The Thin Red Line

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.

Basically I am just an over-grown kid and I love a circus. The Golden Age of the Circus, a richly illustrated oversized book that passed under my scanner yesterday is divided into three sections. The first details the history of the modern circus roughly from 1760 to World War II. The illustrations are fun but the text is a bit dry at times and I confess I didn’t read every word. The second section details the broad types of circus acts from the equestrian rosinback, liberty and voltige turns (acrobatics and dancing atop galloping horses, a troop of horses without riders performing in the ring, and a wild cavalry specialty with daring leaps and stunts, respectively), to the acrobats and tumblers, the equilibristes who walk or dance on the high wire or "tight rope", the aerialists who swing and leap from that "flying trapeeze", the joeys or clowns and the various exotic animal acts, lions and tigers and bears, oh my. The final section talks about the challenges faced by traditional circuses after WWII, about modern circuses from the still kicking Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey to the now ubiquitous Cirque du Soleil.

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