Coffeespoons

Woman Reading in a Landscape by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot ( img src ) She looks so calm and involved reading there, doesn't she? I do wish I were her, even for a little while. April has been a better reading month than March for me, all because of the Holy Week holidays we have here. Four days of not doing anything--just lying down to read. It's something I badly needed. I even got to blog a bit! So here are the books I read this month, with links to the two that I was able to review on my blog: One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde - I'm a big fan of Fforde. And though I think that his first four Thursday Next books were much better than the two books that followed, I'm still a big fan. That is how much loyalty his first four Thursday Net books and the two Nursery Crime books have evoked in me. The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman - read many good things about this, so I got it on my Kindle. What I loved about it are the character studies. T...

Ever since I left teaching, I've become more interested in the field of communication and marketing. Which, I admit, is strange because communication and marketing are pretty useful skills if you're a teacher. Except that, I think, a lot of teachers don't realize this. As an English teacher for almost 12 years, I wasn't provided with any kind of communications training, nor training on designing my message. We were given a lot of training on teaching strategies, teaching frameworks, philosophies, etc. Now, yes, some of the teaching strategy strategy training has to do with communication, but I don't recall any training or preparation that was meant for communication alone. Which, I think, is a pity. When I listen to my husband or my friends from corporate talk about communications training or how to market, I think, "Hey, these ideas are really useful to an educator." And I wonder why we don't talk about these things a lot. A lot of educators may kno...

I finally read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and finished it in one day. What surprised me about it is how readable it was. I'd heard much praise about the book, but I think I was surprised by its readability because my only exposure, so far, to Kazuo Ishiguro was the movie version of "Remains of the Day." I loved it, but knew it was langurous. Thus, it was pleasant to find out that Never Let Me Go was the kind of book that you wanted to and could finish in a day. So now I can finally watch the movie.:) Never Let Me Go is the story of three friends, Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, who grew up in Hailsham, a boardinghouse in England. There, they spent an idyllic childhood under firm but kind guardians. They were taught to create art and value each other's creations. Yet, Hailsham students are different from the rest of humanity. As this was mentioned in the movie trailer, hinted at from the very beginning of the book, and revealed in full by the first quarte...