even*cleveland: gifts for knowledge-hungry and nonsense-loving nine-year-olds

gifts for knowledge-hungry and nonsense-loving nine-year-olds

A print subscription to The Week Junior, for something interesting to read while they scarf down breakfast.

A programmable Xtron Pro, so that part of screen time is learning how the things that appear on screens come to be.

A kit to make a cake that looks like a strictly regulated and deeply beloved foodstuff.

Assorted candy eyeballs, to give boring foods personality.

Several soft-back volumes from Fantagraphics' brilliantly designed The Complete Peanuts and a nifty Jotblock to encourage comic strip doodles.

The Snakes of Wrath, a tile game that rewards the sneaky and the clever.

Woset Soil, a soft paper clay that can be tinted with paint to make squishable shapes.

A teensy, tiny bar of pure gold that is both treasure and a never-ending math problem, given fluctuating market values.

A lightbulb that makes any room a rainbow.

A fluffy cotton bathrobe, because the nine-year-old I live with is dedicated to his nightly post-bath robe relaxation moment.

A funny bookmark from Humdrum Paper, plus a thick book or three to stash it in.

A kit by Kraul to make a basket cable car, to ferry snacks in and out of cardboard forts. (The Make.Do cardboard tool kit has been a HIT in our house for years now.)

Huggable toilet paper, because it is the silliest thing, and they still sleep with stuffies.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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