All posts by Abby

Feltboard, Spare time - Culture

Moving Day feltboard pieces

Before leaving the library today, I set up the story room for Monday morning’s toddler storytime – and realized that I actually had my camera with me (for a change).  So here is a photo of the feltboard pieces I made for Robert Kalan’s Moving Day, the story of a hermit crab who has outgrown his beloved shell home and wanders the ocean floor searching for a suitable shell home upgrade.  Click the image to enlarge:

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I love doing this story in feltboard form, because there is so much repetition (“too big, too small, too long, too short, too smooth, too rough…”) and the feltboard pieces really encourage the kids and parents to echo along with the repeated words.  It makes for a fun communal storytime experience.

Note that when I took the photo, one shell had hidden itself away behind another, so the “too plain” shell is missing from the photo. But it does exist!

I’m hoping that by posting these feltboard pieces I can give a little inspiration to children’s librarians and teachers who are just beginning to use and make feltboard stories.  Please let me know if you find these photos to be useful!

Spare time - Culture

Pippa

Pippa has noticed that the other cats in our life – Max and Ophy – have both appeared on the blog, and she’s a teensy bit annoyed that she hasn’t been featured here.  So here is a photo of pensive Pippa, looking out at the world (click on image to enlarge):

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And thanks, Dan, for teaching me how to make these photos be a manageable size.  Good afternoon project for me!

Young adult book review

Envy by Anna Godbersen

I was really, really looking forward to reading Envy over my vacation.  Good, light, lusty historical fiction – an excellent vacation book.  And I enjoyed its two predecessors, The Luxe and Rumors; though they’re not great literature, they are engaging and have just enough history in them to balance the blueblood romantic shenanigans.  Like chocolate frosting on a saltine.

But what a disappointment Envy was!  The writing is simply atrocious in spots, plodding in others, never sparkling, never fun.  It feels as if Godbersen was rushed to a deadline and the book was under-edited.  Or perhaps she is sick of writing about these people and her heart wasn’t in it this time.  Or both.  Whatever the reason, I winced at word usage more times than I can count, and I got very tired of reading detailed clothing descriptions when a bit of romantic action would have been much more interesting.

Which was the main problem with the story:  there wasn’t much of a story.  Unlike the two previous books, the characters don’t end up very far from where they started 416 pages earlier.  Diana is still pining for Henry, Penelope has become a bore (what happened to the Penelope we loved to hate?), Liz is stultifyingly dull, and Henry is just a sad drunk.  Carolina makes the most progress, and she was the character I liked most at the end of Rumors, but even her journey in this third book left me bored.  Bored, bored, bored. 

Lisa, another Luxe series fan, also read Envy last week, and had much the same reaction that I did (though she did cite a particular plot point that had slipped my mind, using a highly descriptive word, and challenged me to “put THAT on your blog!” – which I won’t).  Lisa pointed out that this third book seems to have been written simply to set up the reader for the fourth book.  I wonder if either of us will even want to read that fourth book when it comes out…I doubt that I will.

Etc., Spare time - Culture

Done – Seen – Read

There’s nothing like a mid-winter vacation to get your mojo back.  Here’s a quick overview of our week off (with details on the most important bits to come over the next few days):

Done

Trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (exhibits visited included the two Kyoto exhibits, the exhibit of photography of the human body, and the bits of American furniture that we could find)

Concert at Symphony Hall, Boston, for an afternoon of Mozart: Symphonies 39, 40, and 41, conducted by James Levine

Dinner at Dalya’s, where we had our wedding reception all those years ago.  Excellent food, as always.

Lunches at 31 Main and Helen’s Cafe; takeout Valentine’s Day dinner from Savoury Lane (great bargain, lasted us two meals…).

The required vacation week bookstore visit, to the Concord Bookshop, my favorite independent bookstore.  Remember to support your local bookseller!

A short-lived trip to the Burlington Mall, mostly to get face soap for me and an iTunes gift card for Jim.  Not really our thing.

