Month: September 2015

by Peter Brown

Lucy the bear wants to make a new friend. So she visits all the forest animals, eager and friendly. But a bit lacking in social skills. She\’s too boisterous and talkative for most of them, I can exactly picture what kind of outgoing, slightly annoying four-year-old child this bear personifies. The pictures of Lucy trying to squeeze into a rabbit\’s hole, belly-flopping into a frog puddle and trying to give a skunk a bath are cute and funny. She\’s well-meaning and nothing but persistent- but the other animals all look annoyed or at best, startled by her tactics. Getting frustrated, Lucy starts demanding that the other animals play with her, but of course that doesn\’t work either. Finally, when she least expects it, a flamingo comes along who likes to play Lucy\’s games. Phew, a happy ending!

Really cute book, and I\’m sure lots of kids know what it\’s like to be in Lucy\’s shoes (or have been on the receiving end). It\’s by the same author who did The Curious Garden.

This book was borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 4/5      36 pages, 2011

by Hal Borland

This quiet book is a story of life in the countryside, life with a good farm dog. Well, I don\’t know if I could entirely call it a quiet book, as there are plenty of dogfights, fierce encounters with bobcats and porcupines, confrontations with rude trespassing hunters and poachers. But overall, it has a calm, quiet voice. It\’s full of nature writing- just as much a story of the changing seasons, the wildlife and forest around the farm as it is about the dog. How he came to their farm, a wandering stray who gradually settled into their lives. The story tells of the dog\’s personality, his intelligence and flaws, his run-ins and friendships with other dogs in the neighborhood, his skills at hunting and his yearly battle against woodchucks (when the dog saw that his people didn\’t want woodchucks in the garden, he took it upon himself to go after any woodchucks in the area). It\’s obviously a book written from a different era; the dog is disciplined with slaps and a rolled-up newspaper (but his new owners are concerned that he shows fear of brooms and mops- they surmise he must have once been beaten with those objects, which they consider abuse). The dog is welcomed in the house but forbidden certain rooms and sleeps outside in a refurbished woodshed- oddly enough people complain about this on other reviews sites but if you pay attention in the book, the author tells how when the weather was particularly bad or the dog recuperating from injuries, they invited him to sleep in the house and the dog made it apparent he preferred to sleep in the hay in his shed. (Where he was locked in to keep him from roaming at night and being a nuisance to neighbors or wildlife). One aspect of the book I most liked was reading about how readily the man could communicate with his dog, understanding its intentions and wants from body language, facial expression, the tone of its bark or whimper, general demeanor. I think any dog owner can appreciate the depth of connection a person and dog can develop.

You might be glad to know that although the dog is old and showing his age near the end of the book, it does not end with his death but shows him gracefully entering his \’golden years\’ in the home he has chosen.

In many ways this book reminded me of Where the Red Fern Grows, but a more in-depth story written for adults.

Rating: 3/5     192 pages, 1961

puzzle made by Springbok ~ photographer unknown ~ 700 pieces

I am having fun getting back into an old favorite passtime: jigsaw puzzles. My four-year-old is pretty good with puzzles and becoming bored with the twenty or fifty-piece ones she can do alone and even our small collection of 100-piece puzzles she still needs help with. She wants to do “the BIG puzzles” with me. I have a small collection, some of them I’ve had since I was a kid myself. I’m culling some out now and hoping to eventually acquire new ones.

I want to keep puzzles I’ll enjoy doing again and again (similar to how I keep books I want to re-read) and I’ve come to realize I am particular about my puzzles, what kind of challenge I like, and what makes them enjoyable or frustrating. I like a certain piece size and number- less than 500 and it’s not challenging enough, more than 1500 and it starts to feel tedious. I don’t like puzzles with uniform cuts (all pieces having two ‘bumps’ and two ‘holes’ and they go in straight rows like a grid) but ones that have unique, funny shapes that you can eyeball and try to match from the jumble on the table.

I’m also particular about the kind of picture- I want something that is striking or pretty to look at when it’s done and something that has a variety of visual textures and colors which makes it fun to put together. So even though I love M.C. Escher’s work, I found the puzzle of his House of Stairs incredible frustrating to assemble and I don’t think I’ll ever work that one again! I also don’t like them so tiny and minute in detail it’s like a find-the-hidden-object game. The one exception so far is a 1500 piece jigsaw I have of the painting Proverbidioms by T. E. Breitenbach. My great-aunt had a print of this on her wall and I remember as a kid always staring at it, trying to figure out what sayings all the images represented. I was delighted to find it as a puzzle. My ten-year-old enjoyed helping me put this one together a few years ago, and we tried again to identify all the sayings (and failed). It took us a long time, too.

So. I’m thinking of maybe joining a puzzle swap site, if I don’t just donated my unwanted puzzles. I have a number of puzzles on my shelf that are now in the “iffy” category- not sure if I want to keep them or not. I decided to work them each again, to make a decision. It’s also a fun activity my youngest enjoys doing together. I’ve done them all before, so to make it a bit more challenging I deterred from my normal strategy, which usually is: make the boarder, then sift out pieces that have the greatest constrast, or the most interest (faces in particular) and work out from there going from specifics to general. Thus the background usually gets done last. This time I decided to do it backwards. I still made the boarder first, but then deliberately worked the background, going general to specific. It was still fun, and made putting this puzzle together take about a week (done in many short sittings) rather than just a few days.

