Sheflie: January 19, 2017: Sands of Time

 

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Shelfie: January 15, 2017: ReReading Blue Lily, Lily Blue

Oops.  In planning for another adventure and just the day-to-day I never did get around to finishing a blog post (though I’m close on at least one).  I didn’t want to leave you without anything for the next two weeks, so enjoy some of these favorite lines of mine from Maggie Stiefvater’s Blue Lily, Lily Blue, the third book in The Raven Cycle.

Needless to say, if you read the full pages, you might find some spoilers, but the quotes I’ve highlighted are all I think pretty safe.

“She drifted toward the bedroom, on her way to have a bath or take a nap or start a war.”

“Violence was a disease Gansey didn’t think he could catch.”

“Blue was perfectly aware that is was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening.  It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.”

Book Reviews: May 2018 Picture Book Roundup: Schooling, Mothers’ Love, Unicorns, and a Wedding

Llama Llama Misses Mama by Anna Dewdney. Viking-Penguin Random, 2009. Intended audience: Ages 2-5.

Llama Llama is going to school for the first time today, and he’s nervous after he gets there and meets all the new faces, after he is left by his mama. He spends the morning moping and refusing to play, but after he cries at lunch and is reassured by both his teacher and his classmates, his day takes a turn. He plays with his new friends till the end of the day when his mama returns. The he shows his mama around the school, and they play together. He decides that he loves school. This is an all-too-familiar feeling and scenario for parents and young students, teachers and students-to-be. For that, this is an important book, and Dewdney’s illustrations are as always endearing.

****

 

Llama Llama Loves to Read by Anna Dewdney and Reed Duncan and illustrated by J. T. Morrow. Viking-Penguin Random, 2018. Intended audience: Ages 3-5.

Published posthumously and completed in her style by her long time partner Reed Duncan, this school time story teaches lessons about the alphabet and the words that they can spell and the sentences that are made by words, the songs, the books. This seemed a little longer, a little more didactic than some of the other Llama Llama books with its vocabulary words and its recitation of the alphabet. It’s more picture book than a primer though. Llama Llama is growing up, and he’s less in need of reassurance of his mother’s love. Now there are other lessons to be learned. The text still has the rhythm and rhyme of Dewdney’s earlier works. The illustrations seem somehow a little more cartoonish, though it is clear that J. T. Morrow tried to stay true to the character of Dewdney’s earlier works.

***

 

Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman. Penguin Random, 1988. First published 1960. Intended audience: Ages 3-7.

This is not the first time that I read this story. I don’t think it’ll be the last. But somehow I’ve never read and reviewed it or rated it on Goodreads. A baby bird hatches while his mother is away, and he knows that his mother should be there when he hatches, so he goes off to look for her—falling right out of the nest. He goes to a number of animals and objects, questioning each about being his mother, but always getting the negative answer, getting more and more desperate with each negative. He visits a kitten, a dog, a cow, a boat, a plane, and finally a Snort. The Snort is the only one to help him find his mother—although the baby bird finds the Snort very scary. The Snort picks him up in its claw and puts him back into his nest, where his mother is waiting, wondering where he has been. The story is told in rhyme with a lot of repetition.

You could probably read into this one; I’m sure it has been done. (Actually there are fewer scholarly articles readily available on Google Scholar than I would have expected, and most of those seem to be about adoption law and children’s rights and possibly only obscurely reference the book; I didn’t buy access to the articles to check.) The baby bird seeks family in all kinds of critters but cannot find it; none of them look like him. He doesn’t seem to believe that family necessarily needs to look alike, but the animals are all against interspecies families and the objects—except the Snort—all reject him with their silence. The only one that the baby bird does not believe can be his mother is a wheel-less, broken, junked car, seeming to suggest that he believes that what is necessary in a mother is locomotion, a certain spark of life—perhaps this is because his mother did leave so he knows that she was capable of self-transportation, but perhaps there is a comment there on the necessity of a mother to be alive. That the baby bird refuses to entertain the idea that his mother could be inanimate, no longer capable of locomotion, no longer possessing a lifespark is just heartrending—because some must accept that, and he is too young to even entertain the idea.

—

Stack the Cats by Susie Ghahremani. Abrams Appleseed-Harry N. Abrams, 2018.

