Books for Josh
I found my way to Josh’s site, COMPULSIVE SODAHOLIC-KINDA EXTRA-ORDINARY? SEE FOR YOURSELF!, this morning and was pleased to see a twelve year old reader.
He loves watching the shows Buffy and Veronica Mars. He also reads a lot of books including Harry Potter and Hardy Boys
That said he couldn’t get into Agatha Christie. That is no big surprise, her works have become very dated. Here are a few of my recommendations:
Enders Game by Orson Scott Card: This is the story set sometime in future, I always get the feeling of at least a century past present. Young kids are monitored from birth to assess their potential for military careers in the IF to defend earth against a third invasion by an alien race known as the Buggers.
Tithe, Valiant, and Ironside by Holly Black: For people who like Buffy or Harry Potter’s world in which the supernatural is real and in plain sight whether you recognize it for what it is or not, Holly paints a similar view of the world for the page in the three novels.
More closed contemporary fantasy world where humans simply ignore the supernatural can be found in the likes of Charles de Lint’s works, especially those involving the fictional town of Newford. There are a number of books in this series that are especially written for YA audiences, though I enjoyed them as an adult and fan of the series. Blue Girl and Little Grrl are are among my favorites of the YA books.
Open contemporary fantasy novels, where humans know the supernatural exists, are available too. Patricia Brigg’s Mercy Thompson series is the the only one that isn’t really filled with sex. The sex filled novels of Anita Blake’s Merry Gentry are really good, but probably not appropriate for everyone.
Other really good teen reads include
1632 by Eric Flint: The whole series revolves around a small West Virginia town that gets thrown back in time to the early 1630’s and shifted to Germany. The whole series is great and there is an good opportunity for writing officially sanctioned fan fiction.
Honor Harrington by David Weber: This is one of the best series I have ever read period. If you like stories about space, war or the military in general this is going to rock your world. Including the short story anthologies written by some big names in fiction this series is now well over a dozen books.
Cross Time series by Harry Turtledove: Is a great series alternate history stories written for teens, but because Harry is as imaginative as always a good read for anyone who likes to ask “what if?”
Oceans on the Sea of Time by S.M. Stirling: follows the adventures of the Nantucket Islanders thrown back in time to 1500 BC.
Dies The Fire by S.M. Stirling: This is really the same series as Oceans on the Sea of Time, but follows the world, namely the Pacific Northwest, after the event that through Nantucket back in time. Guns, cars, electric appliances and basically anything that requires high compression or electricity stops working.
If anyone can think of more please feel free to add them to the list
Sphere: Related ContentSweeping the Clouds Away
Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.
Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.
Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.
Sphere: Related ContentPeople on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.
How Young Is Too Young?
How young is too young to start your kids on the internet? I keep thinking I need to run a parenting course on this subject. Unless I can some how find a way to charge for it though I am not sure I can afford the time to do it. It needs to be done though. Someone needs to put the internet into perspective for parents who just don’t get it.
With a new baby on the way and a nine year old I am forced to visit the question of how young is too young all the time. Katy and I are rarely separated from out computers when we are home. They both sit in the living room. Everything we do is for household consumption. This is has been a way of life since we got broadband replaced with streaming television, clear radio broadcasts from around the world replaced the crap we could pick up locally, and last but not least the plethora of interesting information replaced most of our non-fiction reading materials. It is lots of cheap entertainment in one package.
Liam knows we are always connected, and is really starting to take an interest in it himself. His interest right now isn’t so much socializing as it is a substitute for traditional television. He loves the available online games almost as much as he loves my Xbox or his old Sega. The cartoons on Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network sites have the potential to keep him occupied and out of trouble. Where the television was my babysitter, so be it the computer for this generation. There will come a time when those interests grow beyond that.
There are those who criticize electronic babysitters, but I usually tell them to kiss my furry ass. There was a time when parents could spend more time with our kids, and didn’t have eighty million other things we have to be doing. You take what you can get, wherever you can get it. I can look across the room, see where my son is sitting, and know what he is doing. If I am working, yes blogging is a full time job even if it isn’t bringing in a full time income yet. The same can be said of the short stories I write and send out for professional publication regularly or the novels at various stages. Writing anything, be it code or prose, is work. If I ever hope to make more than my disability payments, I have to devote time to that work and use any babysitter I can.