Made a batch of homemade soft pretzels (yum!), and cooked up some kind of awesome nachos.

Spent a fun evening with Linda & Andy (and Greg), Greg & Carolyn (and Ben); dined on Andy’s awesome vegetarian stir-fry and Carolyn’s yummy cherry pie.

Visited with Jim’s mother and brother; enjoyed her homemade lasagna and birthday cake (happy belated birthday, Bill!).

Seen

High School Musical 3: Senior Year.  Don’t laugh.  I like these movies.  B+ ~ would have been A- if it hadn’t been so uncharacteristically dark.

My Best Friend’s Girl, with Dane Cook and Kate Hudson.  Hard to grade this one, since I’m still not sure what I thought of it.  B+?  B?  Should I take off points for offensiveness, even if it’s very funny offensiveness?

Stardust, with Claire Danes and Charlie Cox, as well as Michelle Pfeiffer as an old (sometimes beautiful, sometimes haggard) witch and Robert DeNiro as a cross-dressing gay pirate (???!!!???).  A- ~ good fun, well done. 

Across the Universe.  Couldn’t stomach this one!  After about fifteen minutes Jim and I both stuck out our tongues in disgust and turned it off.  Blech.

Death at a Funeral.  Very, very funny.  Really enjoyed this one.  A.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Stopped watching this one a few minutes in, after consulting with my sister the professor, who gently commented that the book is way better than the movie, and I would be doing the book a disservice if I didn’t read it first.

And a few favorite T.V. shows:  “The Office,” “30 Rock” (which I’ve grown to love, surprisingly), “The Vicar of Dibley,” “Chef,” and a few minutes of assorted crap to cleanse the palate.

Read

Envy by Anna Godbersen

100 Cupboards by N.D. Wilson

Ranger’s Apprentice: The Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan

The Great Tree of Avalon by T.A. Barron (begun, not finished)

This Old House magazine

The Atlantic

The New Yorker

More on the books in the coming days, of course.

Thank goodness for vacations.  The house is clean, the cats are happy, and Jim and I look like ourselves again – fewer stress wrinkles on our well-rested faces.  Aaaah.

Blog administration

On vacation

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Just a note that I’m on vacation until Monday the 23rd, and have decided to take a bit of a break from blog writing - I haven’t felt inspired to write on this vacation, and readership appears to have dwindled anyway, so a break seems justified and wise.

Join me again on Monday, February 23, and I promise to share some thoughts on the many books that I’ve read this week.

Etc., Spare time - Culture

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Have a happy day, everyone!  Jim and I will be enjoying dinner at home, courtesy of Savoury Lane, with the woodstove and the cats.  (Maybe next year we’ll make it to Nantucket for our once-annual Valentine’s trip, but the economy is way too dicey this year for such a splurge.)  Hope you all have a wonderful holiday, and here’s to peace and love reigning for a day.

Children's book reviews, Storytime

The Odd Egg by Emily Gravett

I love this new picturebook by one of my favorite author/illustrators, and on a whim decided to use it for preschool storytime yesterday, even though it seems more logical to use it for one-on-one book sharing due to its size, shape, and multiple partial pages.  I was also worried that my preschool storytime crowd might think the story was too simple and spare and not be engaged.

But The Odd Egg was a total hit.  The kids were completely enthralled, and were so excited about the story’s progression that they couldn’t stay in their seats.  After several of them had run up to the book to view the pictures (blocking the view of others, of course), I had to start going around the room with each picture so that each child could get a good moment to view each illustration up close.  And the best part was the guffaws of laughter at the final illustration on the book’s endpages.  (I’m really glad that Nanette, the library’s awesome cataloger, had the foresight to process the book without the dust jacket so that last picture of duck and his “baby” can be fully appreciated.)

