(no subject)

I'm contemplating the boxes of children's books in the basement. Some are things I inherited from my mother. Some are things I picked up in high school when I still hoped my brother would turn out to be a reader (the local library was tiny, and there were a lot books I loved that it didn't have). Some are things that I simply grabbed when I saw them out of an uncertainty as to whether or not they'd be available anywhere else.

They're in boxes because we don't have shelf space for them. As Cordelia edges toward chapter books, I've been thinking about going through those boxes. Most of the books will be too old for her for a while yet, but some might be close. I also can't predict how fast she'll improve as a reader.

I keep wondering if there's something I could do to encourage her to read chapter books. I've been holding myself back from it for fear of pushing too hard. I rather expect that it's just another thing that will happen all at once. Right now, she can read a page from a chapter book out loud to me. She just isn't ready to sit down and do that alone or to come back repeatedly to read the next page in sequence. I think she likes the notion, in theory. I don't want to make her feel like she should be doing it already and is failing (a sure method to make her stop reading altogether by making her hate reading). I want her to enjoy reading.

I'm partly thinking about this as I make up her Christmas wishlist for Scott's family. They'd love to give her books, and she's right at a transition. I don't want to ask for chapter books because I don't know when or if they'll get read. I don't want to ask for picture books because they might get abandoned at any moment (or not).

I don't even remember what's in all of those boxes. There's at least one filled with Nancy Drew mysteries and other books I got from my mother, books that had been hers when she was a girl. I don't know if they can be read without disintegrating as they're more than fifty years old. Given that our basement is cool and dry, those books may be better off down there than they'd be upstairs, but they also won't get read if they stay down there.

(no subject)

I get two Netflix DVDs at a time, and Scott and I get one at a time, two different queues. Mine is mostly anime with a scattering of other foreign titles. I've been trying to add more that's in English so that I can have one DVD in English for every one that I'm going to watch subtitled. The hard part is finding things in English that I'll like that Scott doesn't also want to see. I tried writing up a list, yesterday, of shows I've loved, shows I've hated and shows I've been relatively neutral about.

It was more complicated than I expected. Each category had subcategories, and I realized that why I hated something (or was eh about it) mattered. There were a lot of things that sounded interesting in theory but that had too much violence or swearing or general ickiness for me to manage the story. There were things that fell apart narratively or that had really bad acting. There were stories that didn't work because they weren't written as stories but rather as escalating and never to be resolved incidents.

The neutral category was hardest to tease apart. Some things ended up there because, although I enjoyed them a lot, I couldn't bear parts of them or couldn't manage any episodes without someone else holding my hand. Some things ended up their because, while they were solidly entertaining, they lacked something I needed or that I saw as possible and desireable.

I'd intended to post a plea for recommendations, but I realized that the whole thing was simply too complicated. I'm simply going to try a bunch of things that sound vaguely interesting that Netflix doesn't think I'll like particularly. I added the first DVDs of some older series-- Xena, Highlander, Lois & Clark, Voyagers, The Flash and Charmed. I'd have added Hercules, too, but Netflix lists it as currently unavailable. (Of course, I've read more good Hercules fanfic than I have for any of the other shows. I suspect that Hercules would fail to live up to the fic.)

I'm not expecting to fall in love with any of these. My hope is to find them congenial and not stressful. That shouldn't be too hard, right?

I keep seeing people talking about giving up cable for Netflix and/or library DVDs or non-visual forms of entertainment. It always makes me think hard about our cable. I'm not sure we'd ever want to give it up even though our watching patterns are odd.

We might be able to get Cordelia by with DVDs. We'd need a lot of them with a lot of turnover. I could mostly manage without either TV or DVDs. I'd miss both, but books and the internet are reasonable substitutes for me. Scott.... I don't think he could give up either.

We also use an odd subset of channels. We can't switch to lower priced plans because most of them consist entirely of things we don't watch. In an ordinary week, we watch all three PBS stations, Disney Channel, SciFi, Comedy Central, Food Network, Discovery, History Channel, and whichever channel is airing Heroes. We make occasional forays to other channels for movies or headline news, and there have been times in the past when we've regularly watched shows on other specific channels (though, if we didn't have those channels, we probably wouldn't be heartbroken to have missed those shows. We'd just never have known they existed until and unless we found them on DVD). There are probably some other channels that I'd like to have, at least in theory. Pity we can't pick and choose channels.