This brings me back to the question of how young is too young to let your kids go online and do their own thing. I am not talking about staying on half a dozen sites with no social interaction. I mean letting them explore for themselves, finding their own cool stuff, making their own friends? When do you do you start letting them create their own identity?
I am not suggestion that we abandon all supervision; you can’t ever do that if you are going to be a responsible parent. If your kids are going to use a site, service or the any new technology that comes along, it is your job as a parent to make sure you learn it too. As a twenty year internet veteran, I don’t have a problem with this. This isn’t the case with a lot of parents. While some kids might be too young to get involved with internet activities, the fact remains if they have an interesting in it, being too old to get involved just isn’t an excuse.
Sphere: Related ContentCelebrity Kids and Your Kids
With all of the controversy over the Miley Cyrus’s bare back and shoulders being photographed I wonder if we ever stopped to think what we are doing to her as a kid? Yes, she is a superstar Disney hit worth half a billion and on track to be a billionaire by the end of the year, but she is still a fifteen year old girl.
I understand the brand issues at stake here. I use my own name on my blogs and when I comment elsewhere. I have to be careful what I say because it is out there for everyone to see. That is part of the problem for her. She is in fact two brands, Hannah Montana the wholesome Disney girl, Miley Cyrus, a budding starlet. On top of that she is a fifteen year old girl who like most fifteen year olds is trying to figure out who she is. Read more of this Parenting Magazine Article
Sphere: Related ContentNew Dads - What Are You Expecting
What are you expecting as a new dad? I am not sure what to expect, except I know that I will be giving up any chance of getting out of the house and continue on with my life for another six or seven years. It is the reality of our situation, I have disability income for all my various ills and injuries, and Katy doesn’t so I am the logical choice as primary care giver for the kids. I hate it and am resentful of it almost every day, but I do it because as a responsible parent you have to give up what you want a good part of the time to make sure your kids are taken care of.
So what am I expecting this time that will be different? Well unless the economy turns around and Katy can find a good job, any job she has will leave us getting social services including insurance, which will be different for me. Not having insurance for nearly seven years is what let me get as bad off as I did in the first place. I am also older, wiser, and have a more defined career path that works with staying at home. Writing and blogging aren’t considered “real work” by the bureaucrats so profits generated only have to be reported as made, but not income earned. The IRS takes a different view, but with two kids it should work to our benefit. Read more of this Parenting Magazine Article
Sphere: Related ContentLying and Kids
April 24, 2008 by Brad
Filed under Parent Child Relationships, Video
What would the world be like with out Mom-isms Ran across this wonderful site on Digg: 16 Lies Mothers Tell. What sort of lies did your parents tell you, because I know this doesn’t only apply to Mom’s. As a guy I am particularly fond of 13. “You’re going to poke someone’s eye out with that!” Because as it was explained that just made me swing the stick, lightsaber and eventually real sword even harder. Of course as recent evidence proves number 16. “If you keep playing with it, it will fall off someday,” is not only false, but playing with it may help prevent prostate cancer which is showing up at ever younger ages in men. There are even thoughts that masturbation may help prevent testicular cancer too. Read more of this Parenting Magazine Article
Sphere: Related ContentLiam and “The New Pet”
We love Liam, but there are days when we roll our eyes at God and ask, “Oh Lord, how hell did two super smart people end up with such a fucking idiot for a child?” Then we remember he is nine. Then sometimes I say it’s normal because he has a penis. (Sorry guys, but it’s true, you are ruled by the whims of your hormones, even more so than us women.) Then I realize it doesn’t really matter, because he is ours and we love him.
I rant because he tends to be a loud mouth idiot who babbles on for hours about crap he lacks any understanding of to people who really don’t care, don’t want to hear it, or that he should be paying attention rather than the other way around. We haven’t told him of the baby. He isn’t stupid by any means, even if he has some learning problems mostly in delayed abilities because he was between 4 to 6 weeks premature. (I’ll talk about idiot doctors soon enough, but that’s another post) Right now when Brad and I need to talk about it, we either YIM from across the room or when other family members are present it is referred to as the new pet. We’ve decided to wait until we know the sex of the baby to tell him, that way he can say with confidence that he is having a brother or sister. Of course, I am totally dreading the thought of him asking how the baby came to be. I do NOT need to be having THE TALK with my ten year old son. That’s Brad’s job.