I really enjoyed this story about cats and math. It’s counting, addition, division, and subtraction. Three cats stack, but four and five cats endanger the pile, so six cats become two stacks of three each. After ten cats become just too many, the cats begin to go away. The illustrated cats are delightfully round fluffs with small mouths and a wide variety of colors and patterns. There’s a sort of singsong rhythm to the simple text. The story ends with an invitation stack the cats creatively, to invent your own math solutions with the cats—of which by the last page there are more than ten—I count 21!

*****

 

My Mom is Magical by Hello!Lucky and Sabrina Moyle and illustrated by Eunice Moyle. Harry N. Abrams, 2018.

“Mom,” portrayed here as a rainbow-maned and –tailed and rainbow-speckled unicorn, is described in a set of creative comparisons that rely on alliteration: “sillier than a band of bananas,” “sweeter than a cloud of cotton candy.” There’s not a lot of story to it. Pages alternate between pages of text that pops from the page between a frame of illustrations like an affirmation poster and pages of the unicorn illustrated in silly poses and fun costumes. It would make a sweet gift, an alternate to a card for a mother.

***

I’ve Loved You Since Forever by Hoda Kotb and illustrated by Suzie Mason. HarperCollins, 2018.

The illustrations are the star of this short picture book about a parent’s and child’s love. “Before the moon lit up the night and elephants roamed free, there was you and there was me.” Via a bunch of nature-related forevers, Kotb implies the eternity of souls and suggests that a parent and a child await the time when their two “stars” become not separate “you and I” but “we.” I don’t know if she intended to put that much philosophy in the book, but it’s there. It’s a fine sentiment and statement, but there are many variations on this same theme out there, and frankly it’s a drop in a big puddle of sentiment. It takes a lot to stand out from that puddle.

***

Fancy Nancy and the Wedding of the Century by Jane O’Connor and illustrated Robin Preiss Glasser. HarperCollins, 2014. Intended audience: Ages 4-8.

Bree has been to lots of weddings before, but Nancy has not. Bree and Nancy imagine and dream that the wedding will be very fancy, but Uncle Cal wants everything kept secret from the girls until right before the event, so even as the family packs up to go to meet Cal and Dawn, his bride-to-be, Nancy knows nothing of what they have planned for the wedding—not even whether or not she will be the flower girl, though she is almost certain that she will be. Nancy wakes up from her dream of a fancy hotel wedding to find that the family has arrived at a humble cabin the wilderness. Nancy is at first very disappointed, though no one else seems to be, but there’s a party beforehand, and Dawn is kind to Nancy and even borrows a crown from her for the wedding so that she will have something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. In the end, even Nancy agrees that this nontraditional wedding, without any of the frills that she expected, is the most “glorious.” As with most Nancy stories, this was a little long for a story time, but I enjoyed the story nonetheless, and it was a nice change to have a wedding tale about a wedding free from the traditional trappings. I had a group this week for story time too that could sit through the longer stories, so it worked out.

****

Today I’ll Be a Unicorn by Dana Simpson. Andrews McMeel, 2018. Intended audience: Ages 3-5.

This book uses characters from Dana Simpson’s graphic novel series, Heavenly Nostrils, but the story and the characters are fairly universal, really. A young girl wants to be a unicorn. She dons a tail and a headband with horse ears, a horn, and a crown of flowers. With her unicorn friend, she prances through the meadow and sits atop a rainbow. But unicorns don’t eat pizza. So maybe tomorrow she will be a unicorn. There’s perhaps not much original about this story; it’s been done before with other animals—and I think even with pizza. I’m not sure how much I care about the originality. The story remains cute, and Simpson’s illustrations are delightfully whimsical.

****

These reviews are not endorsed by any of the authors or publishers or anyone else involved in the making of these books. They are independent, honest reviews by a reader.

Shelfie: January 7, 2017: A Cat in a Tree

Callie thought that the hollow of the Christmas tree as we put it away book by book was a box for sits.

August 8: A Gray Line Through Wicklow

All photos are mine.  Click to view them in more detail and to read captions where applicable.

Today’s tour is courtesy of Gray Line Tours. We booked through a site, wicklowmountainstour.ie, which offered even more of a discount than did booking through the Gray Line site, but it was confusing because none of the email addresses were what I would have expected.  Gray Line was helpful and quick to respond when I wrote fearing that our purchase had been illegitimate.

Another of the bucket list items that we sought to check off was a walk through the Sally Gap in the Wicklow Mountains. My sister was long in love with the film P.S. I Love You and wanted to recreate the scene where the American woman is wandering lost along the road.

