Books!
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
Well, it’s been a long long time since I posted about any books. You’d think I had stopped reading them altogether! There have been a few dry-ish spells what with the baby and all, but now that I’m making up the list, it turns out to be longer than I would have guessed. What’s crazy is I started this post over a year ago, in April 2006! Weird! Time just flies now (cf. baby).
Here’s the problem with waiting this long to get a books post together: some of the items on the list are so far back in the dim past of my brain, I don’t have much to say about them. Take, for instance, these three compilations of short stories:
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Nick Hornby, ed., Speaking with the Angel
Eggers & Horowitz, eds., The Better of McSweeney’s
Al Barrantonio, ed., Redshift
I know I finished them. I just don’t remember a lot about them. I’m pretty sure they weren’t bad. So if you like short stories, them’s some short story books.
Hopefully the brain will be more helpful with the rest of the list.
First, the kiddie books.
Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
I first read this when I was really young, like, around sixth or seventh grade, and I loved it. It’s the story of a girl stranded on an island, fending for herself in amazing and beautiful ways. I particularly liked the skirt she made of feathers, and the fortress she built against the wild animals. That thing was cool. She had to find or catch all her food — I remember spending some time trying to imagine what abalone might taste like. It was a good story then and it is now too. Reading it this time, I was caught off guard by the sad parts. I suppose kids are generally more cavalier about death than adults. At least, apparently, I was more able as a child to take a tragic death in stride than I am these days, because I know I didn’t cry the first time I read it. If you haven’t read this book, then you should. I’m wishing I was reading it right now.
Patricia Scarry, Hop, Little Kangaroo
This is another book I had as a child, but younger. I still have my little copy of it, and I remember reading it and having it read to me. A little kangaroo has grown too big for his mother’s pouch, so it’s time for him to learn how to hop. She sets him down on the ground and tells him she’s going home to make lunch and he’s got to hop home on his own. Then she leaves. He’s scared, and doesn’t know how to hop, so the animals around him try to help him with all sorts of suggestions for how he might get home — flying, swinging on a vine, digging a tunnel. The tunnel part is a bit of a Winnie-the-Pooh rip-off, but that’s okay — kids don’t mind. The wonderful thing was learning a little about Australian wildlife — there’s a whole bunch of animals, including a kookaburra, a bandicoot, and a soft-spoken sugar glider. (I always thought sugar glider was a strange name for an animal. Imagine my surprise upon learning — much later — that some people keep sugar gliders as pets! Crazy!) The other wonderful thing was the picture of the berry pie at the end. Mmmmmmmm. Pie.
Oh oh oh! I was just googling Patricia Scarry to see if there was any relation to Richard Scarry, and I ran across the book Good Night, Little Bear, which I haven’t seen for so so long, and omg it was such a favorite. Tomorrow, J. and I are going out to lunch, then to the bookstore. Guess what’s coming home with me?
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Now it’s later, and I did indeed find the Good Night, Little Bear book, hooray! The nice fellow at the bookstore also found Richard Scarry’s Chipmunk’s ABC, which was very exciting. It’s full of these eerily familiar pictures, but reading it, the text is not memorable at all. I must have just looked at the pictures a lot before I knew how to read. Or something. We have a Mother Goose book that’s kind of the same that way — it’s full of these beautiful illustrations that are very well known to my mind, practically engraved there, but most of the poems are pretty much totally unfamiliar.
Other books brought home today:
Shapes, an Ann Geddes board book. We didn’t have a shapes book, it’s got pictures of babies and the baby loves that, and it was on super clearance and cost nineteen cents. Woo hoo!
Lucy Cousins, Country Animals, another board book. The board books are fun because baby gets to turn the pages. She is favoring this one over the others tonight.
A Handful of Beans, Six Fairy Tales Retold by Jeanne Steig with pictures by William Steig. So far I’ve read Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast, and they were both great, funny and well written. Any Steig thing is great though. More on that later [next post].
Philip Abraham, Amelia Earhart. This is one for beginning readers, and it has some nice photographs. I heart Amelia.
Heyward & Hack, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. Here’s another from the bargain table. The cover illustration caught my eye, so I opened it and found it was full of lovely and familiar paintings of bunnies. And the story is distinctly feminist, in a 1939 sort of way. Totally recommended.
Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Goes to School. Yay for Pippi! Plus it was another bargain.
OK, turns out the rest of these are also from the clearance tables (no wonder I came home with so many!):
William Steig, Doctor De Soto. Can’t resist the Steig. A funny story about a mouse dentist who ordinarily refuses to serve cats and other dangerous animals.
Richard Scarry, The Best Story Collection Ever!
Love that Lowly!
Brown & Hurd, Runaway Bunny. The classic. I love the picture of the Mother fishing for the little bunny, using a carrot for bait.
McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings. Another classic. I hope we don’t have it already.
White, Charlotte’s Web. A nice big read-aloud version. It’s a little disheartening to see these great old books, hardbound even, going for so cheap. I don’t get it.
Whew! That’s a lotta books!
I also picked up a few items that are more clearly for me. One by Tao Lin called Eeeee Eee Eeee. Looks interesting. And three from Nicholson Baker, one of my very favorite writers. Vox, which I’ve been meaning to pick up for years, The Mezzanine, and Room Temperature.
Next time, we’ll get back to the list, starting with a few more kid’s books, and maybe do a few grownups’ books as well.*
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*Not sure about the apostrophes in this sentence. So I cop out and go with the mixed bag. Because I can. Nyah nyah!