I agree with you. It seems like a natural extension of “love thy neighbor” to seek connection and understanding with other cultures. We need enough humility to recognize that some of what has come to shape our worldview is circumstantial. Everyone counts somethings as sacred though they may use another word for it. Living a life has to be more than executing a script to gain the favor of ones deity, especially for Christians who have been warned not to ask which neighbors we are to love.
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Awesome. I’d say go for it and see how your children get on. Strictly speaking a haiku doesn’t have to have three lines of 5-7-5. In fact, many haiku writers play fast and loose with syllable count focusing more on what the content of the haiku and what it is trying to communicate. But it is a good place to start little ones. So long as one remembers that haiku poetry. It is more about capturing a moment in time or a feel or an observation about life, nature, community, etc. than it is making sure you have the correct syllable count. Three lines for 4-8-3, for example, may be a better haiku than forcing it into 5-7-5 for the sake of it. Does that make sense?
There are some other elements in traditional haiku but I’ll stop there before I bore you to tears! 
On the book, I would say that the Penguin book is probably not appropriate for a 5- & 7-year-old, especially if you are a look for a book they can browse through. There is a lot of complicated front matter about haiku history and some of the verses included I would rate as M for language and sexual content. If you want to expose your children to some traditional haiku I would recommend On Love and Barley: The Haiku of Basho - Lucien Stryk (Trans). Matsuo Basho is the first of what are called the 5 Grandmasters and probably the most accessible.
If you are looking for more modern examples, I would check out the free journal of the Akita International Haiku Network called, Serow.
If you are looking for something explictly for children you could try My First Book of Haiku Poems or Write Your Own Haiku for Kids. Both have good reviews, though, full disclosure, I have read neither.
Hope that helps/answers your question.
Thanks for the comprehensive answer 
Its certainly not boring to me! I LOVE the great books I find for my kids in the library, so I’ll have to check out those suggestions or others. AND I would like to find a good book about Haiku myself, to learn and enjoy 
The library makes me feel like I’m going to my Grandmas and she’s offering all the cookies and I go for it. I’m reading too many anthropology and environment/climate books at once and I definitely need to balance it out with fiction. After I finish reading about the Boxer Rebellion, that is. More works of fiction are needed
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Well then, I am glad I could be of help 
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If you are looking for something yourself, the Basho book above is as good a place to start as any. There is a fun little book called Write like Issa by David G. Lanoue which is a haiku how to (Issa was another for the 5 Grandmasters). It takes you through more of the elements that make a haiku a haiku. Things like the ‘cut’ which acts as a break or pause in the poem and the use of season references, etc. Its only 100 pages so a fairly quick read.
But honestly, I would say the best way to learn and enjoy haiku is just to start doing it. I try to write one a day and have recently started participating in the #HaikuChallenge on Twitter. The challenge is to create a haiku everyday with the chosen word. If you are on Twitter it is great way to get into this style of poetry.
I love your passion for reading. I hope you manage to pass it on to your children 
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I started reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith for lack of a better idea. It is a story of a child born to the children of immigrants living in the tenements of Brooklyn. The child’s mother’s parents come from German peasantry, the mother illiterate and superstitious while the father is angry and abusive. The child’s father is second generation Irish and an alcoholic. When his wife goes into labor he brings the midwife but then goes out on a bender. When he returns the girl’s mother, exhausted from a difficult labor, comforts the terrified father and realizes she will always have to comfort and support him as well as their new child. The father at least arranges for his mother-in-law to visit and she gives her this counsel.
“Mother, I am young. Mother, I am eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?”
“The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns to read. Then she must read every day, I know this is the secret.”
“I will read,” promised Katie. “What is a good book?”
“There are two great books. Shakespeare is a great book. I have heard tell that all the wonder of life is in that book; all that man has learned of beauty, all that he may know of wisdom and living are on those pages. It is said that these stories are plays to be acted out on the stage, I have never spoken to anyone who has seen this great thing. But I heard the lord of our land back in Austria say that some of the pages sing themselves like songs.”
“Is Shakespeare a book in the German?”
“It is of the English. I so heard our lord of the land tell his young son who was setting out for the great university of Heidelberg long ago.”
“And what is the other great book?”
And here continues the part I thought might be of interest:
“It is the Bible that the Protestant people read.”
“We have our own Bible, the Catholic one.”
Mary looked around the room furtively. “It is not fitting for a good Catholic to say so but I believe that the Protestant Bible contains more of the loveliness of the greatest story on this earth and beyond it. A much loved Protestant friend once read some of her Bible to me and I found it as I have said.”
“That is the book, then, and the book of Shakespeare. And every day you must read a page of each to your child - even though you yourself do not understand what is written down and cannot sound the words out properly. You must do this that the child will grow up knowing of what is great - knowing these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world.”
“The Protestant Bible and Shakespeare.”
“And you must tell the child the legends I told you - as my mother told them to me and her mother to her. You must tell the fairy tales of the old country. You must t ell of those not of this earth who live forever in the hearts of people - fairies, elves, dwarfs and such. You must tell of the great ghosts that haunted your father’s people and of the evil eye which a hex put on your aunt. You must teach the child of the signs that come to the women of our family when there is trouble and death to be. And the child must believe in the Lord God and Jesus, His Only Son.” She crossed herself.
“Oh, and you must not forget the Kris Kringle. The child must believe in him until she reaches the age of six.”
“Mother, I know there are no ghosts or fairies. I would be teaching the child foolish lies.”
Mary spoke sharply. “You do not know whether there are not ghosts on earth or angels in heaven.”
“I know there is no Santa Claus.”
“Yet you must teach the child that these things are so.”
“Why? When I, myself, do not believe?”
