29.
Title: [Beowulf]
Translator: Seamus Heaney
Pages:215
Genre: Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Work Text
Date Completed: April 11, 2013
Rating: *****

Majestic, lyrical, thrilling and compelling: Beowulf is an enchanting epic poem of flawed heroism, broken social systems, gendered tyranny, shifting honor, and imperialistic Christianity.  Having read parts of the poem as a first-year undergraduate, I have long intended to read Heaney's best-selling translation.  For years it has waited on my shelf, until I decided to take the plunge and teach the text, the better to approach it analytically and while pressured into carefully reading the work in its entirety.  To do so proved to be greatly fulfilling, and I found myself weeping for the lost hero that I was cursing and judging a hundred pages before.  For perhaps obvious reasons, the question of Grendel's mother and the subject of wergeld proved to be of particular interest, and the definitions of heroes and monsters were inspiration for long classroom debates.  Pure joy. 

30. 
Title: [From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler]
Translator: E.L. Konigsburg
Pages: 176
Genre: Early Reader
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Library Book
Date Completed: April 14, 2013
Rating: ***1/2

Recently, this list of "67 Books Every Geek Should Read to their Kids" popped up through social media, and obviously caught my interest.  It is an interesting look at what adult "geeks" feel contributed to their own geekiness, and what they would hope to share with their own offspring.  The requirements for the list are bound only by submission, and some are a little more expected than others.  Many of the books are familiar, and I've turned to the library for many that are not.  The first of these is Frog and Toad are Friends, which the monsters and I enjoyed as a bedtime story recently.  The second is From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

This book has obvious geek appeal: two children run away from home, and decide to hide away in a museum (where it's probably easier to hide than in a library, which would have been my first choice at age seven).  Determined to "learn one thing every day," the children set about visiting various exhibits, until they are caught by the mystery of a new acquisition - a statue that may or may not be an early work of Michelangelo.  If the museum itself didn't appeal, then surely the mystery does.  Determined not to return home until they mystery is solved - or, as Claudia more clearly relates, until she is different - the two search for clues in the library, the museum, and finally turned to the previous owner of the statue.

The story is charming, and the narrative is well-paced, which will hold a child's imagination without rushing them through.  A positive perspective on voluntary learning, and the passion one has for discovering the unknown, is certainly a lesson worth encouraging in children of all a