Soooo....

.... what have I been reading ...

I read a book about children and bilinguality, which was very interesting: Barn med flera språk by Gunilla Ladberg.  I've always been bilingual, and so have many of my friends, so for me it was an easy decision to try to keep it up with my kids. My mother was quite committed to making us kids bilingual. For the time it was a bit avant-garde in Sweden. Of course, the advantage of having English as a second language is that people can understand that it might be "useful", so they accept it and think it's okay. If you're speaking something unbelieeeevably foreign to your kids you just haven't accepted that you live in Sweden now, you know. Anyway, what I learnt about bilinguality growing up was that you had to be very strict about sticking to the one language with your child, so they wouldn't get confused and start mixing languages. Mixing languages was bad. In this book the author writes about newer research saying that it is so not a problem when we mix - to the immense relief of us bilinguals who have always mixed with merry abandon. She also stresses that Sweden is extremely monolingual, if you adopt a global perspective, and we have a tendency to automatically think that oh learning another language is sooo hard whereas in other places on the planet people just do it without working themselves up about it because sure how else are you going to talk to anyone? So very interesting subject, everyone should read up on it.

I read a Jeffrey Deaver novel called A Maiden's Grave. I have no patience with this writing anymore. God, I used to be entertained by it, but I have evolved. It is shallow and boring. This one is about sign language and hostage rescue. A decided meh. But ok for a train ride if you skim a little.

I just read a  Kathy Reichs too (I got it and the Deaver second-hand somewhere thinking they'd be good summer reads) and feel a bit the same about it as toward the Deaver. The woman's writing style annoys me now something awful. Building up to monumental cliff hanger phrasing at the end of every chapter (what's with the Dickens complex?) that turn out to be NOTHING at the beginning of the next. Yet still more entertaining than the Deaver. Oh, it was Flash and Bones and was about ricin poison and Nascar.

There was something else, but I'm forgetting at the moment... Finished reading Bilbo for my son. When we'd read three quarters of the book he looked at how much we had left and said: "Mammy! We're nearly done! Then we never have to read this ever again!"

So... not a fan then.