Valz

This is my poetry for today. Probably for every day.

This is from "The Adventure in the Life of a Bear" from the book "The Animal Story Book" edited by Andrew Lang in 1914. I love illustrations in old books. When I grew up books for children contained illustrations like this and they inflamed my creativity and deeply contributed to my reading experience. It's such a loss that there are few books for young people today (other than picture books) that contain illustration plates.

This is what I would love to see here. I know nothing of programming so these could all be impractical.

1. 1. When I am reading on someone's blog and want to like what I have read or even just reblog it, I have to click on the title of the entry and wait for a new page to open. Why can't I just do that on the blog page?

2. When I look at my shelves for editing and I am on the table view I cannot sort by date reviewed. 

3. It would be a dream if there could be unlimited scrolling on blog sites. The page is too short the way it is. An option for infinite scroll would be wonderful!

The book lover's dilemma.

Lowry is a gifted writer and the story is interesting but not ground shaking. It is a good book for middle schoolers. Allegory and symbolism abound.

3 1/2  stars

... or listen to an audiobook!

Every year since 2010, SYNC has been giving away free audiobooks for the entire summer - two books each week.  The books are usually a mix of current YA titles and classics, available in MP3 format and are downloaded using the Overdrive Media Console.

The books for the week are normally available on Thursdays through to the Wednesday of the following week.  If you don't download them by then, you lose out.  Also, some titles are only available for the United States; the majority of titles are available internationally, though.

SYNC's 2013 program begins today with Of Poseidon by Anna Banks and William Shakespeare's The Tempest.  The links don't seem to be live yet so keep checking throughout the day! Download links are now active!

You can find more information at the SYNC website, including a schedule of the summer's offerings.

Happy listening!

Ben has a midlife crisis of horrific proportions and Helen, his wife, divorces him and moves to New York City with their teenage daughter, Sara. There Helen starts work as a crisis management expert for a small PR firm. It seems she has a gift. She can make clients apologize truthfully for what they have done wrong and they are then forgiven by the public. Ben goes to jail (a country club one) for a few months and Sara takes up with a semi-dangerous thug. 214 pages later all is resolved.

Is it worth reading? The writing is fluid, the story is humorous at times and even a little exciting but overall it's really just a diversion. 

3 stars

Another book I have to make up my own ending for! Drats!

I loved the first 7/8's of this historical adventure set on the east coast of Massachusetts in the late 1600's. Our heroine, Bethia, is a puritan of sorts. Her father is a devout minister to their community on an island (now Martha's Vineyard) and has made it his mission to bring Christianity to the natives, the Wampanoag. Free spirited Bethia would rather ride her horse at break neck speed around the island in a totally unladylike manner and listen in as her father teaches Wampanoag, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. She is unable to study herself as an educated woman would only be a difficulty for her husband. But Bethia's quick mind and intense love of learning (opposite of her brother) drive her to find knowledge wherever she can get it.

One day on her wanderings around the island, she meets a young Wampanoag boy of her age and surprises him by being able to speak to him in his language. They become beloved friends, meeting daily and teaching each other their language. The boy, Caleb, as she names him (he calls her Storm Eyes) is so brilliant that he soon learns English without an accent. 

She has to keep her friendship secret because her father, brother, and grandfather would never understand. Likewise, Caleb must hide his relationship with her from his uncle, Tequamuck, a powerful shaman thought to practice black magic by the Puritans.  That Bethia believes Tequamuck's power is an equal to her godly beliefs, is a secret she must keep. Tequamuck forsees the future and his people's place in it.

Geraldine Brooks's way with words and the Puritan dialect she writes is perfect. That I listened to it on audio ( Jennifer Ehle reads it) only added to the experience. I loved the language and found myself easily catching the rhythmical way of talking -- I own it.

Time passes, and Caleb comes to live with Bethia's family so her father can tutor him and eventually Caleb ends up in Cambridge on the mainland at a school where he is tutored so he can be admitted to the Indian College at Harvard. Bethia is there, too, as a servant to the headmaster of the boy's school.

Brooks seizes the opportunity to prelude the disasters that will befall all of the Indians in the future by what she does to Caleb and his best friend, Joel, another Indian scholar. Their fate is horrible and I truly think it could have been left out. The story was already told and we could see the future that was coming. I guess I'm just a sucker for a happy ending.

I know that it is an unfair criticism of a book to not like it because of the ending but I am writing my thoughts about my reading experience. If I were to review simply on the merit of the writing and the storyline I would rate it higher.

Written by Pierre Burton, a Canadian literary and media superstar, and illustrated by his daughter Patsy, this adventure features four siblings searching for their baby brother, The Pollywog as they call him. Burton based the children on his own and it brought him more fan mail than any other of his many books. 

I loved, loved this book as a child and gave to my daughter when she was little. She grew up to be an artist and told me that the strange intriguingly illustrated world of this book was one of her influences.  

Below are some images from the book:

It’s Batch Edit time on BookLikes Shelves.

Use batch edit to make the same edits to many books at the same time. Now you can update reading status, change shelves and remove from your Shelf multiple books at one go.

The entrance to new admin view of your book collection is on admin Shelf page (click upper navigation bar). Once you press Table view, you’ll be moved to your table-organized book collection where you can select several books or all of them and move them to particular shelves, add review, date or change reading status in two seconds. You can also use multi remove option. 

To keep your books organized you can create thematic shelves and keep a single book on many shelves. This helps in organizing your book collection, especially when it’s big and diverse. You can also add missing book covers to green books which lack images as well as add books manually when you don’t find them is a book search box.

Excellent job Booklikes! I am so enjoying the reading I'm doing here that I am actually neglecting the pile of library books that are in grave danger of costing me a lot of coins.