Bad, bad, bad. Even if you’re a huge fan of this subject (which I am), this film is only barely worth watching. The casting was awful, as was the acting and dialogue. 2/10

WOW! This was a fantastic film – one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. A very long time. As so often happens, I’m seeing it ages after everyone else did, so probably no one will be interested in talking about it anymore, so I’ll just say that I LOVED it, and leave it at that. 10/10 (can’t remember the last time I gave a film this rating).

This week, it was our turn to choose a book for our homeschooling book club, and this is the one that we chose. We hadn’t read it before, but it looked good, and there was a study guide on the RMS Titanic website, so I figured it was probably a pretty good book.

It was a good book. It’s a very nicely done fictional treatment of the disaster, through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who befriends one of the dogs on board the ship. Rather than focusing on the people on board, the author put a lot of focus on the dozen or so dogs who had been brought on board the ship by passenders. I suspect this was perhaps her way of getting the point across to children that lives were lost (many of the dogs on board did not survive), without dwelling too much on the loss of human life. In any case, that’s how the kids in the bookclub seemed to respond to the book. Almost all of them really enjoyed it – definitely, me and my son did – and we had a good discussion about it, too. 9/10

This was an excellent books – one of my favorites I’ve read about the “Titanic” disaster. It’s different from so many of the books I’ver read before in that it’s not just another rehashing of the sinking, and all the events that led up to it. Instead, this book looks at some of the people on board. It’s separated into three sections, one for first class passengers, second class, and third class, and in each section, there are mini-biographies of several of the passengers and families who traveled in each class. There are wonderful, poignant stories here that I’d not read before. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in this period of history. It’s not a book just about the “Titanic,” but also about that era in general, and the way society functioned under this sort of a class structure. Really excellent. 10/10

This one one of the text books for my yoga teacher training, and I finally got around to reading it this week. It’s a good book – not a whole lot of text unrelated to the poses, so it was a quick read, since the book is mostly photographs. The photos of the asanas are good, and the descriptions are clear and concise. I prefer them to Iyengar’s lengthier and sometimes hard-to-understand (for me, anyway) descriptions. The only downside is that the number of poses show in this book is somewhat limited. On the whole, though, a good book. 7/10

This is, I think, a good book for techniques for helping children to get to sleep at night. My son has never been a good sleeper, and some of the things she offers in this book have helped. Although he’s still not consistently going to sleep right after getting into bed every night. So, I did like the book, but since we haven’t had complete success, I don’t want to give it too rave of a review. 7/10

I tried to read this book – for a while, it was a bedtime book for my son, and I read parts of it by myself after he lost interest. In the end, though, I decided not to throw good time after bad, and I gave up. I just didn’t find it at all engaging – the characters annoyed me, and the story seemed kind of, well, lame. Maybe this is a gem in disguise and I just didn’t “get” it, but I found this book highly disappointing.

“Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” is one of my favorite books of all-time, so I’ve been looking forward to reading this one for a while. Unfortunately, it turned out to be something of a disappointment. The story was interesting, but I found the writing to be uncomfortable to read (which, probably, was the intention, given the story line, but I did find it particularly enjoyable). Also, the main character is a difficult person whom I find it hard to like, enjoy, or really even care about. I almost cared more about all the people around her, hoping she wouldn’t do anything to harm them. On the whole, it was interesting and I did keep reading, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. 6/10

Yet another book about the Titanic. This one contained some interesting survivor testimony that I’d not read before, and does a pretty good job at giving an overview of the disaster. Informative, but not really stellar. 7/10

This is an excellent book for older children (I read it with my 8 year old, and wouldn’t recommend it to children any younger than that; the narrator is 12, and that’s probably the target age). It started out a bit slow, I thought – the dialogue seemed a bit clunky at first, but once the story got going, wow, this was a really interesting book.

It’s set on Alcatraz Island in the 1930s, when it was a prison, and (as you might have guessed from the title), Al Capone was an inmate. The book really isn’t about the prison or Capone, though – it’s a coming-of-age story. First, about the narrator, 12-year-old Moose Flanagan, who has been torn away from his comfortable life in Santa Monica to live on Alcatraz, where his father had gotten a job as an electrician). The story also focuses on the growth of Moose’s autistic sister, Natalie; the reason for the family’s move to San Francisco is the hope that a special school there will help improve her development. Toss into the mix Moose starting at a new school, and all the other children living on the island as well, and there’s all sorts of interesting things happening throughout this book.

I really enjoyed this book, and so did my son (although I think it stressed him out, too – because of the setting, he was always thinking one of the children was going to get murdered by Al Capone). Interesting, and touching, and a good treatment of the family dynamic in a family that is under quite a bit of stress. 9/10