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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-timeby Mark Haddon Christopher is 15 years old, and he tells us he has “Behavioral Problems.” He carries a knife with a saw-blade that (he thinks) would be good for cutting off somebody’s fingers. He wouldn’t mind if everyone else in the world just vanished one day. He likes math. However, he’s not a serial killer or anything even remotely like that. Christopher’s brain works in a different way. He has trouble understanding feelings or interpreting facial expressions. He pays attention to everything, so crowds or some kinds of noises or lots of signs or even looking out the window while he’s on a train overwhelm him. He really hates being touched. That’s part of why he doesn’t like people. The story is told entirely from Christopher’s point of view. It begins when he discovers that his neighbor’s dog, Wellington, has been murdered. Since Christopher loves Sherlock Holmes, and since he really liked Wellington, he decides to investigate the murder and bring the killer to justice. The murder is solved about half way through the book, but it leaves Christopher in the middle of an even bigger problem, and he spends the rest of the story dealing with it. People seem to either love or hate this book. I think one reason some people hate it is the writing style, which I can kind of understand. Since Christopher is telling the story, he tells it his way. However, this didn’t bother me. I actually thought it was pretty easy to read. However, I’ve noticed that a lot of people feel cheated because they thought it was a very different kind off book than it really is. Let me try to clear up some of the most common myths I’ve seen about this book. Myth 1: This is a murder mystery. Well, that’s what Christopher says, but he’s wrong. This is a novel about Christopher, his life, and his family. In fact, Christopher spends every other chapter writing about his daily life, his hopes and dreams, and his hobbies. He is very fond of mathematics and physics, and he talks about math a lot. Myth 2: This book is for kids. Actually, the author got tired of writing books for kids, so he wrote this one for adults. His agent decided that it would be good for kids, too, so one edition was published for adults and one edition was published for children. Just so you know, there’s a lot of swearing in it, and bodily functions appear more than a few times.* Myth 3: This is an accurate, scientific portrayal of autism. It isn’t. In fact, the author never says that Christopher is on the autism spectrum. He never claims that Christopher has Asperger syndrome. The author used to work with people who had autism, and he says he basically combined various traits of people he knew to create Christopher. He didn’t go out and do any research. You might want to check out this interesting article about the book written by a man with Asperger syndrome. If you want to give the book a try, you can read an excerpt of it at the publisher’s website or Google Books. *: One way to get a book marked as “Literature” is to kill an animal, talk about bodily functions, and make the main characters people you wouldn’t want to hang out with all the time. Having the main character talk about academic topics also helps. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the school library.
You can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 5, 2012 at 8:32 am UTC. Click here to see newer information. May 13th, 2010
 Tags: animals, england, family, murder, mystery, school, Science, unusual perspective |  Category: Fiction
|  Write a comment | The Cat Who Covered the World: The Adventures of Henrietta and her Foreign Correspondentby Christopher S. Wren Christopher Wren did not have good luck with pets when he was young, so he wasn’t exactly eager when one of his friends asked if he would be willing to adopt a kitten. However, she apparently knew Christopher well enough to know how to bribe him – she offered him a bottle of Scotch to take the kitten. I’m not really into cats or Scotch, but I really enjoyed this book anyway. The Cat Who Covered the World is the story of this cat, named Henrietta by Christopher’s children. She’s an ordinary tabby cat, but since Christopher Wren is a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, she gets to travel the world and be a cat around all kinds of interesting people. She disappears in Egypt for a while. She makes friends with Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, who was also the guy who helped the Soviet Union develop the nuclear bomb. She kills a mouse and gives it to the ambassador of Pakistan. This is sort of like a story about an ordinary person who gets caught up in extraordinary events, but in this case, the ordinary person is a cat. Usually. Sometimes it’s the author, like when he has to help his friend Kif sneak in to rescue a cat in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 6, 2012 at 2:51 am UTC. July 28th, 2009
Tags: animals, cats, celebrities, events, real people, Travel, writers | Category: Biography, Nonfiction
| Write a comment | Watership Downby Richard Adams Watership Down is a fantasy story about people leaving their old home, traveling across the country to start a new one, and defending it from the forces of evil. What makes this book unusual is that most of the characters in it are rabbits. Fiver is a young rabbit who has visions of the future. One day he has a horrible vision of his warren (the rabbit version of a city) being destroyed, but the leaders of the warren will not listen to him. Fiver and his brother Hazel, along with a few other rabbits, leave the warren in search of a safe place that Fiver also saw in his vision. They are joined by two warrior rabbits, Bigwig and Silver. This group faces many dangers as they travel across the English countryside, like stray dogs, rabbit snares, and highways. Eventually they make it to Watership Down, the place Fiver recognizes from his vision, and start a new warren. Now that they have a chance to relax, the rabbits notice that there aren’t any female rabbits. With the help of Kehaar the seagull, they manage to find another warren in the area that might be willing to share some of its people. Unfortunately, this new warren turns out to be a police state run by a crazy killer bunny who calls himself General Woundwort, but Hazel and the others manage to free a few of the rabbits from Woundwort. General Woundwort won’t allow anyone to leave, so he and some of his soldiers attack Watership Down. The Watership Down rabbits aren’t really warriors, but they are smart, experienced, and desperate. Watership Down is more than just an adventure story. When the rabbits stop for the evening, they tell each other stories from bunny history, myth, and legend. Along the way you learn a little bit of the bunny language, too. Richard Adams did a really good job of making rabbit culture interesting. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the school library.
