Two Years

Been writing this blog for two years today. Hmm....

You Can Write Chinese

Finished You Can Write Chinese by Kurt Wiese. It won the Caldecott Honor Medal in 1946. An American boy whose family has moved to China attends school in Chungking. There are only boys in this school. The teacher explains that there is no alphabet in Chinese. Each character is an actual word. As he draws the words on the blackboard he shows his students how the characters visually resemble what they mean. Some of the examples are very clear. Others seem a bit forced conceptually. However, I think this approach for young children is entirely appropriate. The cover of the book shows the boy and his sister with the teacher, but his sister does not appear anywhere in the book. Perhaps she appears on the cover to make the "you" in the title more universal.

Kurt Wiese illustrated many books for children. He won the Caldecott Honor Medal again in 1948 for Fish in the Air. His work also won one Newbery Medal and several Honor Medals. His most recognizable illustrations are perhaps for The Story About Ping and The Five Chinese Brothers.

Little Lost Lamb

Finished Little Lost Lamb illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. It won the Caldecott Honor Medal in 1946. Weisgard won the Honor Medal again in 1947 for Rain Drop Splash, the same year the he also won the Caldecott Medal for The Little Island. The text was written by Golden MacDonald, a name which was a pseudonym for Margaret Wise Brown. Brown also won several times. She is remembered most for her book Goodnight Moon.

Caleb's Story

Finished Caleb's Story by Patricia MacLachlan. It is the third book in a series of five which began with Sarah, Plain and Tall, which won the Newbery Medal in 1986.

When Caleb is home alone with Sarah and his little sister Cassie during a blizzard he finds a stranger in their barn. He is an old man who is gruff and seems ill. Sarah, always compassionate, invites him into the house. When Papa returns from town he is stunned when he begins to recognize the stranger. The stranger is his father who left when Papa was a boy. Papa is angry that his father has returned after all these years without a word or a letter. Sarah does her best to repair the rift between the two men. All along Caleb is writing about these events in the journal that his older sister has given him.

Caleb is very observant and after a while he begins to realize that his grandfather cannot read. In secret Caleb teaches his grandfather to read and write. His grandfather then writes the letter to his son that he was never able to write before.

I enjoyed this book. It was very brief and even though it has been years since I read Sarah, Plain and Tall and Skylark, it was very easy to drop back into the lives of these characters.

The Cat Who Went to Heaven

Finished The Cat Who Went to Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth. It won the Newbery Medal in 1931. It is the story of a Japanese painter whose housekeeper brings home a cat from the market instead of food. At first the painter is skeptical, cats are demonic, but after observing the behavior of the cat he changes his mind. The painter is commissioned to paint a mural for the temple of the death of Buddha. The painter imagines himself as Buddha and as each of the animals that Buddha welcomes to Nirvana. The descriptions of each animal are interesting and compassionately written. The cat is the one animal that was not welcomed, but this seems to change by the end of the book. I don't usually enjoy books that are religiously based, but this book is special. "One of the thirty 20th-century children's books every adult should know."--The Horn Book. Unfortunately I cannot seem to locate that list itself.

A Little Maid of Provincetown

Finished A Little Maid of Provincetown by Alice Turner Curtis, originally published in 1913. This is the second book in her series of twenty five that I have read. Set during the American Revolution, it is the story of Anne, whose father's fishing boat is captured by the British. The people of the Provincetown Settlement think that Anne's father has turned spy or informant for the British. Anne is taken in by a childless couple who she calls Aunt Martha and Uncle Enos. Anne is taunted by other children who call her spy and traitor. Anne has a plucky spirit and a fierce temper. She throws water and sand in the faces of these children, who then go wailing home. Uncle Enos catches her at it and rather than scolding her for such behavior, he praises Anne for standing up for herself and her father. Anne learns that her father has escaped the British and has joined the American soldiers in Boston. She stows away on Uncle Enos' boat when he sails for Boston in order to try to find her father. Uncle Enos helps her to find him and then Anne carries a message for her father to the leader of the rebels in Newburyport.

This was a fun book. Curtis includes a few British soldiers who are kindly and who rescue Anne when she is in danger. She is not so complimentary of the Native Americans in the region however. This is surprising since the Native Americans in A Little Maid of Nantucket were portrayed in a much more favorable light.

The edition I read was a vintage reissue printed by Applewood Books, the same company that has reissued Nancy Drew books in their original form. Applewood issued twelve titles from the series some time in the 1990s.

