Dogsong; Dragonwings; Charlotte Doyle; PostSecret Books; Harold Pinter
77. Dragonwings by Laurence Yep
At last, Moon Shadow was allowed to go to the Land of the Demons (America) from the Middle Kingdom (China). He had to always be on guard in America as the demons created danger everywhere. His father’s dream was to fly an airplane, a dream that started when his father read about the Wright Brothers attempts to fly in the newspaper. Moon Shadow and his father decided to set out to achieve this dream.
The world of San Francisco in the early 20th century as seen from the eyes of Chinese Americans. And, you guessed it, there is a big sequence that takes place in 1906. In San Francisco.
78. Red Sails to Capri by Ann Weil
Michele sees the boat with the red sails and finds a way to lead the passengers to stay at his parents’ inn. The three men on this boat will forever change Capri.
There is a mystery. There is action. There is adventure. There is the exotic atmosphere of faraway Capri.
79. Dogsong by Gary Paulsen
Russel is a young man who sees his people are estranged from their Eskimo culture. He makes his way to Oogruk, an Eskimo shaman and wise man. Oogruk teaches Russel how to hunt and how to survive and sends him off on his own to test his abilities.
This is what our young men are seeking, I think, even in America today…a way to connect with their elders and learn to make it on their own…heroism…adventure…sacrifice.
80. The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
A book of eight plays. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read a play. And these are wonderful plays, plays that seem to capture the existential spirit of our modern world.
81. A Lifetime of Secrets compiled by Frank Warren
Another book in the PostSecret series. This book compiles secrets people have kept for many years, often those of childhood or early adulthood.
82. The Secret Lives of Men and Women compiled by Frank Warren
Yet another book in the PostSecret series. Secrets are compelling.
83. Passion on the Vine by Sergio Esposito
I decided to read this book so that I could pass it along when the Travelogue Bookbox arrives. Turns out, it was a hard book for me to get through. Why? It’s a fascinating story of one man’s adventures with wine in Italy. Lots of little stories about vineyards and those who make wine. But to make it through this book, you need to be very, very interested in wine.
84. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
Charlotte is a typical well-mannered girl of 1832 as she prepares to return home to her family in America after attending school in England. But the voyage she takes turns out to completely change her life and shake up her world in ways neither she nor her parents could have ever anticipated.
Avi once again completely brought me into a world I knew nothing about and captured my attention from the first page to the end.
1 | Comment (0)
Everyone is Beautiful; School of Essential Ingredients; Little Beauties; etc.
71. Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center
Not every book we read has to be a big literary novel, clever, thoughtful, dense. At times, we just want to read a book that reassures us about the troubles that hit us as humans and about the hidden strengths we have to overcome. And we might just want a laugh or two at the foibles of little boys. Everyone is Beautiful is such a book, a book when we are seeking a gentle, funny read.
I like this book. It’s not Tolstoy, but it’s a perfect read for spring break. It reminded me of the tiring days of young motherhood and the sweetness and pain of raising children. It’s funny here and there and always true.
72. The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
My second read of spring break. An excellent choice for spring break. The plot is simple: A woman runs a cooking school where people come to learn to cook, yes, but also to be healed. Little magical elements in the story, but it never felt forced or excessive.
73. PostSecret compiled by Frank Warren
Frank Warren began this book as a project. He handed out postcards to strangers and asked them to write down a secret and send the secret to him.
As I read the book, I began to feel like I was sitting in the confessional, listening to terse whispers of big misdeeds and little rebellions.
Irresistible.
74. Little Beauties: A Novel by Kim Addonizio
Our main characters in this novel are a young OCD-driven former child beauty contestant (got that?) and a teenage pregnant husband-less girl. They comes together and help each other, as we might hope all people could.
75. The Loner by Ester Wier
Now and then, I continue on my quest to read all the Newbery Honor books. The Loner is the story of an orphan who unexpectedly winds up on a sheep farm run by a big yet shy woman who has lost her son to a bear. Lots of action. Do kids even know about lives like this boy’s?
76. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
The life of a horse told from a horse’s point of view. The horse seemed to accept that his life was to be controlled by humans (he never longed for days of roaming the wild prairie, for example) but he always wished that his masters be kind. Some were. Some were not. Sewell saw lots of cruelty toward horses and part of her reason for writing the book (as it says in the forward to this book) was to show the torment that many horses faced.
I especially liked this version of the book, filled with illustrations of horse terms and places in London and depictions of complicated events in the story.
1 | Comment (0)(un)FASHION; Stargazing; Shark’s Fin; Abe’s Honest Words
65. Abe’s Honest Words by Doreen Rappaport
With text that reads almost like a poem and big, energetic illustrations, and with each page spread featuring a powerful quote, this book approaches the beauty of a snowflake. Page by page, the author tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s tumultuous life in short bursts of prose and emphasizes each big moment with a strong quote and a magnificent illustration. A truly beautiful book, in pictures and words. A book for every Lincoln lover. A book for every library.
