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My wife had been homeschooling, or perhaps unschooling, our kids for years now. I go back and forth on how I feel about it. These kinds of books help me keep things in perspective. Nancy Wallaces first book was about how she got her kid out of public school in the 80s when that was a thing in the states. We don't have that problem now. It was beneficial to see her going through the same troubles I have and wondering if they are doing enough. I kept wondering how these kids would survive in 2020s. We'll I emailed one of them and asked. To my surprise I got a reply same day. I still have a hard time thinking of art as a meaningful career, even more so now that I feel my oldest is going down that path, but if I support and let her make hey own friends with people of all ages, she'll do just fine.

I like stories that wind up everything in a nice little package and the characters live happily ever after. That is not how The Warehouse ended, so it's hard to like it. I'm left not even sure if one character is symbolic only or still a real person truly in love.returnreturnThe beginning was slow as they build the near future world where global warming has made it nearly impossible to be outside, where a mysterious black Friday massacre had led to the end of nearly all brick and motor stores and an Amazon-like megalith rules the market and MotherCloud is the new version of a company town where you live, work and play in a lifestyle that complety revolves around their monster regional warehouses that load your next order and deliver it via drone.returnreturnHart had some inconsistencies in his world. For example we are informed that all of the products in the warehouse are arranged in such a way that no two similar products are anywhere near each other so no customer accidentally gets the wrong product based on a warehouse worker picking the wrong one. That actually mags a lot of sense. But later in the book our protagonist ends up being delayed by trying to find the right puzzle, or had to look the book section, contrary to how he previously told us the warehouse works.returnreturnGibson is the evil CEO of Cloud. Midway of the book I'm convinced he is the devil. But at the end when he's supposed to reveal how evil he truly is, we'll maybe I've fallen for his capitalist bullshit because I honestly think he is a lot closer to the savior of the world he claims to be than the monster his author paints him as.returnreturnAll in all I can't recommend, but I think others might absolutely love it.

I loved Jurassic Park so I wanted to read Crichton's OG novel. I liked it but not nearly as much as Jurassic Park. I have a queasy stomach when it comes to descriptions about blood, and there was a lot of that in this book. If you want to read it, I recommend dead tree rather than audiobook. Other editions might be better, but the one I listened to there were minutes and minutes of the narrator painstakingly reading tables that I would have just skimmed over if I was actually reading it.

It's a 1960s near-future sci-fi thriller. The story comes down to a satellite falling form space onto a small Arizona town, and everyone in the town dying because of some space germs that were on it. The rest of the book goes into trying to figure it out, how to contain it, whether or not to just send a small nuke to Arizona to stop it from spreading further, etc.

Still only in part one, but already doesn't feel as good as the first one.

I wanted to read this book for a long time. It sounds awesome, a kid born right at midnight as newly partitioned India officially is declared independent of Britian, and he eventually learns he has magic abilities that include the ability to communicate telepathically with all other kids that were born in the first hour since the country's birth. returnreturnIt, however, is not good. I find nothing redeeming about this story. Nothing happens in the entire first section of the book, to the point the protagonist's wife even goes about interrupting the story asking him to get to the good part. It's kind of meta, but not in the fun way. When we got to section II it kept feeling like it was just about to get good, just enough to keep my reading. Yet, nothing ever came interesting. I read some 400 pages before I gave up on it.

I'm not really quite sure what I thought this book was going to be. The intorduction was really good and I think is closer to what I was expecting, more of a story/history about Yiddish in the U.S. He speaks of how most linguists harrumph at the use of Yiddish in the States as an accent to the primary language, and with most Jews now living in either the U.S. or Isreal (where Hebrew, not Yiddish, is the default tongue) Yiddish as a language is dying. But the author thinks the way it has worked its way into the general lexicon is actually great. After the intro it becomes, more-or-less, a dictionary of Yiddish words that are heard in American (what the author calls Ameridish or Yinglish) and what they mean, occasionally with a history of its use, either in the old world or the new, and often with a story, that claims to be numerous, about its use. Very dry, not that funny. Eventually I stopped reading each one and just skimmed ahead to words I've actually used or heard others use.

