Holiday bookshelf: what we're reading these holidays

Aidan is reading Rowan of Rin: The Journey by Emily Rodda. We bought it today with his school prize book voucher.

Liam is reading The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (and a couple of others from the Enid Blyton Five Find-Outers series) that he received for his birthday. These were recently re-released in hard cover and I found them in KMart for $6 each. The Five Find-Outers weren't my favourite Enid Blyton crowd, I preferred the Famous Five or the (I think) un-named group that included Roger, Diana, Snubby, Barney and his monkey Miranda (The Rockingdown Mystery was my favourite of those). Liam seems to be enjoying the Find-Outers though. There has also been a re-release in hardback of the Malory Towers series which I noticed at KMart for a pretty cheap price. Might be time to update my old falling to bits paperback versions I think.

Rosie's current favourite for bedtime reading is Tuck Me In. I saw this reviewed on an occupational therapy blog that I look at. Lovely repetition for toddlers and they get to fold the blankets over on each page to tuck all the different animals into bed.

I am reading Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H.Winters. A good read but I'm not enjoying it quite as much as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. On the non-fiction front, I am reading Heart to Heart Parenting by Robin Grille. What he says about parenting makes lots of sense, even though he's not a Christian.

Chris and I both also read Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris, a collection of short stories. This was the first time I had read any of his work. He has a sharp, funny and incisive writing style, but it's not for the faint-hearted. The best story was the first one about being an elf in Santaland. The fiction stories, although still funny, were probably a bit too cutting and cruel for me to like them much. We decided after we'd both read the book that while he was a very clever writer, he doesn't seem to have much compassion for his subjects. But maybe that detachment is part of what makes his writing so amusing.