66. Our White House: Looking In Looking Out created by the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance
Did all my favorite authors and illustrators contribute to this book? A look through the table of contents seems to say yes. A big, big book (it will apparently be more than 242 pages) filled with fun stories all connected loosely to the setting of the White House. The stories I read in this sampler were gentle, scary, sad, and humorous.
The illustrations are clever and sweet, silly and patriotic. I only had a taste of the book here in this prepublication sampler but I will seek out the full version; thirty-five dollars is a hunk of change for a book, even a lovely one like this one appears to be.
67. What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America by Tony Schwartz
I spent all last Sunday afternoon reading this book. It’s an older book, with a copyright in the 90’s, so some of it comes across as a bit dated. I grimaced here and there, reading about some of the “wisdom” Schwartz sought, using the power of brain waves, for example, acts I’ve always tended to regard as hocus-pocus mumbo jumbo. I carried away a lot of positive scientific evidence for meditation; I will seek more information about that. I also learned that one study found 75% of people have some sort of back problems but experience no pain. Curious. I was especially interested in the chapters that touched on dealing with cancer. A study showed that almost all cancer patients had undergone an exceptionally tramatic event in their lives in the year before they were diagnosed with cancer.
Interesting, though a little out of date and a bit pseudo-scientific.
68. Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China by Fuchsia Dunlop
Fuchsia lived in China off and on for about ten years. She entered China as a journalist and left intrigued with its cuisine. And what a cuisine? Is there anything they don’t eat in China? I honestly cannot imagine getting all gooey-eyed over snapping off and crunching on rabbit heads. Ick. And bladders? Eek. Dunlop’s final confrontation is with a caterpillar crawling on a leaf in her garden at home in England. I hope I’m not giving anything away when I tell you that she plucked the caterpillar off the leaf and popped it in her mouth and regarded the entire affair as a triumph of her new eating sensibilities. Sorry, but I must comment with a final yuck.
69. Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper by Peter Hill
I was on a bookring for this book, but the originator of the ring brought the book home before Christmas so that he could read the book again and it seems the bookring shows no signs of starting back up. Thus, I was happy to discover this book at my local library. Who woulda thunk it?
Peter Hill is a young, restless art student in the early 70’s when he discovers an opportunity to work for the summer as a lighthouse keeper. Lighthouse keeping is a mythical profession and lighthouses are mythical places. A job that no longer exists and a place that is all but unnecessary with today’s satellites and GPS. Still, it was great fun to travel with Hill to lighthouses around Scotland and visit with keepers there. It brought me to mind my summer working in Yellowstone Park around the same time. I’ve always thought that summer would make a wonderful book….
70. (un)FASHION by Tibor + Maira Kalman
I read Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty three times and actually sought out a copy for my shelf. I had to take a look at (un)FASHION when I discovered it was part of Kalman’s oeuvre.
And look I did. It’s the kind of book you want to share with someone; on almost every page you want to shout, “Look at this! Can you believe this?”
Not sure you would say I read this book. But I’m quite sure I will re-read it (re-look it?) at least once more before I return it to the library.
1 | Comment (0)Middle Place; Whatever It Takes; Homecoming; Six-Word
60. The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan
I first heard about this book on a YouTube video. The author was reading a wonderful excerpt from her book on the video, all about the wonderful support women give each other during the tough times every woman will face. Somewhere I saw that the reader was Kelly Corrigan and I assumed the beautifully written words were from her book, The Middle Place.
After reading the entire book, I finally realized the piece must be from an article Corrigan wrote; The Middle Place is a story from an earlier part of Corrigan’s life. The Middle Place relates the tale of Corrigan’s love for her dad and the subsequent diagnosis of cancer in both Corrigan and her father. It’s a worthy story. I’d have never checked it out but for the lovely video on YouTube. Now I await her newest book.
61. Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak edited by Smith Magazine
This book would have been a favorite had I read it at nineteen instead of fifty-two; love and romance just doesn’t have the zing it once did for me. I can’t seem to get the pain of heartbreak any more. Is it my age? I found the first book, little six-word tales of a life, much more clever.
62. Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough
Geoffrey Canada is a teacher who came up against the most-difficult-to-educate group of kids a teacher can face: kids who grew up in poverty, with broken homes, surrounded by drugs and guns and alcohol. But Canada was not daunted by this group. As a child, he grew up in the same world and, somehow, he managed to transcend that world and make a good life for himself. Canada, unlike other reformers, found much to love in the Harlem in which he grew up. He found support and love among his fellow African American men, support and love he never really found in any other world. So Canada came to want to retain the strengths of the culture all the while bringing in the strengths of the broader American culture.