I think this is one of those books that is going to take me a while to see if I actually liked it or not, depending on how well I remember its lessons, and how useful it is to implement them. It took me two months to get through a 223-page book, not a good sign in and of itself. returnreturnThere feels like a lot good here, emphasizing not punishment, but boundaries with consequences. We don't need to yell at our kids, we don't need to make them feel bad. Kids are responsible for their own fun. Kids are NOT responsible for their parents' feelings, etc. Parents are responsible for setting boundaries and sticking to them. It is better not to have a boundary at all than to have a wishy-washy one that sometimes has consequences and sometimes doesn't. returnreturnAt times I felt it was a bit too harsh. For example, I think assumptions that entitlement is always bad sets one up for a life to be made a doormat. Claims that someone feels they have earned what their boss has, or being "envious of the upper class" is someone being a classist themselves. Why do they only call it class warfare when we fight back? I also didn't like their referral too frequently to "real life" as if the life of young people is somehow fake. They also seem to make some harsh assumptions that childhood always ends the day they turn 18. While many lessons are universal there was no reference to homeschooling and seemed to assume your kids go to public school.

Most movies based on books are not as good as the book. This is why I usually recommend watching the movie first so that you can enjoy both of them. I have no idea how many times I have seen the 1978 animated film released by the Australian wing of Hanna-Barbara. It was a childhood favorite and I have grown to share it with my own kids, who were less than impressed. Perhaps it was just the shear number of times that ingrained its version such that listening to the original tale seemed lacking. I kept waiting for parts of the story that never actually came up, whether they were completely made up for the movie (if you can even call a 48 minute VHS tape a movie) or were combinations of a number of the stories from the book into one separate story, to the point that I don't think I actually gave the proper chance to enjoy the expanded narrative this audio-book presented. Also what the book usually called the "check reign" the movie called the "bearing reign."returnreturnMy own weird history aside the book is good. A 19th century story of "the autobiography of a horse" the story of one of England's finest ponies told from his first-person perspective from colt-hood to near end of his life, nearly 15 years over the course of 5 audio discs. Each chapter was a more-or-less stand alone story, which would make it great for a few weeks of bed time stories to kids, probably ages 7 and up. returnreturnBlack Beauty is famous for being a tale of animal welfare that inspired English kids to seek out better treatment of their parents' horses. It also was a story promoting teatoling and care of the working-class, particularly England's horse-drawn cab drivers. returnreturnAll-in-all I recommend it, but maybe read the book first this time. 🤷‍♀️

A fantastic tale of Mister Rogers. I figured it would probably be a fluff piece about how we should be kind to each other and not preach religion. I was glad to learn I was wrong. Amy Hollingsworth is a preacher's wife, raised Catholic, but her husband is a Protestant (Pentacostal I think but I haven't been able to confirm that) pastor. returnreturnMister Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister. His parents assumed he'd go to seminary, so he did, but was called by God to children's television and not the pulpit. He tried to the get the American Presbyterian Church to ordain him a pastor without a parish and assign him to children's television, possibly producing content for the denomination's Sunday Schools, but they did not. Eventually he did finish his studies whilst working on Mister Rogers Neighborhood, but he never did pastor a congregation. returnreturnI really appreciated how Fred Rogers was able to over the course of like three years of correspondence with Hollingsworth really show love to her and really introduce Christ to her in a way that even a Cradle Catholic Preacher's wife hadn't known. returnreturnI've heard the story of seeing people hit in the face with pies on T.V. leading Fred to feel he had to get involved to ensure such a powerful medium was used for betterment of humankind, and not such demeaningness. However I was most touched by his description of the Holy Spirit working between the T.V. and the television neighbor to comfort them and tell them exactly what they needed to hear. More than once, he described a way a viewer, kid or parent, described how when he said such-and-such on such-and-such episode and how it changed their life, yet he wouldn't remember ever having said that, and went back and verified it was never in the script, but God found a way regardless. returnreturnI highly recommend this book, particularly to believers in a time when many in The West are lost, both in and out of the Church.