Senor Parrot's Perch

It’s busy around here. It seems that there is no time for fun anymore. I still read, but only at times when I can, when I really should be sleeping. I just finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Yeah, I’m racing right through that series. I want to be ready when the Deathly Hallows comes out. Truth is, it was looking at my daughter’s copy of The Deathly Hallows that spurred me to reading them again.

Last night I started two much smaller books that I picked up at the Midwest Booksellers Association trade show. Both are from Mackinac Island Press. The first is The Adventures of Pachelot: Last Voyage of the Griffon, by Wendy Caszatt-Allen (ISBN-13: 978-1934133088). Pachelot is a dog, quite the talented one, who finds she is able to talk with certain people. Incongruously, she is an Australian Shepherd in North America during the days of the French Explorer LaSalle sometime before 1700. So far, at two chapters in, I give this one a strong recommendation for any boy or girl just beyond the first-chapter book phase. If your kid is reading Nate the Great or Cam Jansen with no problem, hand them this one next.

The second is Secret Sabertooth, the third in the PaleoJoe’s Dinosaur Detective Club series, also by Wendy Caszatt-Allen, along with Joseph Kchodl, the real-live PaleoJoe (ISBN-13: 978-1934133101). I’m one chapter into this, and its got me. But first I had to snatch it back from my daughter, who snagged it the moment she saw it, since she had liked the first, The Disappearance of Dinosaur Sue, so much. In chapter one, Dakota has a crazy nightmare that he is plummeting through the air to the ground after sky diving with his backpack instead of his parachute. The PaleoJoe series is very fun, smart, and something to look for. My thoughts on the first one are here and here.

I expect both of these books to be well worth the time. I’ll say more about them when I’m done.

I’ve also been reading randomly from Meticulous Attachment, a book of poems by Mary Logue which won Honorable Mention last year from the Midwest Booksellers Association. It was a book I picked it up at the trade show last year, and inexplicably put away in a box. Late the summer I was cleaning up and opened the box, found this, along with many other excellent books, and began reading it. It is very good. I have it sitting on top of a pile on my desk where I can grab it and read and re-read her poems. Go out and find it. This year I picked up two more books by Mary, both detective novels. They’re upstairs, so I don’t have the names handy. One she co-wrote with her partner Pete Hautman, author of Rash, a sort of distopic view of our risk averse society. I met them both briefly at the trade show, where they were signing books. Good fun and nice folks.

Everything else is programming. I don’t really have anything to recommend here, though the books I’m working with are generally good and helpful. You’d think that I’d get my website in shape, but I’m working on too many things at once. My wife and I are still working on establishing our store, and I’m doing much of it myself. I’ve broken down and decided that I’ll have the actual site done by professionals, but I still have much to do myself. Along the way, I’ve improved my skills with Dreamweaver, CSS, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks, along with SQL, Apache, PHP and MySQl, but all my work is still sitting safely on my home server. And my desks, both at home and at work, are piled with software manuals. Senor Parrot remains ignored for now, along with my pile of books.

England is without a doubt one of the most significant cultures of the modern world. Its language and cultural heritage infiltrates and influences every corner of the modern world. Its writers and philosophers and scientists created much of the foundation of our modern thinking. Its writers are among the world’s favorite and enduring. A grasp of the literature of this great civilization is a significant key to understanding how our diverse world has pulled together commercially, politically, and technologically along lines one would never have anticipated one hundred years ago when Great Britain’s global colonial structure was clearly declining in the face of growing powers elsewhere in the world.

The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2006, ISBN: 978-0195077292) edited by noted education historian Diane Ravitch and her son, Michael Ravitch, is an ideal introduction for a college bound student in the upper high school grades. Its a splendid “first taste” of the spread on the table in the next room beyond. At 512 pages, this anthology of English literature and thinkers manages to cover a lot of ground. At 512 pages, a high school student would also get an introduction to lugging around just one of the many big books they’ll acquire in college (more…)

Jan Brett’s new book, The Three Snow Bears (Penguin Young Readers Group, ISBN-13: 9780399247927) is bound to please her fans, new and old. This story is a new twist on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and set in the frozen north. The young Inuit girl, Aloo-ki , is searching for her lost sled dogs when she comes across the empty igloo of the three snow bears. This is a perfect wintry-tale for snuggling and reading with a young child.

Every fan of Brett’s will recognize her book immediately. If you’re not a fan yet, you will be soon after opening it up. The illustrations are classic Brett. Each page illustrates the main story and the side pictures animate the back. This signature formula of Brett’s is a wonderful invention for adding detail that excites a child’s imagination and stimulates their own story-telling abilities, so important when they learn to read.

Here are some more pictures from the book.

What’s your favorite by Jan Brett? Mine is her illustrated version of Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat.

This in from ABC News:� Megablocks has funded a study (this link from ABC news) that shows kids who play with blocks develop better language skills than kids who don’t – not too surprising, if you think about it.

The article says the study was small, but the brief description of the experiment does seem to indicate that it was designed correctly.� The prescription?� Give your kid blocks and turn off the TV. But of course, everyone knows TV turns kids into blockheads!

I would guess that there are many other kinds of play that have equally positive impacts on the development of language skills.

Now, since Megablocks funded this study, it should get some confirmation through independent studies-great projects for grad students, I suppose, who are learning the ropes of experimental design and investigating cognitive development of young children. Still, its interesting, and another reason not to park your kid in front of the TV.

The cover of Toy Boat immediately got my attention when I saw an ad for it in today’s issue of Shelf Awareness. It didn’t hurt that I’m nuts about boats, of course. Loren Long has beautifully illustrated other kids books, and appears to have done it again. The story is by Randall DeSeve, and as described by the Penguin, the publisher, sounds like it would easily keep the attention of a young child. I’ll be looking for Toy Boat when I’m out shopping.

Here’s the description from Penguin:

A little boy has a toy boat. He made it out of a can, a cork, a yellow pencil, and some white cloth. The boy and his boat are inseparable, until one day when the wind pushes the toy boat out into the wide lake. Alone now, the little boat must face fierce waves, a grumpy ferry, a sassy schooner, and a growling speed boat. How the little boat misses the boy! But if he is going to survive, he must figure a way to do it on his own.

More about the book at the publisher’s web page:
Toy Boat – Randall DeSeve – Penguin Group USA

Author:Randall DeSeve
Illustrator: Loren Long
ISBN: 9780399243745
Published: Sept. 20, 2007 by Penguin