Tag: picture books

Peter Rabbit and company (Picture Book Roundup #6)

I haven’t done a picture book roundup in nearly a month, so here’s one on my Beatrix Potter books (books 86-88 for 2009), because I recently found a great Peter Rabbit gift set at Book Sale

I didn’t really grow up on Beatrix Potter; I was familiar with her books (well, who wouldn’t be, they’re the best selling picture books of all time!) but I didn’t really pay attention to them until later on, I think when I was in high school, when my sister got The Tailor of Gloucester as a Christmas present and it became my favorite Beatrix Potter story.

The Tailor of Gloucester is similar to The Elves and the Shoemaker story, but in Beatrix Potter style, it involves a cat named Simpkin and a band of mice. The tailor needs to sew a coat for the Mayor of Gloucester, and has all the pieces cut out and laid out at his shop, but he is lacking one skein of cherry-colored silk.

Continue reading “Peter Rabbit and company (Picture Book Roundup #6)”

A narf, a seamstress, and the orchestra (Picture book roundup #5)

It’s been a while since my last picture book roundup, mainly because I haven’t had the time to put some protective plastic cover on my new picture book acquisitions (and you know I can’t read a “naked” book). 

I got three picture books that came already encased in plastic, so here they are in today’s roundup: Lady in the Water: A bedtime story by M. Night Shyamalan (illustrated by Crash McCreery), Lucy Dove by Janice Del Negro (illustrated by Leonid Gore), and Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin by Lloyd Moss (illustrated by Marjorie Priceman), books 73-75 for 2009.

Lady in the Water is based on the film of the same title. Having watched that documentary about M. Night Shyamalan on cable that turned out to be a hoax (a guerilla tactic for the pre-publicity of The Village), I still get the creeps reading this book, which, in a cautionary tone, tells the reader about the narf, the “lady in the water,” a rare type of sea nymph that could be living right in your backyard.

The narrator enumerates the signs that point to a narf: sprinklers going off by mistake, slime in the swimming pool, pinpricks in the chest, and the narf looks for a person that can be used as a vessel so that she can return to the ocean.

But there is something else that could be in your backyard, the hyena-like scrunt that hunts for the narf as prey. The scrunt is also afraid of Tartutic, three monkey-like creatures that lie in wait for the scrunt to make a wrong move.
Continue reading “A narf, a seamstress, and the orchestra (Picture book roundup #5)”

Blast from the Past (Picture book roundup #3)

There are some books that stand out in my childhood memories, and I am on a crusade to find them all again to add to my collection. It hasn’t been easy, as some of them have been out of print for a while now, so I scour Book Sale and BookMooch for copies.
Recently I was able to find some of them, and I thought I’d share them here (Books 41-43 for 2009).First up is Tubby and the Lantern by Al Perkins, illustrated by Rowland Wilson. For a long time I couldn’t remember the title of this book, I just knew we read it in Think & Try (my pre-school) days, during story time and it was shown on Batibot, and that there was a Chinese boy and an elephant.
I mooched a copy from the US, and had it sent to my my mom when she was in the States as the user wasn’t sending international. Finally it came in one of the balikbayan boxes my mom sent home.

Tubby and the Lantern is about the friendship of a Chinese boy named Ah Mee and a small elephant named Tubby. It’s set in a Chinese, lantern-making town, where Ah Mee’s parents are the best lantern makers. On Ah Mee’s birthday, Tubby decides to surprise Ah Mee by making him a giant lantern, which proves disastrous as he is carried into the air and Ah Mee has to save him.

I remember back in pre-school, we had a lantern-making session after reading the book, just like Ah Mee and Tubby made them. Except the candles, of course!

Even more than 20 years later, I still love the story and the cheery illustrations. The illustrator, Rowland B. Wilson, used to work for Playboy, and also worked on animated films like Disney’s Hercules, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Little Mermaid, and Tarzan, as well as Don Bluth’s Thumbelina. He also worked on the series Schoolhouse Rock.

(Tubby and the Lantern photo by Glenn Mullaly)

The next book is also a throwback to my kindergarten days — Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman (illus. by Eulalie). I still don’t have a copy of this book, but I found a modernized version by Little Golden Books, entitled The Boy and the Tigers (by Helen Bannerman, illus. by Valeria Petrone).

Little Black Sambo is the bizarre story of a boy who walks into a jungle (haha, a leisurely stroll, with an umbrella to boot!) and runs into a pack of tigers, who make him give up his clothes, shoes, and even his umbrella in exchange for his life. The tigers end up fighting over Little Black Sambo’s belongings and they spin round and round chasing each other until they melt into a puddle of butter and Little Black Sambo’s father uses the butter to make pancakes for the family! Fascinating stuff, really!

I remember reading this over and over with morbid interest when I was a kid; I even remember dressing up in my raincoat and umbrella so I could role-play Little Black Sambo and fend off the fierce tigers. So I was so disappointed with the new edition, because it was sanitized and cutesy-fied so it’s less offensive and more lovable. The original book was criticized for being racist, but I grew up reading the book and I was oblivious to the racism, I think it was more anti-tiger than anything else, hehe.

