July 2012 - Page 2 of 2

The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver

by Thornton W. Burgess

Paddy the Beaver, whom I\’ve met in another Burgess storybook, The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat, is a newcomer to the forest who keeps to himself. But all the other creatures soon know he\’s there and come to see him, as his activities influence them all. The first thing he does upon deciding to live in their forest is, of course, build a dam. Which reduces the spring to a trickle and the pond to a puddle and the other animals are understandably upset. Paddy assures the others that once his dam is finished, the stream and pond will fill with water again. And they do: when the pond is at the depth he wants, the water flows over it and runs down the brook again. The other creatures are satisfied and come to visit Paddy. Some are quite critical of his apparent destruction in cutting down trees; others of his building methods, until they see the finished product and are properly impressed. Paddy is a nice fellow. He keeps his opinions to himself, is always pleasant to others and even flatters the annoying blue jay who then proves himself to be a staunch friend instead of a pest like he is to most critters.

What took me aback was how the story differs from the scenario presented in Jerry Muskrat. In that story the stream had also died to a trickle, several animals traveled to its source to find the problem, and discovered Paddy building a dam. They complained about how he was ruining their homes downstream and so the beaver reconsidered, tore out his dam and moved somewhere else. As Burgess frequently makes mention of previous storylines in his books, linking them all together, again I\’m not quite sure why this one is different. Did he want to change the beaver story, give it an alternate possibility? did he simply forget that the scenario was a little different before? Hm.

Like with all his other nature books for children, Burgess has infused this one with some good lessons. Here he makes a case for the merits of hard work, good planning, not making quick judgements on first impressions, trusting one\’s friends, teamwork and the wisdom of often keeping your opinions to yourself.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 180 pages, 1917

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Juvenile Fic

The Quest for the Tree Kangaroo

by Sy Montgomery

A kangaroo that lives in trees? That\’s what I thought when I saw this book on display. I like the author as well, so of course I had to pick it up. Sy Montgomery was part of a team that accompanied researcher Lisa Dabek into the remote cloud forests of Papa New Guinea to study these arboreal marsupials. There are ten species of tree kangaroo, which do hop but are excellent climbers with long curved claws and thick prehensile tails. They are pretty muich unknown to science. Lisa\’s team was the first to safely capture some tree kangaroos (the local people used to eat them), radio-collar them and study their movements. The book describes in detail how the team was organized and all the hard (and often dirty) work they did that led up to the wondrous moment of locating their first kangaroo. The gorgeous photographs and descriptive text wonderfully evoke a very distinct place on earth (Papa New Guinea has about 400 bird species, 60 mammals and 6,000 kinds of plants found nowhere else on Earth- and new ones are still being discovered!)

Not only is this book a good adventure story about a faraway, incredibly unique place, and the discovery of an amazing animal, but it\’s also a great introduction for kids about the work that field science actually entails.

Borrowed from the public library. Now I\’m looking for Sy Montgomery\’s book about the pink river dolphins!

Rating: 4/5 …….. 79 pages, 2006

more opinions:
Jean Little Library
brooke dycus
Children\’s Literature Reviewed by Kathy Yale

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads, Juvenile Nonfic

Lolita

by Vladimir Nabokov

My computer was down for a few days so I have a backlog of book posts to catch up on, but I\’ll start with the most recent one, a book I gave up on: Lolita. I\’d been wondering for a long time if I even wanted to try reading Lolita, because I knew well what it was about: a pedophile professing his twisted ardor for a preteen girl he forces to basically be his sex slave. The only thing that made me curious about this book was that all those bloggers (see a few below) profess that despite the distasteful subject matter, the story was so well-written and such a fascinating character study of this disgusting man Humbert that it made good reading.

