Holiday reading and singing

While we were away, I chewed through all 800 pages of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a fantasy of early 19th century England-- Dickens meets Tolkein, or something. It's a wonderful book, and a week later part of me is still living in it somewhere. Blaise read The Wasp Factory, which he liked but does not recommend to the squeamish reader (me). Anselm has almost finished (with parental assistance) the dashing Amazon Adventure, a Willard Price book that Mum found in a second-hand store at home-- it's as good as I remembered, with striking descriptions of bites by vampire bats and discussions of antidotes for curare poisoning. Eliot got hooked, painfully, on Fourteen Nursery Songs: a very successful Grandma gift. We are all very tired of Lavender Blue, Here we go round the mulberry bush, The farmer's in the dell, Billy Boy, London Bridge, etc, which she has been asking for by name whenever there's a lull in the conversation. Her immediate click with all of these songs, and classics like A bicycle built for two, Jingle Bells, etc, most of which she can sing either entirely or in stretches, makes one wonder why outfits like Kindermusik insist on teaching their own (proprietary?) tuneless tedious songs instead of the rich array of folktunes that are already out there. All she has brought home from her classes is the two-note "Big bar, little bar"-- clearly not for want of innate musicality.