Book Love Art – Honoring Styron’s Quote
“A good book should leave you….slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.” – William Styron
I love a fantastic book, I love a fantastic quote, but I also love the way people choose to honor their favorites with their art. If you know the original artists of any of the pieces I include, please comment and let me know who they are, its been a tough time finding their names in the land of cyberspace. Along the same vein, Styron is sometimes quoted as saying ” a good book” and “a great book.” Which is it?
Visit: http://thelensoflife.blogspot.com/2012/04/quotes-of-bookmarks.html
The Ravenous Beast
Title: The Ravenous Beast
Author: Niamh Sharkey
Publisher: Walker Books
Genre: Board Book
I originally bought The Ravenous Beast for the color scheme (its cover is purple, turquoise, and an orangy- yellow) and illustrations. And the fact that Ayla fell in love with it in the bookstore. That was a while back, and now our once new board book is chaffed, worn, and has a cracked spine. Sharkey’s book has become one of her favorites. It gets read at the table during lunch (my favorite time to read it), at night before bed from time to time, and every once in a while I read it at Half Price Books’ story time while the kids chow down on crackers.
If you make sure to do all the different voices and include the exclamation marks while reading, the book is always well received by children, despite the slightly disturbing end where The Ravenous Beast eats ALL the other characters. I suppose the disturbing factor is lost on kids anyway because they all think its the funniest thing ever. Truth be told, it is rather funny. The whale is my personal favorite, but Ayla prefers the cat and the crocodile.
Sharkey is a well-known and accomplished children’s illustrator, not only does she write and illustrate popular children’s books like The Ravenous Beast, she is the Children’s Laureate of Ireland and is now collaborating with Brown Bag Films and Disney to create a show based on her book I’m A Happy Hugglewug. Learn more about her and all her ventures on her blog: http://niamhsharkey.blogspot.com
Weekly Low Down on Kids Books 6/26/12
One Watermelon Seed
One Watermelon Seed reminded me of another recent favorite:Seed Savers: Treasure
A Weekend With Murderers
Its been an interesting, though depressing weekend of books, while I was away from the computer. Since my modem had burned up and we were patiently waiting for a new one, I decided to sit down and have as much as a reading marathon as possible with a toddler in my midst. So between a whole lot of picture and board books, I was on a mission to tick some loitering TBRs off my end table…
…Starting with Native Son
So I set it aside, but moved onto to the worst choice ever: Albert Camus’ The Stranger
All these “helpless” humans killing other humans. I got really irritated, more than a little sad, and switched over to some nonfiction where I polished the weekend off with a whole lot of Astrology and Astronomy books for a little research project. As someone who personally knows someone in prison for two accounts of attempted murder, I just have a hard time buying into the helpless unintentional killings, unless we’re talking self defense or the mentally disabled (like in Of Mice and Men).
What have you been reading?
The Planets
Title: The Planets
Author: Dava Sobel
I’m impressed with how accessible Dava Sobel has made Astronomy. As a New York Times journalist, she brings all the important information to the table. As a writer, she’s a story teller of the highest degree. Beautiful, fluid, and full of all the ancient romance of the stars, The Planets is full of history, poetry, and all the most relevant of scientific discoveries. Sobel’s work is not only a pleasurable read, but the dream-find for a homeschooling mom intent on classically educating her child.
With Sobel’s newspaper background, the book is very readable; a proficient sixth grader shouldn’t have a problem with it. I plan to use this for my child’s eleven year old Astronomy lessons, along with a middle grade level study of Ancient History, as Sobel has filled the book with quotes from or about many of the Greats. “Pythagoras believed the cosmic order obeyed the same mathematical rules and proportions as the tones on the musical scale,” (pg. 163.) introduces an entire chapter dedicated to man’s fascination with the planets and how that has been celebrated through the centuries through the art of music.
Always presented to me in school as a pitiable underdog, small and petite, Pluto was my favorite planet. Even more so when it was first threatened by the idea of being stripped of its planetary status, I became indignant, an uneducated supporter of allowing it keep its rank in the sky and in our textbooks. Like an older sibling protecting a small child, I felt like it was a personal attack to say Pluto wasn’t really a planet. I was angered that someone had decided to take back all I had been taught and strip this little planet of a description I thought it had earned. After reading Sobel’s explanation of Pluto’s discovery, history and status and then a chapter on Uranus, I think I may be sold on the reasons why Pluto title as the 9th planet is threatened and that Uranus is actually my new favorite. So heavily tied to the literary works of Shakespeare in name and attitude with such a unique history, my new knowledge of Uranus now pales my previous love for Pluto – a childish emotion of elementary proportions, tied to an association with the Disney dog.
I have other books by Sobel lurking around in my library, and I can’t wait to dive into those when I’ve exhausted this particular topic. I look forward to reading Longitude and see if she attacks the subject of geography with the same fervor as she did Astronomy.
A Piece of Steinbeck
Click on the Book Cover to visit the National Steinbeck Center website.
Title: Of Mice and Men
Author: John Steinbeck
Publisher: Penguin
Length: 103 pages
A friend asked me if Of Mice and Men was a good representation of Steinbeck’s work. Not having read it, but being a die hard fan of East of Eden
Of Mice and Men was written as an experiment, so says the inside jacket of my beautiful Penguin Centennial Edition. Steinbeck himself called it, “a kind of playable novel, written in novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands.” Its true, it is a playable novel. And as complete as a lone standing novella, it could also be a brief chapter in a full length Steinbeck saga that I’ve grown to expect.
