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With a couple different vacations this summer, I’ve had time to read some books. Half of these I picked and half of these were recommended to me by the wife and/or kids.

I’m going in order of when I read them.

First up: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

I have read this book before, but it was a while ago. It was on our shelf when I was looking for books to read, and as it was a small book it looked good for a vacation read.

I like this classic sci-fi type of book, and because it’s such a classic I feel any review I give will be mostly useless. If you’ve never read H.G. Wells it would be an okay start.

Next up: King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard

I picked this book off our shelves as something to read for the last few vacations, and took it along but never got around to reading it. It also is not a very large book. It was a more interesting story than The Time Machine. I liked it, but it’s not for everyone these days. It was written a while back and different things were socially acceptable back then.

Spoiler Alert

After I read it, I was thinking it would make a good movie, but no one would make it as written. It’s about white people who are journeying into the heart of Africa to find some treasure, and helping a displaced king of a tribe regain his throne. I was thinking what they could do to make it into a movie, then I realized that’s basically the plot of Black Panther. Any attempt to make a movie of KSM would be seen as a white man’s Black Panther. And to remove the African tribe element would turn it into any other adventure story, which would probably be fine, but then it wouldn’t be this story. I think its time has passed for a movie.

End Spoiler Alert

Next up: Story Thieves by H. James Riley

Just kidding, the author is James Riley. But all the authors so far had a first initial of H. so I tried to continue the trend.

This one is like Inception. Except it’s a book. I’ll call it Bookception.

James Riley wrote this book, but in this book there’s an author who is writing his book series, and the protagonists move between the two. It was an entertaining story. There are more books to the series than this first one, which worked well enough as a standalone. It left the door open for the rest of the series but its not like some books that don’t resolve enough in the first book so you have to read the rest.

I don’t remember anything objectionable, so it’s probably fine for anyone who wants to read it. Lower middle grade certainly.

My only complaint is that now I’m interested in reading the book series that’s in this book. I was going to call it the fictional book series. As opposed to the fiction book series. James Riley should take up the pseudonym of the guy in the story and publish those books.

Next up: The Blackthorn Key by Kevin Sands

This one was highly recommended by my son, who is entering 9th grade. It was a refreshing change of pace – a unique setting and characters. England around the time of the Black Plague.

It is a little violent and gruesome, but not out of place with the things that probably happened back then. As with the previous review, I have read only the first book, so I can’t vouch for the rest of the series. But no problems with upper middle grade readers for this one.

Next up: Land of Stories by Chris Colfer

This is another one that I’ve been trying to read for a while. This was one of the better books I’ve read recently, as far as getting into it and wanting to read it once I’ve started. It’s good for people who know all their fairy tales and nursery rhymes and such. So if your kids don’t know those, have them go through Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Mother Goose collections.

As with the previous review, I have read only the first book, so I can’t vouch for the rest of the series. But no problems with lower middle grade readers for this one.

That’s it for this review. Maybe I’ll be able to finish a series soon.

I haven’t had a Family Conversations post in a while, but this should fit in that category. It’s just one though. Now that all the kids are in middle school and up, they don’t talk as much.

The scene: Delta has an origami book and has been practicing making paper cranes, and they’re turning out fairly well.
Delta:Dad, let’s see who can make a paper crane faster.
Me:Ok…go!
We both commence folding. I win the race.
Me:I’m done.
Delta:No, dad, one that looks good.
I do not know how to fold paper cranes. I folded something, but you would not have guessed it to be a crane. Unfortunately, I did not save it nor photograph it.

I just watched Pocahontas for the first time, and it was funny how closely it stuck to the standard Disney formula. I knew there were certain themes that were popular, but after that I listed all them I thought of and now I present those to you, dear reader.

• Main character is the daughter of the king/chief/etc. Bonus points if her mother has died.
• The king wants his daughter to follow traditions, but the daughter is impetuous and does not want to.
• She follows her own way and ends up falling in love with someone not from around these parts, which causes trouble.
• The king or villain or mob of townsfolk tries to kill the love interest, but …
• The daughter intervenes and changes her father’s heart / persuades the locals / helps defeats the villain to save the day.
• Everyone, including loyal animal sidekicks, lives happily ever after.

I came up with this list mostly with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Moana in mind (and Pocahontas of course), but some of it also applies to Mulan and Tangled.

Side note: I think some of the success of Frozen is due to its not following the formula.
Barely related note: The Emperor’s New Groove 2 (AKA Kronk’s New Groove) was made with minimal effort. They really phoned it in for that one – do not watch unless you have a lot of time to kill and nothing better to do.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• There are two phases to Jackie Chan’s career – the good old days and the not-so-good newer days. If his movie was produced by Golden Harvest, it’s from the good phase. Once he started making movies with Hollywood, it was all downhill from there.
• Isn’t all food ethnic food? Or when people say “ethnic food” they mean anything other than their ethnicity?
• It’s summer, but it’s August so football is back on the radar. This year, I’m going to keep track of which announcers know the difference between a reverse and an end-around.
• If you take a laundry bag on vacation and bring it home full of dirty laundry, make sure that it contains only dirty laundry. This last vacation, someone packed the shaving kit in the laundry bag because it was easier to carry that way. We didn’t find it until we moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer, because laundry bags just get dumped into the washer.
• Tip for husbands: if the wife ever references TOH, she’s probably talking about Taste of Home, not This Old House.

This is the third of a two-part series, like the fourth book of a trilogy. You can also read about the first part of our trip here.

After we returned from Canada, we had one day to unpack then one day to repack, then on the third day we left for the shores of Lake Michigan, where we vacationed with purpose.

The first thing we noticed is that the old dirt-and-mulch pathway between houses was upgraded. As far as we know, this is a volunteer effort by the one homeowner, so I just wanted to note that it looks good.

We arrive Saturday, get setup, have dinner, then go to the Saturday concert. Afterwards is a walk down to Lake Michigan to see the sunset. Here is the view at the beach that first evening.

That’s not just overcastiness, that’s the effect of the Canadian wildfires. They were going strong while we were in Canada, but you couldn’t really tell while we were there. Then we came back to Michigan and got a much stronger effect.

Here’s a shot from the same time of day but on Tuesday rather than Saturday, and it’s more how it should look.

We had our usual array of activities during the week:

Tie-dye T-shirts

Crafts

And a shuffleboard tournament

My team did not win the tournament, in case you’re wondering.

Maranatha has a weekly event of the Staff vs. Guests Basketball Game. Our kids have never played on a basketball team, but they have been known to shoot baskets in our driveway setup. For some reason this year, both Alpha and Beta decided to join the game. Guests were ahead for a bit in the first half, but ended up losing by about 9 points.

And we always participate in the sandcastle competition. We had no good ideas this year, so we went with spray cheese.

We did not win first place this time.

A new thing this year was they had one day for a food truck to come in for lunch. Chick-fil-A. Gamma and Delta wanted to try it. I agreed, because we were on vacation. But if they want to do it next year they’ll have to pay for it themselves.

But overall, everyone had a good week. There was only a small amount of sunburn.

Our morning speaker for the week was Karl Clausen, mostly known for hosting a show on Moody Radio. He has lived a very interesting life, and thus has a variety of interesting stories to tell.

I can’t remember if it was him or the evening speaker (Dr. Winfred Neely), but there were two quotes from that week that I remember. One is “Don’t just GO to church – you are to BE the church”. The other one is “There is no inherent merit in poverty.”

The End