Yesterday I realised that I have the Same Problem with 火曜日 and 金曜日 that I Had / still have with tuesday and thursday in english.
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I have been writing a lot of notes in the book, and it helps me a lot. My eyes don’t skip to the translations (as suggested by soggyboy) because the notes are a lot harder to read than the book’s text (small and in pencil), plus its not even in the same location. I can post photos of the first few annotated pages if you are interested 
Though, I must admit, it pains me write in a book. It just feel wrong 
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I totally understand you. I decided Not to write in the book and started to write the summary in procreate. One Sentence per Page.
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Page 9 Sentence 3
The two occurrences of ある are in two separate clauses. As CherryApple noted, あれば is the conditional form, meaning “If there is”. The preceding text falls within that conditional clause.
おかしな ことが あれば
“If this odd thing is (happening) …”
The next ある begins the following clause - the result of the odd thing happening.
ある can mean “a certain …” or “some …”, with あるもの meaning “something”. Thus, あるものだ literally means “something is”. I’m not sure how best to translate this clause, but given the context, I suspect it could perhaps be translated roughly as “something’s up”.
If that’s right, then the whole sentence could be translated as:
はて、おかしな ことが あれば ある ものだ。
“Dear me, if this odd thing is happening, something’s up!”
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Perfect, thanks! I think all the spaces added to the sentence were actually throwing me off from seeing あるもの as ‘a certain thing/something’
Hm, I just ran across this entry in Tofugu’s article about the conditional -ば form, and it seems directly applicable here:
In more old-fashioned Japanese, it is common to add ものだ at the end of the second part of the sentence (the part telling us the result):
- 信じていれば夢は叶うものだ。
- If you keep believing, your dreams will come true.
So … that makes me second-guess my translation of the clause あるものだ in Page 9 Sentence 3. But I think we have the sense of the sentence correct, at least.
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Page 10 Sentence 4
For the onomatopoetic word ぼんぼん, my dictionary also gives a definition of “with a bang bang (sound of a hammer or gunfire)”. Given the placement of the commas around that word, I’m wondering if it is perhaps meant to accentuate the preceding phrase:
“The wife put the cauldron with the rice in it onto the stove - bang, bang - and got the fire burning vigorously.”
Thoughts?
page 10 sentence 4
Hmmm, I don’t think so, I’ve always seen onomatopoeia modifying the verb that comes afterwards when I encounter it in books. It often seems (to the english speaker) to be repeating something that is already described by the verb. “The fire burned vigorously with a ボンボン” is normal onomatopoeia usage from my experience.
I believe a constant of Japanese is that modifiers come before the modified word (adjectives and adjectival phrases both come before nouns for example), so it wouldn’t make sense to place it afterwards.
You also don’t see as much comma usage and spacing in normal Japanese, here it seems to be for the benefit of children to see word boundaries. I wouldn’t read too much into the liberal comma/spacing usage in this book.
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I’m really glad I started this! I thought it might be a quick read, but even if I understood the grammar, there’s sooo many words I didn’t know. I think I filled up at least 20 anki cards reading this first section. I’m not sure I’ll need the word “barrel” anytime soon, but that kind of thinking is how my vocab got to be so poor in the first place 
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Awesome, welcome!!
That’s the reading life 
Keep at it!