February 2013 - Page 3 of 3

Baby Sounds

by Joy Allen

As an adorable little baby goes through her daily routine, the typical sounds she encounters are named. Waking to bird song out the window, banging pots and pans on the floor while mom does dishes in the kitchen, playing with a toy phone, jangling keys, riding in the car (honk honk!), etc. My toddler\’s favorite page is the double-spread showing kids on the swings, their faces pictures of glee. The pictures are nice and soft, done with pastels I believe. The baby\’s teddy bear accompanies her in each activity, and my little one has just learned to start looking for these kind of consistencies on every page. It ends (appropriately) with the child splashing in the bath, and getting a bedtime kiss. Cute.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 14 pages, 2012

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

Opposites

with Polar Animals
by Melanie Watt

We seem to have quite a few baby books in the house right now that feature arctic animals, this is one of them. My toddler always asks to see the walrus! I like this little book. It illustrates the opposite concepts very well, and introduces the child to a certain set of animals pictured in their environment as well. My favorite pages are the ones showing open/closed– a puffin with its beak in the different positions, light/heavy– a walrus sitting on one end of a tipped ice floe, with a tern on the other end up in the air, inside/outside– two owlets hatching out of eggs, one peeking through a hole in the shell, and summer/winter– showing the dark and light pelage arctic foxes take on in the alternate seasons. The illustrations are clearly depicted and cute as well.

Rating: 4/5 …….. 22 pages, 2003

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

Amerika

by Franz Kafka

There was a period in high school when I was fascinated with Kafka. I discovered his works quite by accident. One of my teachers had a shelf of books students were encouraged to borrow from and a certain volume caught my eye just because it was smaller than all the rest- hardbound, but nearly the size of a mass market paperback. I started to read it just out of curiosity. It was The Trial. I found it at once both confusing and intriguing, and went on to read nearly all of Kafka\’s works. Even a few biographies, collections of letters and recorded conversations.

Amerika, his first (but unfinished) novel, remains one of my favorites. It\’s a bit more accessible than the rest, but still has that very prevalent dreamlike quality Kafka suffuses everything with. The narrative is about a young man named Karl who is shipped off to America after an indiscretion with a maid that he doesn\’t want to own up to. It tells an immigrant story- the journey on a ship, arrival in New York, search for lodgings and work, his temporary employment in a hotel, getting mixed up with dishonest characters who take advantage of him and cause him to loose his job, falling in with other shady people who practically keep him as a slave in their dirty crowded apartment, and finally getting hopeful about work with a large company so he goes off to apply and wades through endless useless-seeming interviews, paperwork and procedures. All with a totally surreal atmosphere, bizarre turns of events, people saying or doing inexplicable things, places and circumstances obviously construed by a lively imagination. For the author never actually visited America, and so this story is exactly like a dream someone would have of a place they had never been, but of which they had heard many stories and construed their own idea of what it was like, and then their subconscious mind went rampant with that and spewed out this wandering, yet vivid story that seems to reflect the emotional state of a confused young man trying to navigate a new world.

At least that was my impression, and this is just what I remember some twenty years after having read the book. (I did read it several times, though).

Rating: 4/5 …….. 336 pages, 1940

more opinions:
A Hot Cup of Pleasure
Nobody Likes My Taste in Anything
Don\’t Read Too Fast

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, General Fiction, Past Reads

Goodnight Baby

by Cheryl Willis Hudson

Sometimes my kid\’s favorite board books are the simplest ones. This one, just a few pages long, shows a toddler winding up his day. With brief rhyming text it describes how after playing with friends the child (appropriately pictured looking tired and rubbing his eyes) has a bath and snuggles with a bedtime story before sleeping in his crib. It\’s a nice little reiteration of bedtime routine, doesn\’t have much else going on. I guess it\’s just the familiarity of repeating what happens before bed that makes it appealing to my daughter. Plus she now likes to try and find the stuffed animal toy included in each picture. She seemed to think it odd or amusing at first, exclaiming \”monkey!\” emphatically, but then I explained that the monkey is Baby\’s friend like a teddy bear, and now she doesn\’t sound so surprised to see him there anymore. The pictures are simple and pleasant, and have just enough detail to entertain a child looking for more to think about- what are the children doing with the toys, for example, or what does Baby do with each of the objects in his bath- so it can be a little more engaging if you want, but is also nice and brief when you\’re looking for a quick bedtime story.