The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles

Finished The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles by Maud and Miska Petersham. It won the Caldecott Medal in 1946. This book has many cheerful illustrations, nursery rhymes, finger games, count off games and jump rope songs, some familiar, some rather peculiar. The Petershams were a husband and wife illustration team who also won the Caldecott Honor Medal in 1942 for An American ABC.

Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

Finished Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. This was a re-read for me. I probably last read this fifteen years ago, aloud to my daughter. It's hard to believe that she could have followed it. Much like Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator I really preferred the first book. Both first books are complete originals, zany and fun. Both second books are completely off the wall. I realize that Carroll's second book is a masterpiece of logic with complicated chess moves, but that doesn't really interest me. Stories interest me and there really is no actual story in Through the Looking Glass. There are, however, a number of pretty creepy characters, Humpty-Dumpty and Tweedledum and Tweedledee in particular. In a way I suppose it was just too complicated for my taste. A cranky entry, I know.

Some Tame Gazelle

Finished Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym. This was her first published novel. It is the story of two spinster sisters living in a small village in England. Their world is very small and precise. Any changes to it cause tremendous upheaval. There were moments when I was reminded of characters in the first of the Mapp & Lucia books, but I enjoyed this book so much more because I actually liked these characters.

The main character, Belinda, nurses her long unrequited love for their neighbor the Archdeacon. While a small, quiet, sometimes amusing story, I was very drawn to the characters and found myself wondering about them when I was at work and away from the book. Pym novels always have an excellent quote worth saving. One from this book is "If only one could clear out one's mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one's wardrobe." Next year I will read her next novel Excellent Women.

Down the Garden Path

Finished Down the Garden Path by Beverley Nichols. This book is wickedly funny and best suited to those who know their way around a garden. Read it outside, in the sunshine or twilight, with a glass of something bubbly.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Finished re-reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. This is perhaps the fourth or fifth time I have read the book. The Anglophiles Anonymous group I belong to on Shelfari finally decided to read some children's lit and chose both of the Alice books.

This time around I read all the annotations in the edition I have. The type is so tiny and made me so sleepy that it took perhaps longer than it should have for me to finish the first book.

I have always enjoyed Tenniel's illustrations.

With this reading I was struck by Alice's concern for good manners. While constantly finding herself in absurd situations she still does not wish to offered anyone. Also, characters who I found intimidating or even frightening when I was younger now appear harmless and I feel they are looked upon with an indulgent eye, not only by me, but by Alice herself.

How Green Was My Valley

There is a lovely book it is. A lovely, lovely book.

Main Street

Finished Main Street by Sinclair Lewis back in mid July but forgot to blog about it here. It is the story of Carol Kennicott, married to a country doctor, after living life as an independent young woman in Minneapolis. Gopher Prairie, MN is a small, close, terribly judgmental place and Carol tries her hardest to reform it visually and socially. Her struggle in this effort is at first valiant, but in the end a bitterly lost cause. I felt despair and disappointment for Carol as she was forever buried under the petty norms of small town America in the 1920s.

Despite this bleak prospect I enjoyed the novel. Lewis' characters are so real it's easy to get caught up in their lives.

The Hidden Staircase

Finished The Hidden Staircase by Carolyne Keene, the second Nancy Drew mystery, published in 1930. Nancy sleuths alone, carries a revolver and is pretty damn bold. This book was a reissue of the original text, printed by Applewood Books.




I pulled out my childhood edition of The Hidden Staircase to make comparisons and found that the 1959 revision of the text bears little resemblance to the original. Like The Secret of the Old Clock this book is riddled with racial stereotypes that make one cringe. This second book, however, was much more exciting than the first in the series.

Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym for a number of writers who worked on the series, but most of the first twenty-five Nancy Drew books were written by Mildred Wirt Benson.

Julie & Julia

Finished Julie & Julia in anticipation of the film's release in August. The film is based on this book and Julia Child's memoir My Life in France which I finished in August 2007, just prior to beginning this reading blog.

Julie & Julia chronicles Julie Powell's attempt to cook every recipe in Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking while blogging about her efforts. Compared to most of the books I've read in the last few years this is quite contemporary. It has all the angst, drinking, smoking and swearing of Bridget Jones' Diary, but it has something else as well. It has a sense of tangible accomplishment. Powell, a recovering theater geek, turned temp, turned permanent secretary, learns that she is capable of great and fearsome things. Not only do her cooking skills excel during the project, but her writing skills do as well. This book is very personal and very funny.

I'd have to say that of the two books I really prefer My Life in France. It's charming and equally as funny, but perhaps in a different way.