There’s a little family story behind this puzzle. I used to get puzzles at garage sales and thrift shops (never again- too often they have missing pieces). This one had five missing pieces and my older daughter (four or five at the time) was sooo disappointed. She loved the cute kittens. So I made substitute pieces out of cardboard covered with a layer of white paper, colored with colored pencils and sealed with clear packing tape, burnished with the back of a spoon. I will probably never do that again- these are rather large pieces and it was still very hard to cut the tiny shapes right. But they do fit in the puzzle, even after re-working it a few times over the years. Can you spot them?

I’ve hung this puzzle up on my four-year-old’s wall, just like I once did with her older sister. She was delighted. We’ll be starting another BIG puzzle soon. I might keep sharing pics- it’s fun to do and I thought you might be interested in occasionally seeing something other than books here.

I had fun taking photos of the assembly stages (click on the first image to see larger and use arrows to skip through them):

by Edward Eager

The kids from Half Magic go to a lake for summer vacation. And of course the lake is magic, they find out all about it from a talking turtle. Thus follows a vacation full of adventures. The kids are a little wiser than last time- they know magic doesn\’t often turn out how you expect, and that there are rules to follow, but they still make errors in judgement and try to bend the rules or control what type of adventures they will have. All kinds of mishap and hilarity ensues. They meet a mermaid, have a run-in with pirates, visit the South Pole, seek buried treasure, get captured by cannibals, hide from Ali Baba\’s thieves in a cave, and in one curiously different episode, two of the girls unwittingly wish they were sixteen and go off on a midnight boat ride with boys (who of course don\’t realize they\’re flirting with some little girls!)

The children are very well-read and sharp on history- they keep thinking of famous stories they want to be a part of, or moments in history they want to visit. I like this, but wonder how much of it modern kids would pick up on? The reference to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\’s Court, for example, I only recognized because I read the book just seven years ago- I didn\’t know it at all when I first read Magic by the Lake as a kid, and surely missed many others.

It\’s a fun story and the characterization is done really well- these kids act like real children- squabbling and being snooty to each other and wanting excitement and dreading chores and so on. But for some reason I didn\’t enjoy this book quite as much as the first one. Maybe because some of the attitudes are so dated, the scenes with cannibals and \”natives\” can be painful to read, for example. On another note, there was one sentence that made me blink, completely taken aback. It mentioned a lovely summerhouse by the lake where one could enjoy watching the sunset and listening to the water and the mosquitoes. I cannot imagine a single person who would find sitting with mosquitoes pleasant!

Rating: 3/5       190 pages, 1957

by Gail E. Christianson

This book tells the history of the phenomenon global warming. How it began to occur, and how we first started to notice it, and a little bit about what we might do about it. Historically it starts at a point just prior to the industrial revolution, detailing all the changes in how mankind has used and created energy, tinkering we\’ve done with fuels and chemicals and other things. And all the bad it has done to the environment. And how much it\’s been misunderstood or ignored, and the politicking behind making people think it\’s a non-issue and so on. The history stuff was really interesting, because it connected a lot of ideas and reasons that I\’d never realized were related. Also fairly dull to read. I did want to finish it, to see the final points, but it was hard to get there. Of course since the book is over a decade old it\’s not up-to-date. Some things are, I believe, worse than the author had surmised they would become. Other things he pointed at quickly declining or going extinct, are still here or on the road to recovery. I appreciated that it was pointed out where the science was inconclusive, and where some people thought a warming climate would actually be beneficial. It strikes me as rather crazy that in the 1800\’s some scientists were already measuring changes in the atmosphere, but they failed to realize it could have such a negative impact.

So much stuff in this book, no way I can relate even a small part of it. Lots of sobering things, and it touches on many other interesting topics including evolution, the rapid growth of the industrial revolution, all the incidents that triggered new inventions therein, pollution, wildlife migrations and scientific feuding to name a few.

Rating: 2/5       305 pages, 1999

(yikes)

No Better Friend by Robert Weintraub- Bermudaonion’s Weblog
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson- A Striped Armchair
Once Upon a Flock by Lauren Scheuer
Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson from Things Mean a Lot
A Brave Vessel by Hobson Woodward- James Reads Books
Zoobiquity by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers
Folks This Ain’t Normal by Joel Salatin
From Elephants to Mice by James Mahoney

The Indoor Naturalist by Gale Lawrence- A Striped Armchair
Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis- The Indextrious Reader
Swarm by Lauren Carter – Jules’ Book Reviews
Steering Toward Normal by Rebecca Petruck – Caroline Bookbinder

DISCLAIMER:

All books reviewed on this site are owned by me, or borrowed from the public library. Exceptions are a very occasional review copy sent to me by a publisher or author, as noted. Receiving a book does not influence my opinion or evaluation of it

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