A Swiftly Tilting Planet: 08/20/06
A Swiftly Tilting Planet is one of those books that I've had to read for school and don't have fond memories of the process. In this book's case, the teacher read the book to the class and although I listened as carefully as I could I remember getting lost and confused quickly and being frustrated throughout the rest of the book. Things just seemed to happen and I couldn't figure out how all these pieces fit together.

A few months ago I found an unregistered copy of the book at the Dublin library shelf inside the Starbucks where we do our monthly BookCrossing meeting. Since I knew my husband had enjoyed the book and still speaks highly of it, I thought it was time to try the book again. I made doubly sure that I would read it by offering the book on the Book Relay site. I finished the book on Friday.

Here is my BookCrossing review:

Back in 1984 or 1985 my sixth grade teacher read this book aloud to us. I remember not being able to follow it at all. People seemed to be jumping around from adventure to adventure without rhyme or reason. Now having finally read it myself I can see where my confusion started. There is time travel (through possession more or less), a unicorn spirit guide (for lack of a better term), and a prophecy that can go one of two ways as it jumps from generation to generation with names being passed down and modified over time. This time I was able to enjoy the story, follow the twists and turns of things as Charles Wallace blipped from When to When and predict many of the plot developments. In other words, it was a much more enjoyable story now than it was when I was a child.

Reading Aloud:
Last night before bath time Sean found one of his number books for Ian to read. Ian has been helping him sound out words so he asked Sean to try sounding out the words, especially the ones they had practiced like: one, two, three, etc. Sean had no problem with them and was quickly sounding out all the words in the book. Of course he got a few of them sounded out wrong which is how I could tell he was genuinely reading. One of the words that gave him trouble was "eight" which is spelled funny. We stopped to have a good laugh over how eight would sound if it were pronounced like it is spelled. So at one day shy of 4 years old, Sean has been reading in earnest!

Steps: 10000