Pancake Hen Day
Happy Thanksgiving. The turkey is thawed and in the fridge, everything needed has been bought and I am feeling just a bit bad that I did not bring home one of the library‘s many, many Thanksgiving books. Ah well. One of my duties as a page is shelf reading, which is in fact usually every bit as boring as it sounds, going along reading the spine label of each book on the shelf and re-arranging them so that all are precisely in order. At the moment, they have the library divided into sections, and each page is responsible for reading a particular section. The sections are also broken up, so that I am responsible for reading from somewhere in the high three hundreds up to somewhere in the low 600′s and also for reading Easy Picture Books from DePoala to Henderson, which is how it is I found myself last week on the floor in the Children’s area putting a huge stack of books by prolific children’s author/illustrator Tomie DePoala into alphabetical order.
Pancakes For Breakfast is as it happens a wordless story book about a country woman who wakes up, washes her face and thinks of having pancakes for breakfast. She gathers together her flour, then goes out and milks the cow and then churns the milk into butter, goes out and collects eggs from her hen, then finally makes a trek to a man who sells freshly drawn maple syrup. Then comes home to find that the dog and cat have gotten into and ruined her gather supplies. Then she smells the unmistakable scent of pancakes cooking and heads over to the neighbor’s house and eats all of Their breakfast. A very cute story book. Recommended. Buy now only $6.00
The colors in Keith Baker’s Big Fat Hen are truly stunning. The reds, greens and purples, browns, blues and grays are just very eye appealing and Baker’s drawings superb. The text, however, strangely and seemingly mis-quoted from a popular children’s song ("One, Two, Buckle My Shoe….") are considerably less satisfying. Not Recommended.
And finally today, Anita Lobel’s Hello, Day! is also a very beautifully colorful and well illustrated book about the sounds all the different animals make ("…the cow says MOOO!") when they really mean "Hello, Day!". Recommended.
I am thankful for many things, especially including each and every one of you who visit here and read my little book reviews. Here’s wishing you and yours a happy and safe holiday.
I am not sure which can be more intensely boring shelf reading or weeding. Both are painstaking. I still have a lot of weeding to do.
I took an early trip to my relatives and had a thanksgiving afternoon. We left at about four from my relatives house and were home by five when it is pitch black outside on the highways.
I just have to say that I feel your pain on the shelf-reading. I always worked in very small libraries where everyone had to take a section. We never had anything interesting like children’s books or fiction, though, just policy and legal/legislative stuff.
Have a good Thanksgiving!