Howdy y’all – hope you’re all having lovely weekends. It’s beautifully sunny here in Oxford, but in a few hours I’ll be hopping on a plane for a very short trip to Glasgow (no time to find any bookshops, boo) – I’ll let you know all about that afterwards. For now, here’s a book, a blog post, and a link…
1.) The book – I heard on the Reading the End podcast that Helen Oyeyemi was having a collection of short stories out later this year, and while searching for that (FYI, it’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours and is out in April in the UK, possibly earlier in the US) I came across an NYRB she’d written an introduction for. It’s a collection of short stories called Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo, and sounds darkly, weirdly fascinating. Does anybody know anything about it?
2.) The blog post – it’s got to be the link round-up post for Margery Sharp Day over at Beyond Eden Rock.
3a.) The link – thanks to Biana the publicist for sending me this link, to a video of the highlights from the Costa Book Awards, which seems like a fun thing to embed:
3b.) The sneaky second link – can you match the grammar abilities expected of 7 year olds under the new curriculum? I’m sad to say I got 10/11 – I feel like by now I should be able to ace a test for 7 year olds…
Having only scored 8/11 on the grammar, I think it is just as well I am no longer teaching 7 year olds. However, part of me feels that 7 year olds would be far better off spending their time in less nit-picking English lessons and more time exploring their imagination. After all, what is Key Stage 2 for, if not building on the more basic grammar of KS 1? And those magical early school years are too precious to waste on minutiae – dinosaurs, magic and mini-beasts, perhaps?
That grammar test is scary….
Ocampo was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares and a friend of Borges. I reviewed her collection here (if links are permitted in comments!) : https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/dreams-and-illusions/ The NYRB books is a wonderful, if rather, strange collection. Jacquiwine has reviewed it too!
I can’t believe any 7 yr old could answer this! I thought I was going to get 100% …till the last few questions got really hard and I only got 9/11!
I also got two questions wrong. Now feeling profoundly sorry for seven-year-olds. No wonder when you ask them what they did at school today, they say, ‘Can’t remember.’
You’ve got a treat in store with the Silvina Ocampo collection. Her stories are quite beguiling. Here’s a link to my review if its of interest.
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/thus-were-their-faces-by-silvina-ocampo-tr-daniel-balderston/
I can also recommend the novella she penned with her husband, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, a wonderful spoof on the country house murder mystery.
Well, I only got 6/11. And me a professional writer. But I don’t make grammatical mistakes when I write — there’s a difference between knowing how to write and knowing the names of the grammatical constructions, or whatever they’re called. Fun quiz, though!.
I missed two on the grammar test! Y’all call things different names than we do here, I think? In a couple of cases? I did get the practise/practice distinction, even though that’s not a thing Americans do. :D