{"id":16167,"date":"2004-01-31T15:47:25","date_gmt":"2004-01-31T20:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/01\/31\/1744.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:45:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:45:20","slug":"book-report-readaloud-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/01\/31\/book-report-readaloud-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Read-Aloud Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Amongst the picture books Your Humble Blogger read to his Perfect Non-Reader in 2004 in the first two weeks of 2004 (to keep the list at reasonable length; I&#8217;ll break it up into two entries):\n\n<ul><li> Margaret Mahy, <i>17 Kings and 42 Elephants<\/i>; great, great, great!<\/li>\n<li>Margaret Mahy, <i>A Summery Saturday Morning<\/i>; good, but not great. Did I mention that <I>17 Kings and 42 Elephants<\/I> is great?<\/li>\n<li>Gabrielle Vincent, <i>Ernest and Celestine&#8217;s Patchwork Quilt<\/i>; terrific wordless Belgian book, part of a series about a very large bear and his ward, a mouse.<\/li>\n<li>Paul O. Zelinsky, <i>The Maid and the Mouse and the Odd-Shaped House<\/i>; since the point of the story is to draw it as you tell it, it just doesn&#8217;t really work in a book.<\/li>\n<li>Dr. Seuss, <I>There&#8217;s a Wocket in my Pocket<\/I>; there are a couple of imperfections, but it&#8217;s still in the top twenty or thirty Dr. Seuss books, which ain&#8217;t bad.<\/li>\n<li>Stan and Jan Berenstain, <i>The Berenstain Bears Learn about Strangers<\/i>, <i>The Berenstain Bears' Moving Day<\/i>, and <i>The Big Honey Hunt<\/i>; the last is one of the early (or as I think of them &#8216;real&#8217;) Berenstain Bears books, and the others are from an extensive series of unrhymed topics-for-tots books, which I loathe but seem to be successful at their aim. Of course, I loathe the &#8216;real&#8217; ones, too, so that&#8217;s neither here nor there.<\/li>\n<li>Bernard Waber, <i>The House on East 88th Street<\/i>; the first appearance of Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile.<\/li>\n<li>Eric Carle, <i>The Very Hungry Caterpillar<\/i>; enh, not one of his best<\/li>\n<li>Trinka Hakes Noble, <i>Jimmy's Boa Bounces Back<\/i>; a sequel to <i>The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash<\/i>, a substantially better book (tho' still not very good)<\/li>\n<li>Paulette Bourgeois, <I>Franklin&#8217;s New Friend<\/I>; not memorable, except that I can&#8217;t help wondering what Mr. Owl, with his classroom of a Moose, a Fox, a Beaver, a Snail, a Turtle, and a Bear could be keeping in that terrarium<\/li>\n<li>Eleanor Hudson, <I>Can You Show Me How to Get to Sesame Street?<\/I>; considering this is 90s Sesame Street, and about Elmo, it has some positives. It&#8217;s not the worst children&#8217;s book in the world.<\/li>\n<li> Sesame Street&#8217;s Zoe in <I>Are We There Yet?<\/I>; this is the worst children&#8217;s book in the world.<\/li>\n<li>Out and About with Disney&#8217;s Pooh: <I>The Friendship Garden<\/I>, by Rita Balducci and <I>Eeyore&#8217;s Happy Tail<\/I>, by Ronald Kidd, and also Walt Disney&#8217;s Winnie the Pooh: <I>Eeyore, Be Happy<\/I>, by Don Ferguson; these are among the worst children&#8217;s books in the world. They don&#8217;t actually teach bad behaviour patterns, much, but they what they do to Mr. Milne&#8217;s characters is disgusting, and the language, for anyone familiar with the originals, is an abomination.<\/li>\n<li>Maurice Sendak, <I>Chicken Soup with Rice<\/I>; this isn&#8217;t the best children&#8217;s book in the world, but it&#8217;s awfully good. It was my favorite for a portion of my toddlerhood, evidently.<\/li>\n<li>Maurice Sendak, <I>Where the Wild Things Are<\/I>; oddly enough, considering how Important and Influential this book is, there isn&#8217;t much too it. I prefer <I>In the Night Kitchen<\/I>, myself.<\/li>\n<li> Doreen Rappaport, <i>Martin&#8217;s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/i>; well, we gave it a try, to explain about MLK day. Not inspiring. We did better singing &#8216;We Shall Overcome&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li>Marjorie Weinman Sharmat, <I>Gila Monsters Meet You At the Airport<\/I>; they do, you know. Plastic ones, in the gift shop. Duty-free.<\/li>\n<li>Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archimbault, <I>Chicka Chicka, Boom Boom<\/I>; my own rendition has been irreparably influenced by the Ray Charles version.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There were more, I know, but I can&#8217;t recall what they were. And, of course, many of them I read many times, or many times a day.\n\n<p>Redintegro Iraq,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amongst the picture books Your Humble Blogger read to his Perfect Non-Reader in 2004 in the first two weeks of 2004 (to keep the list at reasonable length; I\u2019ll break it up into two entries): Margaret Mahy, 17 Kings and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16167"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16895,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16167\/revisions\/16895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}