“Benefits include a reduced water bill and conservation of fresh water.”

I pay to run the pump. I don’t care about that cost, and I just showed that no water is wasted (i.e. removed from possible future use) by letting water run. I have yet to be convinced there is a good reason why I can’t let the water run as much as I want.

I could see how someone could argue against lawn watering because then much of the water evaporates and doesn’t go back into the ground. While the argument shouldn’t be that water is wasted (since it just changed phase rather than disappearing), I will agree that the water does change its net location. Why it’s bad to provide rain for someone else is another discussion. I won’t put up much of a fuss either way on that argument, because I don’t water my lawn. Why help your lawn grow when that just means you’ll have to cut it more?

I know people have criticized the newer math sections in elementary schools, due to the way they comply to Common Core.

One of my kids’ math sheets illustrates one of the absurdities:

It’s the “How did you figure this out?” part that would aggravate me if I were still in school.
How did I figure this out? You just spent hours of classroom time teaching me how to figure this out, that’s how.

I would guess they get a lot of nebulous answers – with math, by writing the numbers, etc. I liked my son’s answer: “using my knowledge”. That is how it’s done, after all.

But the people who dismiss this question as useless are missing the hidden agenda.

It’s not a math sheet – it’s subtle career projection test.

In my years in the industry, I have found that audits – not financial audits, but business process audits – ask similar questions. I think these math sheets are secretly trying to gauge which students would make good process auditors and place them on the appropriate career path.

A general business process audit question would be something like “How do you know how to do your job?” To which my default answer would normally be something like “Well, I went to college and then the other people here at the company told me how our product is supposed to work and then I used my knowledge.”

But since the how-to-survive-an-audit pamphlet said not to answer in that manner, my default answer now is something like “I follow the engineering process workflow document, which is located at this intranet web address. No, I do not have any paper copies of it, because that would be bad.”

Summer is about over, which means my window for reading books is closed. So it is time for me to review the books I read and let you know what I thought of them.

Here they are, approximately in the order that I read them. Note: I noticed that all the books published before the year 2000 had authors with initials: G.K., C.S., H.G. I don’t know what that signifies, but it was interesting.

• Tentacle by Roland Smith
  This was an incomplete book – it needs the rest of the trilogy to be satisfying.

  It is book 2 of a trilogy. To put it another way, it is the middle section of one long story that has been split into 3 books for marketing purposes.

  I read it because Alpha checked it out of the library and I wanted to know what he was reading.

  The book looks to be a sea monster type of book, for the book cover shows a huge tentacle reaching out of the ocean. It seemed to convey “horror story” with that illustration, so I approached the book warily.

  The cover was slightly misleading, as the story involves the search for the giant squid, not a squid who terrorizes boats and beach-goers.

  The story was fine, although the beginning part mentions a severed human head. I thought that was a bit rough for a 4th/5th grader to be reading, but then I considered it a bit more:

  Would I have any problem if he were reading Treasure Island instead?
  No, no problem.
  Could I reasonably expect there might be a severed head in that story, or maybe other depictions of harm?
  Yes, that would not be out of place.
  So then, “severed head” is okay in classic literature but not okay in newer stories?
  Yes, I suppose so.

  So in the end, I had to admit to myself that it should not be a problem.

  I’d say 3rd grade on up is fine for this series. But if your child is interested in this series, try the old Tom Swift series first.

• Peak by Roland Smith
  Apparently my son was on a Roland Smith kick, because he checked this one out too. So I read it.

  It was an engaging story, but with some questionable items.

  The phrase “I was conceived” occurred near the beginning of the story. Why it’s in the book is one thing, why the mom of the 14-year-old in the story felt the need to tell him where he was conceived is another matter. Not everyone needs to know everything there is to know.

  I guess that was my biggest issue with the book. Most of the rest of it was about mountain climbing.

  Also, do any protagonist kids in any current books come from intact families?

  Ages 10 and up.

• Why Gender Matters by Dr. Leonard Sax
  The only non-fiction book in my list. If you are involved in parenting or education, you should read this book. There are a couple of chapters that could be skipped, but the chapter titles are clear enough so that you won’t be surprised by the content.

  Really, you should read this book.

  Not a book for kids.

• The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley
  Ah, the final installment of the Flavia de Luce series.

  Of the 6 books in the series, this was one of the better-told stories.

  That being said, I noted a couple. One, the book mentions that glass is a liquid. Two, the book mentions dripping coming from melting dry ice.

  It is a common misperception that glass is a liquid. In any other type of book, I could gloss over that. But this is a book whose protagonist is an expert chemist. Maybe Mr. Bradley wrote the book too authentically, using the prevailing knowledge of the day (1950s) rather than today.