For the most part, they were right. The writing is very rich. In spite of what you know is really going on between this older man in a fatherly role and the twelve-year-old he is abusing, the revolting bits are never stating explicitly, and in fact you might even miss them because they are so casually mentioned between pages and pages of rambling lists and descriptions. It\’s really rather frustrating to read, actually. I\’d rather have known more about what was happening, or more about Lolita herself; the bare glimpses you get of her through Humbert\’s endless dronings on about how lovely she is or describing all the hotels they stopped at or all the cars they saw or all the landmarks they visited etc etc are so obscure you never really know what she\’s thinking or feeling about all this. One moment it seems she is actually flirting with the creep, the next she\’s sobbing and protesting. Overall she comes across as a spoiled brat (he\’s constantly buying her gifts to keep her compliant), mouthing off, talking back, acting like a regular teenager. He\’s constantly paranoid that she\’s going to run away, or ogling her friends, or worrying about how to keep his obsession a secret. The first part, about how he weaseled his way into her family and became her stepfather, was interesting but then it gradually just got so dull I couldn\’t stand it anymore. Not that I wanted more details of a particular sort, I just wanted more story. Of course I suppose this is just to give the reader a picture of what it\’s like inside a depraved mind, but it was boring. I really did try to finish, because I wanted to know what happened to Lolita. I quit actually reading the book around page 180, then did some skimming, enough to find out

SPOILER ALERT highlight if you want to read the next paragraph

that she ends up in the hospital and then later on is married and has her own kid, escaped from Humbert\’s clutches and still it appears, communicating with him begging for money, and so on while keeping her distance. Unfortunately I didn\’t care anymore, not even enough to try and read the pages in between to learn how she got to that final place, much less interested in the agonies Humbert was going through being apart from her or the mess his life was afterwards.

Bah. O well. I didn\’t finish it, and I don\’t care. If somebody ever writes a book about Lolita from the girl\’s point of view, I might be interested in that, but just barely.

This is the first Nabokov book I\’ve attempted to read, and I\’m afraid it might also be the last. In the back of the edition I borrowed was a list of all his other titles with brief descriptions, and not a single one caught my interest.

Borrowed from the library.

Abandoned ……… 317 pages, 1955

more opinions: Shelf Love
anyone else? (Edit 06/ 8/2020 I used to have more listed but those blogs are no longer online)

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Classics

What Is Green?

a colors book

by Kate Endle

Lovely little colors book that has double-page spreads featuring familiar objects of each hue. Orange has a fox, pumpkin, carrot etc. Green a leaf, frog, lime slice, and so on. The pictures are made from little cut paper collages, with stripes on the page margins of more patterns in the same color. They\’re cute little figures. What really caught my eye though, was the matching book of animals I saw on the feature page on Amazon. Reviewers say the animal book has beautiful illustrations, so I\’d like to see that one too but of course must just take my chances at the library.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 10 pages, 2010

more opinions:
What Adrienne Thinks About That

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Baby books, Current Reads

Dolphins on the Sand

by Jim Arnosky

Gently beautiful pictures and simple descriptions detail the plight of a group of dolphins stranded on a beach. Unable to swim back to the safety of deep water when the tide goes out, the dolphins lie helpless as dark falls. They are discovered by a kyaker who goes for help and then a team of people arrives. They keep the dolphins wet, move them to a safer location, ward off sharks who know the dolphins will be weak, and finally release them back into the ocean. The book makes it clear to young readers what work is involved in saving stranded dolphins, as well as pointing out that we don\’t know why dolphins strand themselves, with a few theories. The pictures are lovely, and alternate between bright pastel colors when all is well and more sombre hues when the dolphins are in trouble. The details are nice, too- lots of local flora and fauna are pictured, as well as small decorative panels with seashells, bird footprints in the sand, etc. A nice touch.

