For each issue we’ll highlight books, some new, some old, some for adults, some for children.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture

by Diana Senechal

This is an important and timely book for educators and parents and really any thoughtful adult.  While addressing the important issue of solitude and contemplation, arguably the most important issue, it does not get lost in philosophic abstraction or drift to polarized positions.

Diana Senechal is a musician, a scholar in literature and language, a current blogger, and an experienced teacher, including having worked in New York City public schools.  All of this shows.  Her work is approachable and clearly draws from experience.  It is humble and bold in tone and argument.  It contains incisive analysis and fresh perspectives on old issues, and is woven throughout with poetic insight and lyrical flares that mark her style and keep the reader reading.

She reflects on such seemingly little topics as the loss of quick gaps of quiet, whether between conversations or between meetings or when leaving Starbucks or simply while walking from one building to the next.  Speaking from experience, she discusses specific current pedagogical methods and trends.  She criticizes the continual “big idea” efforts to fix education with sweeping, often autocratic centralized approaches.  She engages ideas and practices that can drift into or be seized by either camp labeled “progressive” or “traditional.” (Though, all too often “traditionals” are more so modern and rigidly stuck in a mechanized/industrial approach, while forward speaking “progressives” often partially echo back to old, dynamic, imaginative ways.)  With the voice of an educator and a seeker, Senechal speaks with the minds and doers of the present, while naturally weaving into the conversation thinkers and works like Petrarch and Sophocles’ Antigone as well as a mathematical proof by Newton.

This book is something with which to take your time, to savor, and pause to ponder (or ponder to pause, if you will).  Enjoy!

Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

An exquisite artist, Wilde enters into the precarious realm of writing fairy tales.  It is a realm of simple language and matter-of-fact presentation of the ordinary and magical side by side.  It is a difficult task for any modern writer to make work artistically.  It is easy and common to sink (or slink) into simplistic moralism or to get tangled in complex character development that lessens the impact of the wondrous characters and events (sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrid) that are to prance or prowl across such pages.  And, one would think it especially challenging to a wordsmith like Wilde.  But here we are: beautiful incisive tales that deftly cut to the heart of the imagination and the mysterious land of fairy.

William Wordsworth - The Major Works: including The Prelude (Oxford World's Classics)

by William Wordsworth

One of those artists and an assortment of works that is simply good to have around for oneself and others in places easy to reach…whether for a moment of solitude on the porch while seeing the day end or begin, or for any of those snatches of time we can take back to enter into recollection and engage gifts that bring beauty and meaning.

For adults of all sorts

For humans of any age

For middle school students and beyond