  And as far as dry ice melting and dripping, that’s even worse for a book that describes chemistry so well. Maybe Mr. Bradley meant that when the dry ice warmed, the objects it was keeping frozen started to thaw and water dripped from them. Because dry ice doesn’t melt. It sublimes. Or sublimates. Goes straight from solid to gas.

  The book has a solid ending, a definite conclusion. It leaves a crack open for another series, but just barely.

  My problem with the ending was that
  Spoiler Alert
  people other than Flavia solved the mystery just ahead of her. In the other books, Flavia solved the mystery first and then we got a chapter or so of her explaining to the investigators how she did it.

  In this case, the investigators and police solve it (Flavia does too, independently, but not before the others) but we never get an explanation of how they solved it. We know how Flavia solved it, because that was described in the story. Oh well.
  End Spoiler Alert

  Not a book for kids. Teens maybe.

• The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton
  I had heard great things about this book, so I started with high expectations (not Great Expectations, as that would be confusing). And perhaps that’s why I found this book disappointing.

  I didn’t have a problem with the writing or with most of the story. It was the ending chapters that lost me. They didn’t make sense. I mean I understood the words I was reading and what was happening, but I got the impression it was an allegory for Something Deep and Profound and I wasn’t catching on like I should. In other words, it ceased to be entertaining and began being confusing.

  And then, at the very end, it was all for naught.

  I don’t know – high school and up?

• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
  I had heard great things about this book, so I started with high expectations (not Great Expectations, as that would be confusing). And perhaps that’s why I found this book disappointing.

  I didn’t have a problem with the writing or with most of the story. It was the ending chapters that lost me. They didn’t make sense. I mean I understood the words I was reading and what was happening, but I got the impression it was an allegory for Something Deep and Profound and I wasn’t catching on like I should. In other words, it ceased to be entertaining and began being confusing.

  Yes, I copied and pasted this review from the previous review. Because they both had the same effect on me. My recommendation is to read Book 1 of Till We Have Faces and skip Book 2. If you’ve seen the musical Into the Woods, it’s like that. Watch the first half, and leave at intermission – you’ll be much happier that way.

• War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
  I read this only because Alpha picked it up at a book sale and was reading it. Being a classic, it should have been fine for him, so I didn’t read it until after he did. He liked it so much he went to the library and checked out a collection of 7 books by H.G. Wells.

  There are some depictions of violence and mayhem, so ages 10 and up maybe, depending on your child’s sensitivities. Do not give this book to a child who is prone to nightmares. But Alpha has never complained of having nightmares I guess we’re good.

• The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
  Based on some reviews of this book and what I remember of the previews of the movie that was made some years back, I was expecting this one to be a bit more terrifying than War of the Worlds.

  But it was not.

  The descriptions of violence are a little more graphic, but they involve animals instead of humans, so the overall squeamishness level is about the same.

  If your child can handle War of the Worlds, he can handle this book.

I recall some of the parenting advice I read before I had kids. One particular piece of advice was “Make your kids feel more involved in the family by allowing them to make some decisions.”

At first glance, it seemed reasonable enough: let them make some unimportant decisions, such as what color shirt to wear, etc. and they’ll be happier. I don’t know if people are still dispensing that advice, as I haven’t been paying attention to the baby and toddler stuff much anymore.

It might work for some people, but be very careful with it. Limit the decisions.

Your job as a parent is to be in charge.

Your child’s job is not to be in charge.

Who is in charge? The person making the decisions. Each decision you let your child make reduces your authority. That is not what you want.

And the more decisions the child makes, the more decision the child expects to get to make. Do you as a parent want the child to think that he gets to provide his input on any decision or matter? If you go overboard on allowing your child to make decisions, you will be frustrated by a child who thinks that everything is negotiable.

You don’t want to turn your adult child out into the world with no decision-making experience, so I’m not saying never ask for your child’s input. But start it when they are ready for responsibility, maybe late grade school. Otherwise you’ll be arguing with your kids. “Alright, 8:00, time for bed.” “But I want to go to bed at 9:00.” “I didn’t ask what you wanted, I said it’s bedtime.” Oh, but you did ask what he wanted. Maybe not this time, but many times before. He is used to your asking what he wants, why should this decision be any different?

When the child is young, explain why he gets to make this decision. “Okay, it’s your birthday, so you get to choose the dessert.” That way he knows that his getting to make a decision is a special event, not a common occurrence.

Going back to the original premise: if kids don’t get to make decisions, then how will they feel like they belong in the family?

By being part of the family.

By doing things the family does.

By having things expected of him.

By having parents who care for him.

Which child is going to feel more involved in the family: the one who gets to decide what he has for dinner that night, or the one whose parent reads him a book at bedtime?

Spend time with your child, have conversations with your child, do things with your child. But don’t feel like you need to abdicate your decision making to him.