No tour that we could find and no public transit will get you near the Sally Gap, a crossroads in the middle of the Wicklow Mountains National Park, nor could I even find a way to hire a cab to drop us there, though I did my research only online and didn’t actually call any companies to ask if it was a possibility, international rates for phone calls being what they are.

There were many different sites and tours offering to go through the Sally Gap and the Wicklow Mountains National Park, and several offering photo opportunities at a bridge in the Park where the two main characters of the film kiss, but when I started tracking the tours back, they all seemed to boil down to three or four different companies. The one walking tour ran only once or twice a month and not during the time that we needed it to be.

I contacted one company and was told that a walk such as what my sister wanted would be impossible. Because I was running short on time, I did not email ahead to ask Gray Line if they thought that such a walk was possible. Sometimes it is better to have fewer expectations.

When we arrived at Gray Line’s office, the Dublin Visitor Center on Grafton Street, there was already a long line out of the door, and none of the people in the line were there for the tour that we were. But my sister wound her way to the front to pick up our tickets while I watched for the bus, not really sure what I was looking for but hoping that I’d know our tour bus when I saw it. Ultimately, from the office a guide emerged and called forth groups for different tours and led them to the correct bus around the corner in front of the Bank of Ireland, another tour before ours but then ours.

My sister managed to pick up our tickets from the desk inside and have them in time to be called forward, but the tour did leave a few minutes later than was advertised.

Once on the bus, things went more smoothly.

The tour is supposed to visit Glencree German Cemetery, but the day of our tour the company had learnt that the roads to get there were impassable so we got more time at Glendalough (the “lough” is pronounced like “lock”) instead.

Since we weren’t there to go to Glencree and I’d forgotten that we were with this tour supposed to stop there (I did look at a lot of tour itineraries), I didn’t much mind, but I hope no one on the tour was particularly upset.

Our bus pulled out, heading south this time, where we saw St. Stephen’s Green and more sites important to the Easter Rising.

We were driven along some narrow mountain roads past a hut-like construction that from our guide’s story I suspect may have been a set piece for Vikings, past Lough Tay to the bridge called the P.S. I Love You Bridge, though it’s real name, I think, had something to do with sheep (our guide mentioned it, but now I can’t find it online anywhere). While our driver went on to turn the bus around, we were given 15 or so minutes to climb around the stream and photograph the hills and the heather—our guide said it wasn’t heather, but everything else I’ve read, and my own instincts, think that it is—perhaps a specific kind of heather or heather locally known by another name, but I think heather nonetheless.

 

View from just to the side of the bridge

View from down below the bridge

Looking back up towards the bridge

Above the bridge with our bus coming back to pick us up

Turned around, we headed just a bit farther back the way we had come to an overlook point that looked down on Lough Tay or Guinness Lake and the valley that it occupies, and were given another ten or fifteen minutes to go explore the area, to take photographs, and enjoy the scenery. On this tour, I learned a lot about the Guinness Family and their legacy not only of world-renown beer but also of philanthropy.

 

Lough Tay

Looking back towards the set piece on the hill. You can see the cut of the road too.

Looking down into the valley as we climbed back up from our viewing point on the hill

It started raining just as it was coming time to get us back on the bus.

The views out the window were obscured by trails of water across the glass.

Thankfully the rain had all but stopped by the time we arrived at Glendalough, and the sky cleared as we wandered the ground of the monastic settlement.

We were pretty much set loose on the grounds. We wandered first through the cemetery, a blend of old plots with illegible headstones and newer markers.  We did a lot of careful tiptoeing and stepping and apologized often to the dead as we unavoidably trod on gravesites.  Between the headstones are the ruins of the settlement: a nearly in tact chapel, a ruined cathedral, a priest’s house, and a tower also nearly in tact.  An archeological group was doing some excavation just outside of the graveyard, cordoned off and too far away to be disturbed the tourists.

 

St. Kevin’s Kitchen, a 12th century chapel still nearly in tact.

Round Tower

Inside the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul with its ruined archway, the Round Tower peeping up over the ruined wall

Most of the buildings on the site are from the 10^th-12^th century, the settlement having been destroyed by Norman invaders in 1214.  Visit Wicklow has a lot of good information about the individual structures around Glendalough.

We walked out from there towards the Lower Lake.  The way through the woods is fairly broad and flat.  I think it was even paved.  There were occasional benches to sit and trash bins.

 

Crossing over a bridge from the monastic settlement to the trail

The Round Tower in the distance

Lower Lake

The Round Tower farther in the distance. I can see how it would be a beacon for pilgrims.

