[books] Blood Rites and Pagan Homeschooling

[snugglekitty]

Another entry in the "summer fun" category is Blood Rites by Jim Butcher. This is book six in the Dresden Files. I love these books. I was describing them to an_gadhar as "like really funny film noire, with demons." They aren't getting crappy over time, either, which I really appreciate. Also, there's the understanding that the line between the good guys and the bad guys is not always entirely clear. And the past few have included kinky sex. We like kinky sex. Four stars.
There are some plot inconsistencies from book to book, but that's to be expected of cheap genre fiction. Those issues are really for the editors to fix, not the authors, imo.

And in the "books to look into" category, we have Pagan Homeschooling by Kirsten Madden. I wanted to find out if this book was good before I invested in it. So I got it through ILL and leafed through it. The answer is "Heck yes." This is a surprisingly comprehensive resource for the length of the book. It includes bibliographies with every chapter as well as actual excercises you can do with your actual children. Then there's a lot of encouragement that you can do this and make it work, even if you don't have tons of money or fancy textbooks. Highly recommended, and I'll definitely be buying it for myself. Five stars.

Comments

[srl.livejournal.com]

oo, the second book sounds interesting (and i am not at all into parenting). I may ILL it if i remember in the fall. got some examples of what it covers?

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Sure. It covers general stuff along the lines of, "Why do people homeschool? What are the effects of homeschooling? How do you make it work with money? How do you make sure your kids get enough socializing?" And then a lot of specific stuff like, "How do you teach children to work with energy? What are the ethics of using magic to do better on tests? How can you teach education units based on pagan topics?" And there are TONS of resources listed - books, groups, websites.

Does that answer your question?

[srl.livejournal.com]

yes, that answers most of my questions. I think the stuff I'm interested in is mostly the second part-- the pagan-specific items. My parents had a lot of sympathies with the Christian homeschool crowd when I was a kid, so I'm more or less familiar with the general homeschool-advocacy arguments.