You can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated January 27, 2012 at 11:31 pm UTC. Click here to see newer information. July 17th, 2009
Tags: adventure, animals, england, epic, exploration | Category: Fantasy, Fiction
| Write a comment | The Book of the Spiderby Paul Hillyard I realize that not everybody likes spiders. I understand. I don’t panic around them, but I really don’t want to hang out with them, either. However, unless spiders really freak you out, you might want to give this book a try. The Book of the Spider covers a wide range of spider-related topics. It is not a textbook or a field guide; it’s pretty fun, casual, and sometimes funny. It starts with a chapter on arachnophobia and then moves to spiders in folklore, myth, and literature. There are chapters on particular categories of spiders, such as social spiders, spiders that fly (with silk), and aquatic spiders. Hillyard also discusses spider silk, the history of the study of spiders, and various other topics. This is not a book designed to scare anyone. The author genuinely loves spiders, so he would much rather convince you enjoy (or at least respect) spiders than shock or horrify you. This is meant to be a fun book, and I think it works well. I still panic when I walk into a spiderweb, but as long as I’m eat least two or three feet from any spider, I do appreciate them. Also, I have to mention one specific fact I learned. Back in the 1920s, people didn’t know whether black widow spiders were poisonous. William J. Baerg, who was teaching at the very same college I would later attend, was challenged to prove that their poison could affect a human. Baerg’s plane went something like this:
Where to Find ItYou can get it from the school library.
You can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 4, 2012 at 6:35 pm UTC. Click here to see newer information. July 14th, 2009
Tags: animals, history, nature, real people | Category: Biology, Nonfiction, Science
| Write a comment | The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Survival and Obsession Among America’s Great White Sharksby Susan Casey If you sail about 27 miles west of San Francisco, you’ll reach the Farallon Islands. They are home to hundreds of thousands of birds and quite a few sea lions, and every year around September, the great white sharks show up. Nobody knows why great white sharks – the same ones every year – spend a few months in the Farallones. Of course, there’s a lot we don’t know about great white sharks. However, Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson are working to change that. They have been working in the Farallon Islands for the last ten years. They know all the sharks by name. Susan Casey, the author, spent eight weeks with Peter and Scot. The Devil’s Teeth is about her experience there. We get to know Peter and Scott, as well as Cal Ripfin, T-Nose, Spotty, Mama, Betty, or the Cadilac (a few of the local sharks). We also get to see what life is like on these desolate islands just off the coast of San Francisco. You can read some of it online at Google Books. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 2, 2012 at 2:25 am UTC. Click here to see newer information. July 11th, 2009
Tags: animals, nature, Science, scientists | Category: Nonfiction
| Write a comment | The Dog is Not a Toy: House Rule #4by Darby Conley Get Fuzzy is a comic strip about a fairly ordinary guy named Rob, his slightly evil cat Bucky, and his lovable but stupid dog Satchel. Bucky is usually rude, insulting, and destructive, although every once in a while he’ll do something nice for Rob or Bucky. He is constantly coming up with crazy schemes that never work. For example, he has tried designing tee shirts, writing books, and making music, but he isn’t really smart enough to do any of it well. Satchel, on the other hand, is almost always in a good mood and likes nearly everybody. The only way he can live with Bucky and still be in a good happy all the time is to be a little simple, but we love him anyway. One of the really impressive things about Get Fuzzy is that almost every panel is funny. A lot of cartoons use the first panel or two is used to set up the one joke in the strip, but Darby Conley usually manages to make the setup funny, too. Even when nobody says anything, you can probably find something funny in the picture. Bucky’s facial expressions are priceless – they combine arrogance, hostility, and total cluelessness. Rob has a very good “WTF? Why did I even get up this morning?” expression that he has to use a lot around Bucky and Satchel. Where to Find ItYou can get it from the public library.
This list was last updated February 6, 2012 at 8:47 am UTC. |
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