And did Canada ever have a dream?! Canada wanted to do more than bring in the superheroes to lift a few children here and there out of poverty. Instead, he decided to work in every area of a child’s life to improve the entire world. He started classes to teach parents from day one how to take care of their children. He created a baby school for the youngest of children to learn in an enriched environment. He began preschools and kindergartens and elementary schools and middle schools. He maintained the superhero programs for the oldest and most jaded and most difficult to reach children of poverty.
Did Canada accomplish his goals? His is still a work in progress. But the early results are startling. What could we do if we all worked together to have poor children experience the kind of lives those of us in the middle class take for granted?
Here are a few brutal facts from his book:
“…significant skill gaps exist—by race, class, and maternal education—and they open up very early. At age one there is not a great difference between the cognitive abilities of the child of a college graduate and the child of a high school dropout, but by age two there is a sizable gap, and at three it’s even wider.”
“…GED recipients earn no more than high school dropouts, on the average, even when their intelligence scores are higher. And why? Heckman says it is because they lack all of the noncognitive skills that a person must possess in order to make it through high school: patience, persistence, self-confidence, the ability to follow instructions, the ability to delay gratification for a future reward….”
“…both cognitive and noncognitive skills are teachable—but it matters a great deal when you try to teach them.”
“There was plenty of research around that showed that poor children not only benefited from being in prekindergarten, but they benefited more than other children.”
“And in reading, as it turns out, the metaphorical rich overlap with the literal rich. Even as early as the beginning of kindergarten, children’s level of ability with the printed word tends to correspond closely to the income level of their parents. As Susan B. Neuman, the education scholar, has reported, more than four out of five children at the highest socioeconomic level recognize the letters of the alphabet on the first day of kindergarten, compared to less than two of five children at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Half of all well-off kids can identify the beginning sounds of words when they start kindergarten, while just 10 percent of poor children can do the same.”
“…with very few exceptions, good early readers become great readers, and limited early readers almost always end up as poor readers. Late bloomers are, in fact, quite rare.” (The Matthew effect)
“And then after kindergarten, because of the Matthew effect, the disparities get even worse….Kids who are able to master “decoding,” to grasp the strange fact that black marks on a page connect to sounds…and that those sounds and marks go together to convey information…—those kids think reading is fun. They do more of it. And the more they do, the easier it gets, and the easier it gets, the more they do. For children who have a harder time cracking the code early on, the opposite occurs, a grim process that one researcher calls “the devastating downward spiral.”
“By middle school, the gap between avid readers and reluctant readers has grown into a chasm. If you rank fifth-grade students by how much time they spend reading on their own, outside of school, you find a huge range. A child at the ninetieth percentile—not the most book-crazy kid in class, but close to the top—will spend an average of twenty-one minutes a day reading…which means that she goes through more than 1.8 million words a year. A child at the tenth percentile—not the most reading-averse kid in class, but close—will spend an average of six seconds a day on independent reading, which works out to just eight thousand words a year.”
‘Joseph Torgesen, a researcher at the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University…looked at a dozen or so experimental studies of intensive reading interventions done in different parts of the country and targeted at different ages. When he analyzed the interventions aimed at nine-to twelve-year-old struggling readers, he found results that were mixed at best. With enough time and work, it seemed, it was possible to push these middle school-aged kids forward on the reading basics, like decoding, accuracy, and word comprehension. But the news was much more discouraging when it came to “fluency”—the ability to read with ease. Torgesen’s conclusion: by the end of elementary school, “if children’s impairments in word-reading ability have reached moderate or severe levels,” catching kids up may be simply impossible. But when Torgesen looked at early interventions with delayed readers—in first and second grade—his mood brightened….The interventions were remarkably effective; each one brought at least half of the targeted students up to an average level of reading ability by the end of the grade, and in one study, 92 percent of them hit that level.’
63. The Homecoming by Ray Bradbury
I don’t like scary books (at all!) but I do love Ray Bradbury. It was that love for Bradbury that carried me through reading this very scary book. The plot is thin: a young boy’s family gather together on All Hallows Eve and the family, all except the boy, are ghouls. The boy is deeply saddened by being different, completely human, in a family where everyone has special, albeit creepy, abilities. The story is rich in sensory details, Bradbury-ish in every way. The appeal of the story for me was greatly increased by the format of the book, a small volume with just the right pictures and script. I could barely make it through this scary story, but even I, a big ole scaredy cat, I could not miss the beautiful writing and the rich characters.
64. Flower Children by Maxine Swann
I’m probably the last person on earth who still remembers the hippie era as a time of great hope and optimism. Flower Children, like my visit to San Francisco last summer, is yet another nail in the coffin for the hippie era. Much of the story is told is plural first person, an interesting way to approach a childhood in a family of four children. The children grow up with two hippie parents, both of which come from very affluent households. There is no terrible secret or destructive action, but the children’s parents steadily deteriorate and gradually decline. It is a story that begins in great hope and slowly develops into a life of deep underlying sadness.
1 | Comments (4)