My favorites by Steinbeck are long sweeping story lines of depression, written with perfection, where Of Mice and Men is a short stint featuring a relationship between two men as one struggles with the lines between gentility and brute force. When I think of Steinbeck, its for his onion layers of generational secrets, sins, and passions. If given this in hand written form, not knowing what it was from, I think I would guess Steinbeck, but ask where the rest of the book is, thinking this was a bit of back story to something much more epic. I wouldn’t call this a short representation of his work though, its so unique and different. It feels more like a small little corner of his brain, a little tiny piece of the puzzle that makes up Steinbeck’s genius.
For starters, there’s much more dialogue than I usually see in Steinbeck’s pieces, true to the form of a play. There are far less propelling descriptions that push you along a timeline, instead of equating my reading experience to a landscape often seen in those large European antiquarian homes and museums, I feel like I’m looking at one scene or portrait on an average sized canvas. I wasn’t left with a deep sense of having been, step for step, in the same place the characters had walked, like I did with East of Eden. I closed the book saddened at Lennie’s plight, but did not feel the overwhelming gush of reality being poured upon me by a starving man seeking nourishment from the breast milk of a woman who had just delivered a stillborn baby in a barn.
Steinbeck succeeded in his play-novel experiment, and its quite good – I feel like I’m watching a play. But I don’t feel like I’m nose deep in story, reluctant to come up for air even to eat, or drink, or use the restroom; which is usually the case when I read Steinbeck. Who do I recommend Of Mice and Men for? Anyone attempting to guide their reading habits from one genre to another. If you usually read novels and want to try plays, pick this up as a stepping stone. If you are a theatre buff, actor, or director who usually reads plays or screenplays and are in the mood to get your literature on, Of Mice and Men would be a good starting point. It would be a great crossover piece for younger literature students as they are led from one unit to the next, and I think I may use it as such for my daughter, an afternoon project. Although, I wouldn’t spend more time than a afternoon on it, and I will probably never read it myself again.
Weekly Low Down on Kids Books 6/13/12
Oh my goodness have we been reading! And reading… and reading… and reading some more. The goal for the summer reading program at the public library is 500 minutes. That’s a lot of picture and board books. Yet, one week in and we’ve already reached 250 minutes, so not too shabby. Out of all the many, many, many books we’ve read, here are the top three for the week.
Top pick by Ayla (so much so, I had to re-check it out because she refused to allow it to go back in the library bag to be returned, which also means I’m going to have to find a copy to keep because this book WILL be returned to the library next week):Snog the Frog
I however, thought The Busy Life of Ernestine Buckmeister
Once Upon a Time, The End
The Secret Adventures of H.G. Wells
Title: The Map of Time
Author: Felix J. Palma
Publisher: Atria Books
Length: 611 pages
It may have taken me longer than I first supposed to finish Felix J. Palma’s The Map of Time. Yes, there may have been days between reading that I had not expected, because the marketing was so astonishingly gripping. But any distaste I had for this book while I was reading it was purely psychological. It had to have been, because Palma’s writing is brilliant.
My psychological beefs? Let’s see if I can express them.
#1 The premise described in the jacket isnt even remotely a familiar story line until the last 60 pages of the book. Good thing I don’t usually read dust jackets, I just dive in, but I have friends who do who were reading this book roughly around the same time as myself, so on this occasion I went against instinct and read the synopsis. While reading the novel, I felt a bit duped by the summary, anxiously waiting for a time traveling book thief that didn’t arrive until over 500 pages in. The front cover is applicable to all three story lines, but the inner art work is directly related to the end, so the anticipation literally killed my reading mojo. I wish the advertising had been a little more straight forward, except I love the advertising and it clearly worked, therefore on that count, I have not a single suggestion.
#2 The book is really 3 books. At least in my mind it is. Its 3 separate but interconnected stories, overlapping characters and puzzle pieces and the theme of time travel, though not actual time travel. In my perfect world, this book would have been a series of novellas (which I inevitably would have begged to have in one complete volume as an omnibus – see… psychological issues!). Instead of being broken up in generic Part One, Part Twos, etc, I would have mentally prepared the reader for the disconnected yet interconnected adventure with titles. Example: Instead of being called The Map of Time, call the book The Secret Adventures of H.G. Wells. Part One, would be “Book One: The Murder of Jack the Ripper”, or something of the sort. “Book Two: Captain Shackleton’s Love Story” and “Book Three: The Time Lord and the Book Thief.” Perhaps Book Three could keep the original title “The Map of Time” it wouldn’t really matter. I just want to go in with the understanding that these are separate but connected adventures, rather than flailing about wondering if the next paragraph has any relevancy – which it does!
#3 There’s a word mis-used at one point where I believe ‘ancestor’ should have been utilized instead of ‘descendant.’ But that’s really trivial, and no one cares. (It also could have been me getting my time loops all mixed up.)
The story itself, I wouldn’t change a lick, because it’s marvelous. It’s the present structure that I clearly have issue with. Feeling as though the story was disconcertingly disconnected (when in reality as a series I would find it beautifully interconnected) made me set it aside in irritation one too many times. With the internal structure slightly altered with silly titles, I suddenly feel better about the whole thing. I would have found both jacket and description equally fitting and not misleading at all.
Moral of the story (my story, not Palma’s story)… this book is bloody brilliant and I’m keeping it, despite having kicked and internally screamed several times while reading it. Don’t be put off by your own expectations.
Anakalian Whims 