Rating: 2/5 10 pages, 1992

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Baby books, Current Reads

A Beast the Color of Winter

by Douglas H. Chadwick

I still remember this book vividly, even though it\’s been years and years since I read it. It\’s all about mountain goats, relating the experiences a wildlife biologist has on the high slopes of Montana while studying them. In the best style of nature writing, the narrative describes his experiences in finding the animals, learning to identify them, puzzling out their behavior, and speculating on many things. There are wonderful descriptions of both the landscape, the author\’s personal experiences and the animals\’ activities themselves. It\’s scientific and detailed but easily accessible to the curious reader and altogether intriguing. I never knew mountain goats could be so interesting. This is one of those books that I would immediately snatch up anywhere I found it, to add to my collection. Just thinking about it makes me want to go out and read more by the same author- I see he\’s also written about elephants, wolves and the elusive wolverine.

I love the title, too. Borrowed this one from the public library, once many years ago.

Rating: 5/5 …….. 224 pages, 1983

Tags: 5/5- Loved It, Animals Nonfiction, Past Reads

Bodach the Badger

by David Stephen

I grabbed this book with delight when I saw it on a free shelf, because I have loved for years another book by the same author, about a fox. This one was just as good, if not better. I was expecting it to be mostly about the badger and its habits, but was pleasantly surprised to find quite a lot of human interaction in it. I don\’t recall that much about people in the fox book- perhaps I just glossed over those passages before? Must read String Lug again to find out- when the Dare is over, of course!

Bodach is about a group of badgers that live on a mountainside in Scotland. I\’ve only read a very few books about badgers before and those were either American badgers or didn\’t feature much of their natural behavior so I was happy to learn a lot about European badgers, which live very differently. For one thing, they live in family groups in large underground tunnels which they occupy for generations. I knew a bit about that from Badgers, but not the idea that they bury their dead, that they can purr, that they suck on their paws, that they eat -aside from small mammals and earthworms- slugs and acorns!

The storyline mostly follows the daily life of the badgers, but also includes quite a bit about the humans who live on farms around them. One set of farmers is fond of the badgers and keeps a close eye on them, another farmer across the way traps them and makes their pelts into sporrans. I wasn\’t sure from the context if this was illegal, but it was certainly frowned upon. Not only do the regular farmers make efforts to observe the badgers, they bring field trips of kids from a local school to see the badgers and learn about them, they treat injured badgers found in bad situations, and when a man several miles away wants to repopulate a sett on his land that has been empty for years, they carefully trap several badgers and transport them for him. So I was pleased to find quite a bit about wildlife conservation and education in this little novel!

There\’s a lot of foreign terms used in the narrative, I\’m not sure if they are Gaelic or Scottish, as there was no glossary (a thing I sorely missed) but I liked the extra local flavor they added to the story, even if I often had to puzzle out the exact meaning. A lot of other animals are in the pages, too- weasels and foxes, deer, owls, eagles and wildcats. Also vivid personalities of the farm dogs, and one particular overeager terrier named Tarf. Through the course of the novel one of the main human characters tries to teach Tarf how to behave at a badger sett- differently from what he expects her to do at a fox burrow. His methods and reasons I found an interesting side-storyline. But the badgers are the main thing.

Rating: 4/5 …….. 191 pages, 1983

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Fiction, Current Reads

Kipper\’s Book of Weather

by Mick Inkpen

Another simple, yet effective board book. Kipper\’s Weather simply depicts and names different weather patterns and shows the cute puppy doing appropriate activities for each. Basking in sunshine, splashing in rain puddles, sliding on ice, rolling snowballs, etc. My favorite pictures are the ones where he\’s peering through obscuring fog, or holding a metal trash can lid over his head to ward off hailstones. And my daughter likes the pretty rainbow at the end, which spans two pages. I always make little sounds to illustrate each activity or bit of weather- splash for the rain, plink plink for the hailstones, brrrr in the snow and so on. Recently my little girl has begun pointing out and naming the weather in its true context as well, she says \” \’nowing\” for the snow and \”rain\” very distinctly. I think she would name a rainbow as well, she says the word for the page in the book but we haven\’t seen one in real life for a very long time!

Rating: 3/5 …….. 16 pages, 1994

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

Touch and Feel Ponies

by DK Publishing

My kid really likes ponies right now- she can even make the cutest whinny noise when you ask her \”what does the horsie say?\” So this board book was a hit right off. Like all the other Touch and Feel books, it has different textures for your child to explore- hairy pony manes and furry coats, smooth prize ribbons, a closely woven blanket, and so on. My toddler particularly likes noticing things the ponies have in common with herself- they eat apples (pictured on one page in a bushel basket on the ground), get covered with blankets and even wear socks. She pointed this out to me on the back cover, where a pony getting loaded into a trailer has protective coverings on its lower legs. \”Pony sockies!\” my little girl said excitedly. Yes, it really did look like the horse was wearing socks.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 10 pages, 1999

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

Month: February 2013

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