My 40-By-40 Reading List

About ten years ago a good friend of mine said she was trying to get to thirty countries before she turned 30. I loved the idea and tried but didn't quite make it (I got to 24). Having a baby at the age of 29 kind of put a halt to my foreign holidays.

The other day I saw that Capture by Lucy is aiming to complete her 35 before 35 to do list and initially it made me sad that I am too old to do that. 

But then I had a brainwave. I'm trying to read more - I used to fly through books - but now rarely have the time. I can get through a real page turner in a week or so. But anything intellectually stimulating seems to just make me fall straight asleep these days.

So my big idea is to read 40 good books by the time I hit 40! I have three years to get this done. 36 months for 40 books. Manageable, right? OK, so I  will have to put my mind to it, but I am sure I can get it done. 

In the years between Number Two being born and getting pregnant with Number Three I read a reasonable amount of books, 'Possession' and 'The Children's Book', both by A. S. Byatt, included. I know I am able for something more high brow that Nick Hornby (no offence to Nick Hornby. I love his books). Recently I even got round to reading 'Death of A Salesman', which was on my books-to-read-someday list for years. 

At the moment I am reading Mary Kenny's revised version of her biography of William Joyce, a.k.a. Lord Haw-Haw. After I have finished it, these are the books I plan to move on to:

1 Wolf Hall - I own this for years now and haven't got very far with it so far. Worth another try.

2 Bringing Up The Bodies - I own this too but need to read Wolf Hall first, of course

3 The Goldfinch - I have been reliably told that it is an excellent read

4 Middlemarch - I loved the BBC version in 1994 and own the book

5 Robinson Crusoe - I have this too. The bookmark is still in it 3/4 way through. I dont know why I didn't finish it.

6 Bambi - the original book, not the Disney version, in German. I own this for seven years now and have still not read it. 

7 The Water Babies - my dad read this to us as children and I remember I loved it. I just don't remember much about it. I bought a gorgeous 19th century hardback version for a treat a few years ago but didn't get far with reading it.

8 The Wind in the Willows - I have heard the tales of Mole, Toad and co. as a bedtime story and seen it on TV but I want to read it for myself. We have two beautiful hardback copies - one belonging to Number One, the other a christening present for Number Three - so it is not like I have to go searching for the book.

9 Dracula - The Bavarian has a copy of this and I have been meaning to read it for years.

10 Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who's Back) - this controversial farce is something I want to at least try reading. I may hate it and stop but I want to give it a chance. The Bavarian enjoxed it, my friend E. hated it. What will I make of it, I wonder?.

Books 11 to 40 are yet to be decided upon. I want to leave myself the option of reading books that are yet to be published. I would hate to feel I have to read certain books when I would really love ot be reading others I have just discovered. 

If you have any suggestions of reading material (novels please. I am not much of a textbook reader), I would be thrilled if you left me a comment. 

Now We Know Our ABCs

We are only now coming to the end of the six-week Summer holidays. School will resume for Number One next week. Lately I have been reflecting on Number One's development. He has made such progress in the past few months. I can hardly believe the change in him. Last September he could write his name and that was it. Now, 12 months later he's reading whole books in German and in English and can write in both print and cursive. 

It was a tough year for him and it has made me determined to have Number Two better equipped for dealing with school. Number One had been keen on learning but we didn't want him to be bored at school, so we followed all the advice from teachers and kindergarten not to teach him to read or have him learn the alphabet. He'd learn all that at school, they said, and in the end he did. But it was a very steep learning curve, not made any easier by the fact that many children in the class could read and write on starting school.  I feel that he'd begun to lose interest in learning before school had even started.

Number Two has been following his big brother's progress and is very eager to learn, always spotting letters from his name and from other words he recognises. So we've decided to go against the advice and go with what our child wants to learn. I've rooted out all the ABC books I bought when Number One was younger. But best of all, I've bought us a brilliant new alphabet poster and matching mini poster that are perfectly suited to bilingual children like mine.

Love Your Lingo is an Australian company founded by an Irish woman called Una. I am ever grateful to Helen, The Busy Mama herself, for mentioning Una in a post and helping me discover these brilliant ABC posters. They cost around €20 each (the pricing is in Australian dollars and worked out at just over €19 the day I bought mine online). 

The alphabet posters and mini posters are of excellent quality and are highly unlikely to get ripped to shreds, the fate of most posters that some into this house. The illustrations are clear and the words chosen to represent each letter of the alphabet are ones that children will quite easily recognise. But for us the fantastic thing is that the words chosen begin with the same letter in German and in English. So B is for bath / Badewanne, L is for lion/Loewe and T is for tower/Turm. I am over the moon to have discovered these. It has made such a difference to Number Two's confidence with letters already.

The Little Linguist's Alphabet from Love Your Lingo covers English, German, French, Spanish, Portugese and Dutch.

As I was re-visiting our alphabet books, I found this one which I had forgotten was multi-lingual. Wenn Raketen Träumen (When Rockets Dream) is a brilliantly imaginative ABC book for space-loving boys like mine. We came across it by chance a couple of years ago in our local newsagents and only discovered when we got home that it was multilingual.

Each page depicts the rocket dressed up as something different, with D for Dragon/Drache, F for Fish/Fisch, P for Penguin/Pinguin, etc. Some are a bit tricky to name, like C for clown's nose/Clownsnase. 

The relevant word is written in the top left-hand corner of the page in seven languages, making it a great book for lots of families.

The boys had great fun spotting the rocket in each of the drawings and naming the creature or object he had transformed into. 

Apple Pie ABC by Alison Murray is a beautiful book to look at but not terribly helpful for small children. Number Two loves the facial expressions and cheekiness of the dog, but he is not overly interested in the story because the language used in much of the story is too advanced for his age group. A for Apple, B for Bake and C for Cool are fine, but Q for Quietly determinded is a bit out of his vocabulary. 

I'm excited to see how longs Number Two's interest in reading and writing keeps up. What was your experience with your children? At what age did they develop an interest in letters and reading?