All posts by Beth

I'm a Canadian crochet-obsessed mum living in the UK who used to make a living teaching English to teenagers. Current distractions: babies, baking and baby sign language!
Books

‘The Fourth Bear’

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(with apologies to Dennis Lee…)

Alligator Pie!
Alligator Pie!
If I don’t get (this book),
I think I’m going to die!

Take away my iPod,
Take away my Sky,
But please, please, please, please don’t make me miss this book!!

From Jasper Fforde.com:


The Fourth Bear
A Nursery Crime

‘…However many photos you see of the Gingerbreadman, nothing can ever prepare you for seeing him in the flesh. He was a dark brown colour the shade of mahogany and at least six foot eight inches tall with heavy limbs and a large head. His jacket was open revealing several large pink icing buttons that ran down his chest. He had large glace cherries for eyes the size of tennis balls’and a huge dollop of red icing for a nose. His mouth was two slivers of licorice, the corners of which rose into a smile as soon as he saw them. ‘Alan!’ said the Gingerbreadman with a deep yet friendly tone, ‘What a pleasant surprise! And most timely, too. See here, I have bred a new rose which, in honour of your work to cure me of my criminal tendencies I take great pleasure in naming after you. Behold, Mandible’s Triumph! …’

The Gingerbreadman: Psychopath, sadist, genius, convicted murderer and biscuit is loose in the streets of Reading. It isn’t Jack Spratt’s case. He and Mary Mary have been reassigned due to falling levels of nursery crime, and The NCD is once more in jeopardy. That is, until a chance encounter during the Armitage Shanks literary awards at the oddly familiar Deja-Vu Club lead Jack and Mary on the hunt for missing journalist Henrietta ‘Goldilocks’ Hatchett, star reporter for The Daily Mole. She had been about to break a story involving unexplained explosions in Herefordshire, Pasadena and the Nullabor Plain; The last witnesses to see her alive were The Three Bears, comfortably living out a life of rural solitude in Andersen’s wood.

But all is not what it seems. How could the bear’s porridge be at such disparate temperatures when they were poured at the same time? Was Goldy’s death in the nearby 1st World War themepark of Sommeworld a freak accident? And is it merely chance that the Gingerbreadman pops up at awkward moments?

But there’s more. What does a missing scientist with a terrifying discovery in subatomic physics, a secret weapon of devastating power, a reclusive industrialist known only as the Quangle Wangle and Colonel Danvers of the National Security all have in common?

How can you miss this book?? WHERE’S MY LIBRARY CARD????

General

Race for Life

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Are you ready??

I’m back!! Sorry I’ve been away so long…

But I’m actually here to beg for money. Not for me, but for Cancer Research UK.

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Those who know me know (and those who have seen pictures can guess) that I’m not the most athletic person in the world. I’ve only won a race once, as far as I know, and that was when I was 11. So for me to voluntarily enter a race, something’s got to be up. Race for Life is a fundraising effort to raise money for breast cancer research with Cancer Research UK. I’ve decided to enter for a couple of reasons – first, because frankly, I need the exercise, but also because I’ve lost several women that I love to breast cancer, including my grandmother and the vicar that helped marry Richard and I. And I know of several other people who are suffering from it at the moment, and I think it’s time I get involved.

So, please, help me reach my minimum target of £100. Anything over that is gravy for me, but would mean a lot to the people who are suffering from this disease. And hey – I’m a woman, and I have a family history, so it could be me one day…

Please visit my fundraising website, and give your support if you can. Thanks very much!

Books

What would you do if a novel cost a month’s wages??

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If, like me, you are a voracious reader, then I think that this charity is something you’d like to support. You know that old saying, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’?? Well…

I was introduced to Book Aid International by our school librarian, Sue, as on Thursday this week was World Book Day, and we’ve been having quite a lot of activities in school for this. One of the things that Sue does every year is run a sponsored read to raise money for Book Aid. Here’s the basics:

Book Aid International works in 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Palestine, providing over half a million books and journals each year to libraries, hospitals, refugee camps and schools.

Books are the basic tools of literacy and education yet millions of children and adults across the developing world do not have access to them.

Books can make a real difference to people’s lives. Farmers, nurses, mechanics, development workers and teachers all need books and information to support their work. Children and students must be encouraged to use books to develop their education and lifelong learning.

How much does it cost?

Every £1.50 that you raise pays for a book to get into the hands of a reader overseas.

