Weekly book shelf, 5/14

We are on vacation this week, soaking up sun and surprising warmth that we didn't even have to leave Michigan to find. For years I have packed for vacations with the idea that, being a vacation, I'd have lots of extra reading time, but have yet to see those plans fulfilled. I have been known to stow extra books away in odd parts of my luggage only to unpack them, untouched and almost forgotten, upon our return home. The same was not quite true for Calvin—he seemed to squeeze in plenty of reading time, even though he spent all of his beach time flirting with the incredibly frigid water—but he mostly re-read favorites, like Nate the Great and some of the Magic Tree House.

 Here's some of what Calvin was reading this week:.

Berkeley Breathed is the Bloom County cartoonist and we enjoy both his art and his story telling in Pete & Pickles. The book is a little dark—there's references made to death and loss (Pete's wife has died in the past), to depression (Pete, again), and to mistreatment of animals (Pickles in the circus). There is also allusion to modern art and geographic locations, and the tale of friendship and its happy ending is very uplifting. The illustrations in the book actually start out dark and gloomy, then end full of color and life, mirroring the movement of the story itself. We got this book for Calvin two years ago for Christmas and it has been a favorite ever since.

We still have exactly two chapters left in Glinda of Oz, at this point, but are really making headway with the Aeneid, and now he's asking to read the Iliad and the Odyssey. I was thinking I'd track down copies of the "For Boys and Girls" versions of these, also by Church.

And on my bookshelf this week... in fiction I finished Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin. In non-fiction I finished with The Monk in the Garden, by Robin Marantz Henig, and am waiting for my copy of Beasts in the Garden, the brand new Erik Larson, to arrive on Tuesday before I get started on a new one.

Weekly book shelf, 5/6

Like many families we have a read-before-bed tradition. Usually that's when Calvin and I read another chapter, or two or three, in our most recent read aloud, these days that's usually an Oz. But we have a morning book tradition in our family, too. Since Calvin usually gets up in the mornings before Jon and I are (fully) awake, he selects a handful of picture books and brings them into our room to sit either in the sunshine on the floor or on top of us in bed and read to himself while we slowly blink the day into focus. The books then remain in our bed or on our floor until that night when I set them on the dresser. I have a stack of at least fifteen books still on my dresser from this week because I've been too busy to put them back, but also because sometimes he'll revisit one of them on a morning, and because I like to see the stack grow over the course of the week.

That's just a little reading anecdote, and whatever books he read in the mornings this week are still upstairs on my dresser, so here are the books I know he read downstairs this week. Earl the earthworm is a cute little story with lots of information about worms and their ecosystem. We both continue to be a fan of the Magic Tree House series, he's started on a Rome kick, and he also continued to devour Nate the Great in such quantities as our library had.

He read these two out loud to me this week while I worked in the garden. The first, Jip and Janneke, was a gift sent to him by my cousin who lives in the Netherlands. I wish this book was available here so that I could recommend it to everyone. It's adorable, and he's had a great time with it since it arrived on Tuesday. And he read two chapters to me from that perennial favorite, the original Winnie the Pooh, sans Disney influence.

We've used these for our exploration of Ancient Rome, and yes, I realize I've mixed my Greek and Roman myths here with the appearance of Theseus, but since we started with the Aeneid he at least understands how they intersect, and some of our other research books even explain the lineup of Greek and Roman gods.

We are almost done with Glinda of Oz, but not quite.

And on my bookshelf this week... in fiction I finished A Man Without A Country, by Kurt Vonnegut, and Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and am now reading Delta of venus. In non-fiction I'm almost finished with The Monk in the Garden, by Robin Marantz Henig, but it's a tad tedious so I'm still plugging away at it.

The Magic of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

The penultimate book in the series as written by Baum. If there weren't another twenty-some more books widely considered as part of the Oz canon I think I would be very sad. As it is, I think I still am. I think it's possible to make these books feel fresh and new, even twelve books into the series, because anything, and I mean anything, can happen in Oz, so there are no contraints, natural or artificial, binding the author's creativity. Of course the plot line doesn't change all that much from book to book—there's only a handful of those to choose from here—but the intriguing and unique characters that fill in the bare bones of the plots are what make the books enjoyable one right after the other. The Magic of Oz is another winner for me, full of just enough adult-size humor to give depth to the child's fairy story. This is children's fantasy at its best.

The Tin Woodman of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (our reviews)

There are only two more books, after this one, left in the Oz series as written by Baum, and I am sad to see the end so obviously in sight. While there are yet another 26 books in what is considred the Oz canon, I am a sentimentalist, and it will be hard, and a little nerve wracking, to break into the Oz world as imagined by other authors. I am hoping that, if so many other Ozites consider these other books to be canon, we will be just as happy with them as we have been with Baum's vision, and certainly there are far more than 26 other Oz books out there, so selectivity did come into play. My fingers are crossed and my breath held as we near the end of Baum's road, though.

The Tin Woodman of Oz, though, was also a slight variation from Baum's usual, and I've heard that this, and the last two books in the series, are dark by comparison to his previous books of wonder. In the Tin Woodman, in fact, the reader is reminded of the Tin Woodman's somewhat gruesome past, and also meets his severed head, on the tinsmith's shelf, and many of his former body parts, now glued back together to create a different being. And, if these anomolies are not enough, there is definitely a thinly veiled question here about makeup of a soul, and the value of a body. Which, after all, is the real Tin Woodman, Nick Chopper? Is it the head, with the brain, the body, with the heart, or the new tin creation, with the memories, the creature we have all become accustomed to? There is really a lot of symbolism and imagery in all of Baum's work, much of it being politically motivated by the situations of the early 20th century, but this is perhaps the most striking, and the most demanding, of them all.

For all of that, however, much of this is naturally over a four-year-old's head, and since I did not see fit to draw attention to these complex themes, although I'm sure we could have discussed them, Calvin enjoyed this book as he has all the others: deeply and with great excitement.

The Lost Princess of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (our reviews)

This rates at the top of the Oz list for me. I enjoyed all the books, but as with any series some will inevitablly be better than others. The Lost Princess of Oz is the tenth book in the series and it brought back every single one of our favorite characters. Calvin loved it. The first few chapters were almost like a roll call and every time another of our best loved friends arrived for the story Calvin would giggle with joy. And we met some delightful new ones, too.