This is another Newbery winner that I listened to with my son on our road trip. We enjoyed this one even more than Bud, not Buddy.
Banished from his mouse community for fraternizing with humans (to borrow C.S. Lewis’s phrase), Despereaux is sent to the dungeon where it is assumed he will be eaten by the rats. Of course, he isn’t eaten by the rats, but while he’s in prison he learns of a rat’s plans to harm one of his beloved human friends, Princess Pea. His quest to save the Princess Pea forms the rest of the story, which I won’t spoil for you!
This is a very charming fantasy tale that kept us truly entertained on our trip. It might be a little scary for those under 8 or so, though. I also recommend DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, which I read and enjoyed earlier this year.
The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books
by J. Peder Zane
2007, 323 pp.
Rating: 3.5
This book has top ten book lists for 125 writers. Zane then scored these selections with a #1 pick getting 10 points and a #10 pick getting 1 point to come up with an overall list. The top ten works are the following:
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1600)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913-1927)
The stories of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-1872)
I find it interesting that the breakdown according to nationality was 40% Russian, 20% British, 20% American, and 20% French. I LOVE Russian lit-especially Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I have read the titles in bold and would like to read the other books on the list in the following order: Middlemarch, War and Peace, The Stories of Anton Chekov, Lolita, and then In Search of Lost Time. I want to read Middlemarch in 2008 and perhaps War and Peace as well.
There were various other top ten lists in the back with the following as the #1 pick for each:
#1 work of the 20th century: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#1 work of the 19th century: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
#1 work of the 18th centure: Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
#1 work of the 16th and 17th centuries: Hamlet by William Shakespeare
#1 work of the 15th century and earlier: The Odyssey by Homer
#1 author by number of works selected: William Shakespeare
#1 author by points earned: Leo Tolstoy
#1 work by an American author: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#1 work by a British author: Hamlet by William Shakespeare
#1 work by a Russian author: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
#1 work by a French author: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#1 work by a living author: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
#1 comic work: Don Quixote by Cervantes
#1 work of fantasy/science fiction: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Carroll
#1 mystery/thriller: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
He also lists all 544 books mentioned by the writers in point order with a summary for each. I did glean some titles for my TBR pile that I’ll list here:
The Golden Argosy edited by Van H. Carmell
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Mrs. Bridge/Mr. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
Wheat That Springeth Green by J. F. Powers
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty
The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
Silence by Shusaku Endo
The River of Earth by James Still
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
I like lists of books so you may be wondering why only a 3.5 rating. I just really liked The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop and The King’s English so much better. Also, out of the 125 authors that participated, I had only heard of 55 of them. As I read through the selections, I found that other than the obvious classics I haven’t read and the above titles, I just wasn’t interested in many of them. Doom and gloom and s*x and violence. I don’t have to have a happy ending to enjoy a book, but I do want to feel something other than utter hopelessness.
Sammar, (I believe it was pronounced ‘Summer’), is a young widow working as an Arabic translator at a university in Aberdeen, Scotland. She has been grieving for several years over the loss of her husband who was killed in a car accident. She has a little boy but feels she is unable to care for him and leaves him with her mother-in-law in Sudan.
Faith plays an important part in Sammar’s life, so when she starts to fall for Rae, her boss, she realizes it could never be. That is, unless he converts to Islam. Their relationship starts off slowly, just by talking on the telephone. I found this to be very real and touching. Many of my best conversations with my husband have been on the phone, and this was the first time (that I could recall, anyway), that I had found it portrayed in such a way in a book. The progression of the relationship and the issues of faith and belief are explored in the rest of the novel.
I really enjoyed Aboulela’s writing. It was very tender and poignant. I found it easy to feel Sammar’s grief. There were a few things I did dislike about Sammar’s character, though. I really cannot imagine leaving a child behind like that for such an extended period of time. A few weeks perhaps, but not a few years! The writing was beautiful. However, in the last few pages of the book there were a few too many sentence fragments for my taste. I don’t mind some, but it seemed a little excessive. I would definitely read another book by this author, though.
This is the author’s first novel and was first published in the UK in 1999.
Wow! What a fantastic book. I don’t know why I’ve never read this before. I really thought I already knew what it was about–a girl’s father defending a black man for r*ping a white woman. It is about so much more than that, although of course that plays an important part.
Scout and her family live in Maycomb, Alabama. In the beginning of the book, Scout is going into the 1st grade and her brother Jem is going into 5th. Her father is an attorney, her mother died when she was 2, and her caregiver is a sweet, smart black woman named Calpurnia. The family relationship among all members is strong–very strong. Scout and Jem play together at home (but not in school–Jem insists). Scout and her father always read together in the evenings. This is a point of contention with Scout’s teacher Miss Caroline. Some of my favorite passages come from this section and they are hilarious to me as a former teacher who now homeschools.
The teacher asks if anyone knows what the alphabet is, and then. . .
…as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from the Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading. [...] “Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage–”
The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at us on which were printed “the,” “cat,” “rat,” “man,” and “you.” No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic revelations in silence. I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me. “Besides, she said. “We don’t write in the first grade, we print. You won’t learn to write until you’re in the third grade.”
…as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.
I don’t want to give away too much of the story, so from here I’ll be brief. Scout, Jem, and their friend Dill (said to have been inspired by Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote) spend a lot of time together in the summer trying to see Boo Radley, a neighbor who is a recluse. In fact, they are obsessed with this endeavor. Atticus Finch, Scout’s father, takes on the r*pe case. The fallout from the case is felt by the Finches from the community as well as from their extended family. The book ends well, though, with a very satisfying conclusion.
To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 and was made into an Academy Award winning film starring Gregory Peck. It is the only novel Harper Lee ever published.
I listened to parts of this book on Audio CD read by Sissy Spacek. Highly recommended.
Caution: There are a few curse words and adult themes in the book. I would recommend this book for high school level and up.
I really, really loved this story. Had it not contained quite a bit of graphic s** and lang*age, it would have received at least a 4.5 rating. As self-evident from the title, time travel is involved. Henry cannot control when and “when” his time travel occurs. This makes for some very interesting situations! It is a great love story, and it did make me cry. That hadn’t happened in a long time. I highly recommend it, but I sure wish some of the graphic content would not have been there.
"Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal." (John 6:27, ESV)
This is another Newbery winner that I listened to with my son on our road trip. We enjoyed this one even more than Bud, not Buddy.
The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books