What’s £1.50 to you or I? It doesn’t even pay for a fancy coffee at Starbucks. Club all those £1.50s together, and:

£320 pays for a case of books for a library service, university, hospital or school (each case contains an average of 240 books). If you raise £320 or more we can report back to you with specific details of the case of books that you paid for. Please bear in mind that we cannot assess the impact of the books until nine months after we have received your donation. If you allow your donation to be unrestricted we will use it wherever it is needed most and will supply a feedback pack with pictures of some of the many organisations we have helped during the previous year.

Now, Sue’s goal is for every kid in our school to raise just £1.50, which would mean about £1500 to send off to Book Aid. (It might also get some of the kids in school reading… But don’t tell them that!! 🙂 ) Most of the money raised will go to communities in sub-Saharan Africa, but Book Aid also has a small programme running in Palestine. This is to help those people who are forced to stay in their houses under curfew for long periods of time to have some meanins of alleviating tension and escaping – and what better way than through reading a good book?

Being a bibliophile and an English teacher, of course books are important to me. As a BookCrosser as well, I try to share my (over)abundance of books with others. Why not send them where they’re most needed? I’m going to give £1.50 for every book that I’ve read this year to the end of March.

What about you?

Beth's Reading Log, Books

‘The Periodic Table’

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The Periodic Table (Essential.penguin S.)

No, I haven’t suddenly switched teaching subjects – this is a collection of stories by Italian Jewish author Primo Levi. It was recommended to me by James, one of the current crop of PGCE students at school, as a more ‘manly’ read – he was a bit taken aback by the titles being bandied about at the last book group meeting; there were only two guys in the room at the time, however…

The book is a collection of recollections and fiction that are centred around various elements of the peroidic table. Each story is titled by an element, and this element features in the story, even if tangentally. The opening story, ‘Argon’, looks at the properties of inert (‘noble’) gases and compares their properties to those of his ancestors:

The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases. Not all of them were materially inert, for that was not granted them. … But there is no doubt that they were inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion. It can hardly be by chance that all the deeds attributed to them, though quite various, have in common a touch of the static, an attitude of dignified abstention, of voluntary (or accepted) relegation to the margins of the great river of life.

These personal, and often tragic, recollections are surprisingly interspersed with fiction: the account of the ancient Scandinavian who travels into continental southern Europe taking with him the secret knowledge of the working and uses of lead; the man living on an island who buys new wives for himself and his companions with refined mercury; the imagined journey of a carbon atom with which the collection ends. Yet I found all of the stories, whether factual or fiction, tinged with sadness. This has undoubtedly to do with the circumstances of his life – Levi survived the Holocaust, but only just – as well as the great burden of knowledge that Jewish people carry; that within living memory, someone hated them enough to try to exterminate their race. Perhaps I am imposing the over-arching sense of tragedy; I have never been able to descibe my feelings about the Holocaust – it just leaves me with an indescribable feelings of loss and sadness. I visited Dachau while on a school trip to Europe in high school, and the idea of the ovens (which looked like large bread ovens to me – ordinary, until you knew what they were used for) still leaves me breathless with horror. I still remember not being able to hear any birds while on the site, despite the warm spring day and the abundance of trees and other foliage around the camp. Perhaps I just blocked them out, but even the most annoying of the kids on the trip were hushed and stunned by the impact of the camp. How much more so for those who lived though it.

Levi does have the ability at times to see through the sadness and fear to some happy times – the meeting of his wife and their marriage are not elaborated on here, but are mentioned as well as an almost-affair with a beautiful goya (non-Jewish woman) – but they too are tinged with self-depreciation. Both he and Guilia (the goya) remember and reminisce about what might-have-been, although his primary feeling over the relationship seems to be one of regret. And the school-days friendship with the ferrous Sandro ends with the story of his death at the hands of the Fascists and their prohibition of the burial of his body; his body was abandoned in the road.

And yet for all this sadness and tragedy, this is a book you should read. It took me longer than usual – it’s not long, but the emotions it stirs gave me pause – but it is good for us to read about things that are disturbing as well as those that are amusing. But this is also a good piece of writing. It allows us to see into a time that most of us know about but don’t understand; that we can’t understand unless we are a member of a persecuted race. And that all these events may have lead to Levi’s death – the coroner ruled that he committed suicide in 1987, although many people believe his death was accidental – adds to the sadness, but also the understanding of the events of this terrible part of the 20th century.