It’s so nice to find a picturebook that an adult (me) loves, and that also passes the test of a group of child listeners.  Bonus:  the kids loved the book, and stayed attentive to it, even though they were all wired up on the tons of sugar that they’d just consumed at their school’s Valentine’s Day party.  If a book can pass THAT test, then it’s a real winner.

Storytime

New murals

Great art project last Thursday during the preschool storytime – free paint.  The kids worked together on painting two large pieces of butcher paper that I had taped to two tables.  They mixed colors and painted as a team for a long time – 45 minutes or so – and by the end had produced two lovely murals for the walls of the story room.

The coolest part of these murals is that they ended up working like scratch board, since the kids took such a long time to paint.  The first layer of many wonderful colors, applied by paintbrush, had dried by the time the second layer of mostly blue was applied with hands and fingernails.  As the kids used their fingernails on that blue layer, they exposed the first, multi-colored layer.

The murals were finally dry when I arrived for work yesterday morning, so I hung them on the walls, and they really look fantastic.  Really, really fantastic.  Drop by sometime to see them!  (And I’ll also remember to bring my camera tomorrow so I can post a photo here for you out-of-town readers.)

Book groups, Young adult book review

Today’s Challenge: The Hobbit

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As usual, I’ll be spending my Sunday doing my homework: reading the book that will be discussed in this week’s book group at the library.  The teen book group meets this coming Tuesday, so today I’m reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, a book that was chosen by one of the teens in the book group.

99.99% of the time I view this homework assignment as a wonderful opportunity to keep up to date on recently published children’s and young adult literature, since most of our book choices are newly published.  I love reading, I love children’s and young adult literature, and I love facilitating these book groups each week, so it’s all good (though it’s always that much better in the wintertime, when I can read by the woodstove).  But I’ll admit that The Hobbit falls into that .01% of the equation – I’ve struggled through this book several times, both on my own and while in grad school, and have never ever ever loved it.  Though I thought it was a great suggestion for the teen book group, I personally dreaded having to read it again.

When I read The Hobbit in grad school, I bought a fancy illustrated copy of the book for myself, hoping that Michael Hague’s illustrations would make the reading more palatable.  They didn’t, and I ended up donating that copy to the children’s room collection (it’s been gratifying to see that many children have loved reading my donated copy).  So when it came time to read The Hobbit this time around, at first I checked out that copy that I had donated.  But I realized that I had come to loath that yellow cover and Hague’s lush illustrations, and so I took a trip to the Concord Bookshop last week and bought a new copy of the book for myself, one which is illustrated by the author. 

And something surprising happened when I began reading it yesterday: I actually liked the book.  Huh?  What a shocking surprise.  My reaction supports the reader response theory that time and place and mood can affect the reader’s opinion of the book.  This copy feels good in my hand, not too big, not too small, smooth and clean.  The colors of the cover make me happy.  The size of the font is just right – large enough to read, but small enough that the book remains a manageable size.  Tolkien’s illustrations and maps suit his text, the careful spidering lettering matching the tone of the book.  And I’m reading it on a beautiful sunny winter day, the sun reflecting off the snow outside.  The woodstove is cranked, the cats are taking turns in my lap, and Jim is in the porch playing guitar.

All these things add up, and reading The Hobbit doesn’t feel like a chore this time around.  And who knows, maybe I’ve finally reached the point in my life where this is the right book at the right time for me.  Maybe I’m finally ready to read and understand and appreciate it.  I can only hope that the teens in the book group have a similarly positive experience with the book…

Etc., Spare time - Culture

Max’s new best friend

We’re happy to report that two weeks ago Max (now known as Duncan) moved to a wonderful new home, and now has a cat best friend who actually likes to play with him!

And Ophy and Pippa are happy to report that their lives are back to normal – mostly napping, some eating, and absolutely NO kitten attacks!  So while Jim and Abby miss Max’s youthful exuberance, we’re all thrilled to be back in our regular groove, and doubly thrilled that Max ended up in such a terrific home.  Thanks, Susan and Chris!