In the new edition, Little Black Sambo becomes a hindu boy named Rajani and the tigers are so cute they’re not even scary. The illustrations are great, but they obviously chose the style to bowdlerize the new edition.

Arrgh!!! I still want a copy of Little Black Sambo.

Finally, my last book for the roundup is Many Moons by James Thurber, illustrated by Louis Slobodkin. It won a Caldecott Medal in 1943.
I actually have two copies of this book, a new paperback edition that I found at the Book Sale Warehouse and an old hardbound library discount that I found at the Book Sale in Cagayan de Oro (P35!), but in case you’re wondering, I’m not letting either one go.

I remember this was the final story in our CRL workbook in Grade 3 (i think…) and it’s about Princess Lenore, the princess who asks for the moon, and the court jester (who outwits the Lord Chamberlain, the palace wizard, and the mathematician) who gets the moon for her.

It’s a great fairy tale, and Louis Slobodkin’s swirly illustrations are the perfect touch.

I am still looking for a copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo, Robert the Rose Horse, and Are You My Mother? I hope I can find them soon :)

***

My copies: Tubby and the Lantern, hardcover; The Boy and the Tigers, hardcover; Many Moons, paperback / hardcover

My rating: Tubby and the Lantern, 5/5 stars; The Boy and the Tigers, 2/5 stars; Many Moons, paperback / hardcover 5/5 stars

The One with the Dramatic Reading

Book #36 for 2009
Love you Forever by Robert Munsch

Friends fans will remember an episode (Season 10- TOW Emma’s cake) where Joey does a dramatic reading of a famous children’s book as a present for Emma’s birthday.

Scroll forward to around 7 min:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDynkzIE1tw]

Joey is reading Love You Forever, a timeless story about a mother’s love for her child, and how the child grows up to pass on this love to his own child.

I finally have a copy because it turns out I got one as an exchange gift from the INK Christmas party (thanks Nic!) and I squealed in delight when I found out. I’ve been wanting a copy of this book ever since the Friends episode, and I’m glad I didn’t have to buy it at full price.

Haha, now I can’t seem to be able to read it without the Joey accent!

***
my copy: paperback, from exchange gift

my rating: 5/5 stars

Curiouser and curiouser…

The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary
Book #29 of 2009
I took a break from reading In the Company of the Courtesan first, as I dropped by Mall of Asia after work to hit Book Sale, and get my stash of “carmel”-cheddar popcorn from the Chicago Popcorn Shops (yum!) with my sister.
So I got home around 10 and stretched out on the padded divan with The Curious Sofa. When I picked it up at Book Sale, I actually recognized Edward Gorey’s illustration style instantly, so it was a cinch to figure out that Ogdred Weary was a pseudonym, an anagram of his name.
To those who don’t recognize him, Edward Gorey is an artist/writer known for his macabre pen and ink illustrations and over a hundred books, the type that blur the line between adult books and children’s books.

The Curious Sofa instantly caught my attention due to the subtitle (a pornographic work), so of course I had to buy it, haha, I thank my lucky book-scavenging stars that it was only P25 (Squee!).
The book is about a young woman named Alice, who meets the well-endowed Herbert in the park, and they hop from place to place and are joined by more and more “well-endowed” people, and they all do, erm, “naughty” things together.

“Naughty” is in quotation marks because Gorey leaves it to the reader’s imagination. The picture book is actually as just as pornographic as you think it is, because while it makes a lot of suggestions, it doesn’t actually contain anything overtly pornographic, and the characters could all be twiddling their thumbs or having wild wild sex, depending on how much fun you want to have with the book.

Curiously (pun intended), the book reminds me of one other book on my shelf — Audrey Niffenegger’s The Three Incestuous Sisters, which is about six times the size of this book. I got my copy at the National Book Store cut price sale, for P299.

The Three Incestuous Sisters is in full color, albeit a muted palette and sepia undertones, painstakingly created using watercolor and a technique called aquatint, where a pattern is scratched through a layer of wax on a zinc plate. The plate is then submerged in an acid bath. The acid erodes the zinc where the pattern is scratched and creates grooves for the ink to fall into to create a print. No wonder it took Niffenegger 14 years to finish the book! The paintings are haunting, and bizarrely beautiful at the same time.

Niffenegger (author of The Time Traveler’s Wife), calls it a novel in pictures. It tells a twisted story of three sisters who lived by the sea: Ophile, the smart one; Clothilde, the talented one; and the youngest, Bettine, the pretty one. When Ophile and Bettine fall in love with the same man, the storyline goes off on a surreal tangent, as tragedy after tragedy strikes, and the sisters’ relationship is never the same again.
Both books employ the noir style and surrealism, although The Curious Sofa was some three decades ahead, copyrighted in 1961. They differ in tone, though, as Gorey’s work is cheeky and humorous while Niffenegger’s is evocative, and deep-seated in emotion.
I lean more towards Gorey though, as I felt really drained after reading The Three Incestuous Sisters, as if I’d absorbed all the emotions flying around in the book. And also because I’m not a big fan of the surreal; there’s just a point where it becomes hokey to me.

***
My copies: The Curious Sofa, hardbound; The Three Incestuous Sisters, hardbound

My rating: The Curious Sofa, 5/5 stars; The Three Incestuous Sisters, 4/5 stars