Rating: 4/5 32 pages, 2008

more opinions:
The World of Books

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads, Picture Books

Hyenas

Animal Scavengers

by Sandra Markle

I browsed the J Non-fiction section of the library last week, in the nature section while my daughter was looking at books on outer space. Picked up a few about animals. This one tells about hyenas, particularly the brown hyena. In easy prose, it describes the daily life of one hyena as it searches for food and socializes with clan members, interspersing facts into the narrative. When the hyena bears a cub the story switches to follow the cub\’s growth and development until it is old enough to have its own offspring. All of which is illustrated with clear photographs- which is why I borrowed up the book, really. To do some sketching. I think this book is from the same series as the zebra one I read a few years back- a good solid series introducing kids to wildlife.

rating: 3/5 …….. 40 pages, 2005

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads, Juvenile Nonfic

World\’s End

The Sandman

by Neil Gaiman

A pair of co-workers driving late at night and things start to go strange. Snow starts falling- in June? Then something strange runs across the road, the driver veers aside and the car crashes. Struggling through the snowstorm with his injured passenger, quickly disorientated and lost. The two find haven in a large inn that is full of strange customers also waiting out the storm. Folk who look like elves and centaurs, as well as normal humans, but all hail from different worlds. Apparently the storm raging has affected reality, so they were all misdirected to this inn. To pass the time they tells stories, varied and curious. Some even have other stories contained within them.

There are stories of voyages and adventures, of misdeeds and politicking, of people who deal closely with death, and others who have the most ordinary humdrum lives (with little to tell). One is of a woman masquerading as a man. My favorite was the story of the dreaming city, even though I\’m not really fond of cityscapes myself. The Sandman, or sometimes his sister Death, make the briefest of appearances on these pages. And I\’m still puzzling about what the procession was they all viewed at the end- was it for Orpheus\’ death? I guess I might find out in the next volume…

Rating: 3/5 …….. 168 pages, 1994

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Graphic Novels, Short Stories

Brief Lives

The Sandman

by Neil Gaiman

I quite liked this seventh volume of Sandman. Unlike many of the other volumes I\’ve read, it doesn\’t have stand-alone stories but one continual narrative. Another plus is that it focuses on the character of Dream and his siblings, rather than having Dream as a minor (but often very key) character who comes in near the end of a story. The broad sweep of it is that Dream\’s younger sister Delirium has decided to seek out their brother Destruction, who abandoned his realm and went missing hundreds of years ago. First Delirium asks for help from Despair and Desire, then she approaches Dream. Rather unlike him, he agrees to go on a journey through the waking world to aid her search. But it turns out he has his own motives, and doesn\’t really want to find his brother at all. He gets tired of the search and wants to call it off; she gets upset and sulks; Dream is convinced to make amends, and when they finally do find Destruction he comes to terms with facing his son Orpheus as well….

Maybe most of that doesn\’t make sense, I fear. Well, what I liked about it was Delirium. I think she\’s my favorite character. She talks in a random half-steam-of-consciousness way and acts like a child bouncing from one idea to the next and it\’s charming rather than irritating (to me). You\’d think this would make their search end prematurely but surprisingly she sticks to her goal and doesn\’t forget why they\’re searching. Quite often the things she says make connections that illuminate problems or solutions. There\’s a subtle mystery as to why all the people Dream and Delirium seek (their brother\’s friends) in their journey disappear or die before they can reach them- a fact that makes Dream want to abandon the whole endeavor. A lot of the themes in this book have to do with change, resisting or accepting it or adjusting to it…. I\’m afraid I\’m not making this very coherent, probably due to being tired. I\’ll just say again that liked it, better than the last few volumes. I liked the characters more than ever. Read some of the other reviews listed below for better analysis.

rating: 3/5 ……… 168 pages, 1992

more opinions:
Incurable Bluestocking
Mark Reads the Sandman
University City Public Library Book Challenge

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Current Reads, Fantasy / Sci Fi, Graphic Novels

winner

Anna has won my leopard bookmarks! Anna, just email me (jeanenevarez -at- gmail-dot- com) your address and I\’ll send them off!

Month: July 2012

RATINGS / SUBJECTS: