day 26: booknotes catch-up

January 26, 2017 @ 8:33 pm | Filed under:

1. Picture books

    

Today is the 26th and my Goodreads log says we’ve read 23 picture books so far this year. Sounds about right; we’ve missed a couple of days here and there but not more than two or three. I may have forgotten to log something.

Mrs. Biddlebox by Linda Smith, illustrated by Marla Frazee. Until I went to grab the cover from Amazon just now, I didn’t realize this was out of print. The author died not long after it was published—we had the same editor, who sent me a copy, knowing my kids would love it. They truly do. Mrs. Biddlebox turns a grim, gray day around by, well, eating it up, bad mood and all. I hope your library has a copy because it looks like it has become a collector’s item, judging by the resale price.

I Scream, Ice Cream: A Book of Wordles by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by Serge Bloch. Lots of punny fun from the always delightful Rosenthal.

Diary of a Fly by Doreen Cronin, illustrated by Harry Bliss.
Diary of a Worm.
Diary of a Spider.  Everyone knows these; everyone loves these. My kids can’t listen to one without demanding all three.

The Lady with the Ship on Her Head by Deborah Nourse Lattimore. A longtime favorite of mine—my copy was signed (and delightfully doodled in) by the author when she did a booksigning at the children’s bookstore I worked at during grad school, many moons ago. Madame Pompenstance can’t figure out what kind of fancy hairdo to concoct for the king’s contest. When she bends over to scoop a few sad shells off the beach to ornament her coiffure, a tiny three-masted ship rows right onto her head. She has no idea it’s there, even though the tiny crew drops anchor below her earlobes, forming cunning little earrings; she only knows that she has a fearful headache all day long. So funny, and the art is lavish and captivating. A big hit with my gang.

Frog Girl by Owen Paul Lewis. You had me at the bit where the frog lifts the skin of the lake and takes the girl to her underwater frog village.

World Rat Day by J. Patrick Lewis and Anna Raff. A poem collection of made-up holidays. Dragon Appreciation Day is Rilla’s favorite.

2. High-tide companions

We’re still reading The Secret Horses of Briar Hill at bedtime—only a few pages at a time, because Huck is a sleepy guy at the end of the day. We can’t move it to morning because then Stevie would miss out. So I’ve started a new midmorning read-aloud; I was wanting some historical fiction to tie in with our Age of Exploration studies. Beanie suggested one of her old favorites: A Murder for Her Majesty. I haven’t read this one in ages, and possibly never aloud. SO GOOD. We’re only on Chapter 2 so far: young Alice witnessed her father’s murder and went on the run. She’s been taken in by a group of choirboys at York Minster, and they’ve just decided she should cut her hair and hide in the choir. Suspense!

3. My own meanderings

You didn’t think I really meant that Dickens quote the other day, did you? I didn’t look it up to see who said it, but “Let us have no meandering” sounds like Betsey Trotwood. Me, I’m a meanderer. After I finished Ilsa (about which: seriously, more later—not tonight because they’re waiting on me to watch the rest of Fellowship), I found myself in a familiar dither over what of a hundred (a hundred hundred!) options to choose next. Sometimes it takes me weeks to choose. It’s annoying. Just settle down and PICK something! I fight with my brain sometimes. I’ve read the openings of at least five books. One is about King Edward VII and I do mean to finish it. Another is about bees (I know, shocker), and yet another falls into my favorite subgenre: books about books. I keep dipping back into it and will probably curl up with it this weekend for real. And then there’s a (digital) stack of YA novels whispering to me. Also: I did download Martin Chuzzlewit and have chuckled through two chapters so far. I’m arriving too early at Jamie’s May Dickens read-along but her description of this particular novel piqued my interest. Realistically, though, I’ll have to shelve it soon and turn my attention to Great Expectations, which I’m teaching in March.

Oh, and I forgot the three in-progress audiobooks. What is wrong with me? Code Name Verity (edge of my seat; I’ll be recommending to Beanie; and yes I’m very late in getting to this one, which knocked everyone’s socks off a few years ago); Landmarks (still); and A Short History of Nearly Everything.


    Related Posts

  • Smoke, blooms, books
    Smoke, blooms, books
  • All Dem Leaves
    All Dem Leaves
  • Books Read in March
    Books Read in March
  • Strawberries
    Strawberries
  • "...strange archaic sympathies with the world"
    “…strange archaic sympathies with the world”

Comments

3 Reponses | Comments Feed
  1. Avatar

    Melanie Bettinelli says:

    Code Name Verity has been on my list for a while.

    The Lady with the Ship on Her Head looks like something we should check out. I can already hear the giggles. Right now they’re all loving The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate and Anne of Avonlea, both have roused much laughter.

  2. Avatar

    Penny says:

    Code Name Verity changed my eldest’s life. That’s part of why she is an international relations major and working for good in the world. Awesome book.

  3. Avatar

    Ellie says:

    Yes I read Code Name Verity, was it a couple of years ago now?, and absolutely loved it. Very dark. I’d give it to my kids now (17 and rising 15) but wouldn’t have then.
http://melissawiley.com/blog/2017/01/26/day-26/
melissawiley.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-17
98575
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BPGZLE3Q4P4AMRVWXTHWOTTSVQYXUSVL
<urn:uuid:d2c8ad14-bd41-46ec-92b5-3d591c0ae142>
2021-04-19T03:08:45Z
184.171.244.57
text/html
sha1:IRYHRPMN7BFKD2CZM3AE5LSD6ECUPA5B
<urn:uuid:1b1284f1-0023-4671-8fd0-25c13908e875>
http://melissawiley.com/blog/2017/01/26/day-26/
response
<urn:uuid:5b8c803e-4d04-40d9-811b-c5dffcb5ca40>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-17
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-90.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/