Julian, Dick, and Anne are disappointed when their parents announce plans to vacation alone in Scotland. The children quickly change their tune when they learn that they will be spending the summer at their aunt and uncle’s house on the coast with their cousin George (Don’t ever call her Georgina) and her dog, Timmy. What follows...
3 Stars. Eh. Axel was a whiny wimp who complained endlessly about having to go on the trip. The minute his uncle, Professor Liedenbrock, started to get the least bit angry with him over his dithering, Axel would cave and blithely go along with whatever ridiculous plan the professor has in mind. Axel was generally the one with [...]
I was looking for a book featuring a private investigator to complete a reading challenge, so when I saw this was available (and that it was short–it’s the end of the year and time was running out), I jumped on it. I’ve never seen the movie and didn’t really have any idea what it was […]
I honestly picked this up for a reading challenge, not expecting to enjoy it. I do love fantasy but science fiction isn't really my thing, with only a few exceptions. I read Fahrenheit 451 back in 8th grade and didn't care for it, but there was very little reading that I had to do for school that I did like. Imagine my surprise [...]
5 Stars. I read this back in college and loved it so much that I still have my copy from that class. I decided to re-read it when my husband and I visited the coast of Maine last month. I might love it even more now. The narrator, who remains unnamed, is accepted in this tightly-knit community, but she's still enough of an [...]
Young orphan Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. There is a Bohemian family on the train with him. None of them really speak English. They all get off at the same station in Black Hawk. It turns out that the family has just bought the farm next to Jim's grandparents. Neighbors are still far apart back in 1800s Nebraska but Jim still spends a lot of time with the Shimerda family, especially Ántonia, the oldest girl and closest to his age. As he watches Ántonia grow, he realizes that she has an indomitable spirit and admires her for it. I liked Ántonia. A lot. She's smart, feisty, hard-working, loving, and full of life. As she grew older, I got more worried for her. This is a classic after all. I expected it to take a Thomas Hardy turn. I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't. More than that, Ántonia embodied the American immigrant spirit. Her family starts out living in a dugout, basically a cave dug into the earth. They were comfortable back home in Bohemia so this is an adjustment for them, but rather than complain about it, as her mother does, Ántonia does her best to help raise the family out of that hole in the ground. She has setbacks of course, and people talk about her and her unfamiliar ways, but she just keeps doing what needs to be done. Ántonia lives in the town of Black Hawk for a while and becomes friends with a group of other immigrants. The wider group shows just how much these new settlers have to offer the country. Some become successful businesswomen, others become farm wives, some are content to just keep working in hotels and laundries. They all make some kind of…
Soooooo........yeah. I just rated Walden, one of the great American classics, two stars. That probably says more about me than it does about the book, doesn't it? Don't answer that. But here's the thing--well, a few things. 1. I'm not generally an abstract ideas kind of person. I like narrative and stories and characters that come to life for me. Walden has none of these. Obviously. The section that I liked best? Thoreau described a pretty epic battle between some tiny red ants and some big bullying black ants. There were sides and protagonists and bravery and heroism, the agony of defeat, and the high cost of victory. I flew through those few pages. And then I got back to ideas and it was like I'd stepped in quicksand again. 2. I found Thoreau to be great in small, quotable chunks. Page after page? He wore on me. I don't care how much he spent on potatoes, I don't care about his theories about measuring bodies of water, I don't care exactly what day the pond thawed each year. And yet this book has produced quotes that most people will recognize. "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away." “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck…
Sixteen strangers move into a brand-new apartment building next door to the estate of missing, eccentric millionaire, Sam Westing. When Westing turns up dead, the sixteen people are given clues and charged with finding out who killed him. I swear I read this when I was in fifth grade, but I didn't remember a thing about it when I just re-read it. But it was a lot of fun. I had a pretty good idea where the mystery was going, but I really think that as a kid, I would have been stumped. There were all kinds of crazy twists and turns throughout. At first glance, I was a little puzzled as to why this won a Newbery Medal. It's a mystery with some great puzzles involved, but is it really a lasting contribution to children's literature? I was surprised by how much was going on under the surface of this book. The sixteen investigators are partnered up in some unusual ways. They learn to move past some of their prejudices by working with someone they normally would never interact with. Even the young, pretty thing shows us why it's bad to dismissively label someone like that. The only thing that jarred with this message was the serious use of the term Mongoloid. But I guess even that goes to shows that there's always room for us to improve our views of others. I think this quote shows something of what I'm trying to say here: "She meant, you know, that people are so afraid of revealing their true selves, they have to hide behind some sort of prop." Throughout the game, these props are systematically stripped away, and the characters are left to openly be themselves. And the other characters learn to accept them as they are. Don't get…
Linda, an overweight girl in fifth grade, gives a report about whales one day. Someone passes around a note that "Blubber is a good name for her" and Linda has a new nickname. The other kids start to tease and harass her and just generally make her life miserable. Our narrator, Jill, watches all this and even takes part in it. Holy cow, what mean little kids these are! This was hard to read, even as an adult. Or maybe it's because I'm an adult and unconsciously prefer to look back at childhood with rose-colored glasses. We definitely had a pecking order in our class and the kids at the bottom of it were picked on but I don't remember it being this bad! The sad thing is that it all feels real though. I tended to keep to myself so there could have been mean girls cornering other girls in the bathroom and stripping them off and making fun of them mercilessly for all I know. And even if my class wasn't that mean, just the act of avoiding someone or always choosing him or her last for teams was damaging enough. There may be degrees but bullying is still bullying. The beauty of the book is that the reader first has enough distance to see how cruelly the other kids treat Linda and then, when the tables are turned, learn how it feels to be tormented. It definitely teaches a lesson about how destructive bullying is without being too preachy. I don't know if there are better books about bullying out there but this one has become a classic. Children should have to read it or something like it so that they can learn how hurtful their actions can be. And if a child is being picked on,…
Anytime kids gather together in the dark, scary stories are inevitably told. Alvin Schwartz gathered a good selection of the most popular and published them in this anthology. I kind of think this scared me when I was little but I don't actually remember ever checking it out from the library. My theory is that I knew it would scare me so I steered clear. I do remember all my little classmates rushing to check out the one copy we had in our school library though. Reading this now, the stories aren't particularly scary. The author chose to divide the book into sections, with the first being "Jump" stories, where the teller gets to the climax and gives out a blood-curdling scream to scare the wits out of the listeners. I can see that they would be scary in person but on the page they were actually a little silly. The others were a little more fulfilling if you're looking for a frightening read. There are sections about ghosts and urban legends and even a few songs. (How's this for a coincidence? I read "The Hearse Song" here, "The worms crawl in, The worms crawl out, The worms play pinochle on your snout" and then came across it again in my very next read, Blubber.) It was interesting to me as an older reader to recognize basic elements here that I've come across in other books that were published later. I can't help but wonder if the later books got the idea from this one or if they are all just referencing the same old folktales and legends. The illustrations by Stephen Gammell are downright creepy and perfect for the book. Young readers who like a good fright should find what they're looking for in this collection. According to the…