Suggested Reading - Life 101

Guests, Michael Dorris

ISBN: 978-0786800476

Moss is frustrated. His father has invited outsiders who dress in strange clothes and speak an odd language to the village's special harvest meal - and no one but Moss seems to care how that will change the way things have always been. No matter whom he talks to, no matter what he says, people just smile and tell him, "Someday you'll understand why." Impatient for answers, Moss impulsively goes into the forest alone for the first time, hoping to find some clue during his "away time" as to who he really is and who he should become as a man. But even in the woods, nothing is quite the way he expects it to be, and before he finds his way home, Moss must see the world as a more complicated - and much more interesting - place. Learning from the subtle morals of old stories as well as by simply listening to the people around him, Moss grapples with the ultimate truth of being a grown-up: you are who you are.


I am America, and so can You, Stephen Colbert

ISBN: 978-0446580502

Realizing that it takes more than thirty minutes a night to fix everything that's destroying America, Colbert bravely takes on the forces aligned to destroy our country—whether they be terrorists, environmentalists, or Kashi brand breakfast cereals. His various targets include nature (I've never trusted the sea. What's it hiding under there?), the Hollywood Blacklist (I would have named enough names to fill the Moscow phone book), and atheists (Imagine going through life completely duped into thinking that there's no invisible, omniscient higher power guiding every action on Earth. It's just so arbitrary!). Colbert also provides helpful illustrations and charts (Things That Are Trying to Turn Me Gay) [and] a complete transcript of his infamous speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner all of which add up to a book that is sure to be a bestseller and match the success of Colbert's former Daily Show boss Jon Stewart's America.


The Tooth Fairy, Graham Joyce

ISBN: 978-0312868338

An unlikely sprite assumes a sinister incarnation in this exceptional supernatural novel about a troublesome but endearing trio of boys coming of age in the English Midlands in the 1960s. Seven-year-old Sam first lays eyes on the Tooth Fairy, oddly dressed and smelling of horse's sweat and chamomile, in the middle of the night after he has stashed a tooth under his pillow. Over the years, the fairy becomes a fixture in his life. No one else can see or hear this odd creature, who is sometimes male, sometimes female and alternately coy, cruel and cuddly. Even without this personal demon, Sam would get into plenty of trouble with his chums: Clive, a "gifted child" who wins a NASA (yes, the American NASA) science contest at age six but longs to be normal; Terry, an affable lad whose life is plagued by catastrophe; and Alice, the fetching, knowing girl who drives the boys wild with lust. Joyce (Requiem) engagingly describes the boys' childhood experiences, sampling drugs, toying with explosives, worrying over acne, and carefully portrays their childlike stoicism in the face of several horrifying tragedies. Sam worries that the Tooth Fairy, who grows menacing and sexually demanding, is responsible for those calamities. The novel's appeal lies primarily in the three boys, who are charmingly mischievous, naive and hormone-driven, portrayed by Joyce with a gentle wit. No less compelling, though, is the fairy, a fleur de mal from childhood's secret garden whose perfume seduces Sam and the reader alike into a fertile, startling nightmare.


The Butterfly Jar, Jeff Moss

ISBN: 978-0553057041

In the tradition of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends (Harper, 1974) and Jack Prelutsky's New Kid on the Block (Greenwillow, 1984), Moss presents another slightly wacky, fun-to-read collection of original poems. Although the pen-and-ink illustrations and the stark white cover seem a little too closely styled after Silverstein's books, the 80-plus poems can stand on their own merit. Some are just a few lines:

If the moon were made of cheese
I would reach into the sky
for a late-night snacking sandwich
of ham and moon on rye

while others stretch to two full pages. In most cases, Moss describes common childhood adventures and misadventures with a fresh slant. Demarest's cartoonlike sketches complement the verses and are subtly humorous.


Metamorphoses, Ovid

ISBN: 978-0140440584

Ovid’s sensuous and witty poem brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation—often as a result of love or lust—where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic and yet playful, the Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes.


Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

ISBN: 978-0141439761

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"


Frankenstein, Mary Shelly

Webpage: http://www.literature.org/authors/shelley-mary/frankenstein/

Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image … but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books."


The People in Pineapple Place, Anne Lindbergh

ISBN: 978-0380707669

Poor August Brown. He's lived all of his ten years in Vermont and now is home was in Washington, D.C., where he didn't know a single person his own age. But that was before he decided to follow the rag-bag lady...

Down the street they went-checking garbage along the way-until they came to Pineapple Place. It was a quaint little street with cobblestones and six cheerful little houses... and children! A ginger-haired girl, a red headed boy with four sisters, and a girl named April. Little did august know they were all locked in a different time and place, and only he could see them. Or that he and the invisible children were about to embark on the most exciting adventure ever, roller-skating through buildings of the nations capitol with everyone staring at the highly visible August.


The Dream Hunters, Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano

ISBN: 978-1563895739

Like most fables, the story begins with a wager between two jealous animals, a fox and a badger: which of them can drive a young monk from his solitary temple? The winner will make the temple into a new fox or badger home. But as the fox adopts the form of a woman to woo the monk from his hermitage, she falls in love with him. Meanwhile, in far away Kyoto, the wealthy Master of Yin-Yang, the onmyoji, is plagued by his fears and seeks tranquility in his command of sorcery. He learns of the monk and his inner peace; he dispatches demons to plague the monk in his dreams and eventually kill him to bring his peace to the onmyoji. The fox overhears the demons on their way to the monk and begins her struggle to save the man whom at first she so envied.

Dream Hunters is a beautiful package. From the ink-brush painted endpapers to the luminous page layouts--including Amano's gate-fold painting of Morpheus in a sea of reds, oranges, and violets--this book has been crafted for a sensuous reading experience. Gaiman has developed as a prose stylist in the last several years with novels and stories such as Neverwhere and Stardust, and his narrative rings with a sense of timelessness and magic that gently sustains this adult fairy tale. The only disappointment here is that the book is so brief.


Black Beauty, Anna Sewell

ISBN: 978-0439228909

Black Beauty tells the story of the horse's own long and varied life, from a well-born colt in a pleasant meadow to an elegant carriage horse for a gentleman to a painfully overworked cab horse. Throughout, Sewell rails--in a gentle, 19th-century way--against animal maltreatment. Young readers will follow Black Beauty's fortunes, good and bad, with gentle masters as well as cruel. Children can easily make the leap from horse-human relationships to human-human relationships, and begin to understand how their own consideration of others may be a benefit to all.