“Because,” explained Mary Rommely simply, “the child must have a valuable thing which is called an imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.”
“The child will grow up and find out things for herself. She will know that I lied. She will be disappointed.”
“That is what is called learning the truth. It is a good thing to learn the truth one’s self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”
“If that is so,” commented Katie bitterly, “then we Rommelys are rich.”
“We are poor, yes. We suffer. Our way is very hard. But we are better people because we know of the things I have told you. I could not read but I told you of all the things I learned from living. You must tell them to your child and add on to them such things as you will learn as you grow older.”
Mary goes on to give Kate advice about saving and someday buying a bit of land because “For thousands of years, our people have been peasants working the land of others. This was in the old country. Here we do better working with our hands in the factory. There is part of each day that does not belong to the master but which the worker owns himself. That is good. But to own a bit of land is better; a bit of land to that we may hand own to our children … that will raise us up on the face of the earth.”
A little corny but it gives a taste of culture at work I think.
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Not corny at all. I have that book on my shelf but have never read it. Still working on A Prayer for OM. I think I am putting off finishing so as to put off his demise. While I am bit younger, the setting of that book is familiar to those of us who grew up in the sixties.
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I agree. It is only the manner of speaking that seems dated but that is because we’ve come along a bit later and enjoy some advantages they lacked. But the advice is fairly timeless and durable.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is the best story I’ve read in several years. I’m not a usually a cryer, but it was one of the most powerful stories of redemption I’ve read in a long time. Also, I learned a ton about the history of Afghanistan. Another good one is A year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. It’s about an isolated English community dealing with a Plague outbreak. Very interesting observations of what happens in communities when faith fails people who are faced with inexplicable suffering.
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That one took me like five years. I can now say I read it to all my friends who rave about it.
Interesting… I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn a few years ago, and there are parts about it that stand out to me, but I don’t remember that part. I guess that’s inevitable with a long book. I really liked it overall. One reason I read it was because I read another book about a government program that worked to put lightweight editions of books into the hands of soldiers during World War 2. Apparently this was one of the more popular ones, with topics that resonated with a lot of soldiers during that time – probably reminded a lot of them of their own childhoods.
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I loved that Kite Runner book too. I may have read it before retirement or else soon after.
I wonder what put you off the Meany book. I’m guessing the huge helping of fanciful whimsy. Irving’s other book The World According To Garp makes it seem buttoned down by comparison. But his Ciderhouse Rules is his best I think and it is the most nitty gritty real of the lot.
I’ll be putting a hold on the wonders book.
While the heroine’s grandmother is religious and walks with considerable grace given her circumstances she is also very superstitious. Other than this passage I don’t recall anything else that speaks so directly to religious ideas. Of course the new mother has a pretty big realization about her life right there and is in a state to take it in. I like the new mother because she seems to be pretty honest with herself.
Interesting how so many books seem to touch on religion at some point, and even when it is tangential to the story the insights can be profound. Maybe because they sneak up on you when you’re not looking for it?
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I’ve been meaning to read Cider House Rules, I have it on my shelf. There were aspects of Owen Meany I really appreciated, but I was just never really drawn in and it was so long. I kept picking it up and putting it down and having to reread to remember where I was. I had the same problem with The Brothers K, which I don’t think I ever actually finished, though I got through 400 pages or so (the one by Duncan not Dostoevsky. I finished the Dostoevsky book.) I just never got to a point where I was like “I really care what happens to this character or how this turns out.” I think both novels suffered from narrators with far too much white male angst that I just couldn’t relate to and found kind of entitled and hard to respect.
Some books are really best read when your alternatives are limited. Meany was the only novel around when I finally got my knee replaced.
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Could be… and I think religious themes can help to answer the basic questions of “Why is this character the way they are and what motivates them?” even if it doesn’t end up being a major theme of the story.
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Khaled Hosseini is fantastic! A Thousand Splendid Suns and And the Mountains Echoed are just as devastating and rich as The Kite Runner.
I’ve read A Thousand Splendid Suns, but not the other one.
They are so hard to read but so good. I trust that the author is giving us a window into the lives of Afghans, but I don’t have any Afghan friends to corroborate that.
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I also liked A Thousand Splendid Suns though I can’t remember a single detail at the moment. (Knew I read another by him but couldn’t think of what it was called.)
For a look into other cultures and their point of view encountering our own I’ve also liked what I’ve read by Chimamanda Adiche, Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. She is a Nigerian woman interested in feminist issues as well as a good observer I think.
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I just now finished reading “The Kite Runner”. Oh my. Thanks, everybody for these recommendations - his themes of redemption sure are hard-won.
He sure speaks as if he was there in the book I just read, though I just now read somewhere else that other Afghani’s have disputed his portrayals of Kabul. It made me wonder how much of the fiction narrative included echoes of real events in his own life - almost like the story was a long confessional to the world?
Even just within that story, Kabul changes so much (and has apparently changed quite a bit since then - hopefully for the better from the looks of things on Wikipedia, anyway), that he freely acknowledged that he didn’t know the city any more. Even while he was there, the one cab driver informs him that, as the son of a rich man who employs servants, “you were just a tourist too” even while growing up there.
I suppose all of us can’t really know even our own lifelong neighborhoods unless we are so related to all our nearby community that we’ve actually been in their houses. Each house - each little community may have a little world of its own that, today, might not be known at all by somebody who stays home, and then commutes out of it to work or do anything else.
I really like Hosseini’s development of family life and the raucous community relationships of the time.
[It is also a stark portrayal of depravity when people with evil hearts get hold, in a “law-mongering” way, of whatever religion happens to be at hand - in that case Islam. But other Abrahamic faiths have all had the same problems too, of course.]
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