here's your hat, Mantel. git on out.

credit: www.guardian.co.ukI've written before (and before that) about how much I look forward to the annual announcement of the Booker Prize long and short lists, how I read my way through most of the titles selected.  If only it were possible to sign up for a special book club that would send me all of the selections in one package, oh, bliss!

That's not to say the Booker is a fool-proof source of books for me.

There have been some duds.

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Sunday, starting over

On Memorial Day we had dinner with some friends, one of whom is an English teacher at a posh private high school here in Marin.  We were discussing the practice of diagramming sentences, because of a question that had come up in one of the private tutoring sessions she offers after school and on weekends to make ends meet.  As if teaching high schoolers English full-time weren't enough...  

Anyway, I realized over the course of that conversation that I never learned how to diagram sentences the way she was demonstrating it -- that just wasn't a thing we ever did at the French American Bilingual School, where I was a student through 7th grade, or at Everett Junior High or at Lowell.  I do recall quite a lot of use of my Bic 4-color pen, underlining in red, click, circling in green, click, annotating in blue.  But never like the diagram at left.  Nope.  Never.

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