We didn’t go much past the edge of that first lake, but went back towards the modern village, such as it is, ducked into a few shops, two of which were permanent structures but more of which were pop up tents, and saw a sign for a sheep dog demonstration. We tried several routes to find the entrance to the event without success, though over the wall that bordered the road we could catch glimpses of the sheep and the young Border collies, one of which was definitely a pup. Unfortunately, we eventually found out, we’d missed the beginning, and the next demonstration wouldn’t begin until after we were supposed to be on the bus back.

We sat for a little while, having nowhere else to go in the time that we had, on the hill beneath the trees just a short ways inside the monastic settlement’s stone gate, overlooking the road.  Sitting beneath the trees on the hill was peaceful with the cemetery behind and a sheep pasture beside and more pasture across the road below.

The last stop on the tour was Avoca, a small village known for its hand-weaving center but also as the filming location for the BBC show Ballykissangel (1996-2001).  We ate in the pub, Fitzgerald’s, which frequently appeared in the show. I got the sense that visiting this pub was like visiting the Cheers bar in Boston. But the food was good, the service quick, and fairly inexpensive.  There were only a few people there besides our tour.  One of the televisions inside the airy pub was playing episodes of the show, but I was more interested in the airing commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Amiens on the other television behind the bar.

We didn’t have much time to explore Avoca itself.  We crossed over Main Street to a small park overlooking the river that gives the town its name , and we went up the road a little ways past the lot in which our bus was parked to see what was over the hill’s crest.  Looking down the road we could see the Avoca Handweavers, but we didn’t go down the hill towards the museum and factory because we didn’t want to be late for the bus back.

This tour wasn’t necessarily what we were hoping for, but the places that we did visit were beautiful.  I just wish we’d had more time to wander in the mountains.

To the best of my ability to track our travels through GoogleMaps, my photos, and my recollection, this might’ve been our route, but I’m much less certain on on our route out of or into Dublin.

Which would mean in all that this is what we managed to see of Ireland, only really a third of the country and a fourth of the island.

We got off the bus around 6 PM on O’Connell Street. We spent the evening ducking into bookstores—on my sister’s suggestion not mine, though you know that I happily acquiesced. We visited larger more corporate bookstores like Eason and little used shops too. We wandered and found St. Stephen’s Green, and ended up—by my own faulty sense of direction, I’ll admit—down by the Grand Canal.  The canal was pretty, but I didn’t take any pictures; I was too busy consulting maps.

Again, thank God for GPS! When our map failed us—we’d wandered too far south and were off the edge of one of the maps that we had, and I don’t think that I consulted the other, though I should have done—we pulled out my phone, and turned north. We passed the Bleeding Horse Tavern, a tavern that’s been at that site since 1649 (I didn’t realize at the time that it was any point of historical interest, but I remember commenting on the name; I found it on that second map after I had got home and was researching these blog posts), and continued north around the side of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

We ate our wrapped, convenience store sandwiches (purchased the night before in case the pub on the tour offered nothing that my sister could eat) in the park beside the cathedral before heading back to the dorm to pack and sleep for an early morning.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral was the most prominent tourist site near our dorm; it seemed like a place that we should spend some time.  We were never there when the doors to the cathedral were open, but we were able to say hello to the building this way.

 

Christ Church had buttresses; St. Patrick’s has flying buttresses.

 

August 7: Coast to Coast in a Big Green Bus

Click on the photos to embiggen and to read captions where available.  All photos are mine.  Trying to decide on pictures for this post was so hard, and I have so many more that I want to share.

This day’s travel was courtesy of Paddywagon Tours.

At Destiny Student – New Mill, we were about a 20 to 25 minute brisk walk from the meeting place on College Green. I’d asked the front desk for better instructions to our meeting place the night before and been supplied with a map and a route. The route we were given took us up a residential street, New Row South, then up past St. Patrick’s Cathedral, turning at Christ Church right along Dame Street.

We found the green Paddywagon Tours bus easily on Dame Street and confirmed with the driver that we were in the right place. He welcomed us convivially and sent us off to pick up coffees and breakfast since we were a few minutes early.

Fortified with caffeine and sugar, we climbed back on the bus. Once we were all assembled and the bus took off, our guide talked us through some of the sights out the window, the Bank of Ireland with its bricked in windows to avoid the light tax and Phoenix Park with its herd of deer. And the tour continued as we got out into the country, our guide talking us through Ireland’s history from the four kings of Ireland, to Strongbow’s arrival at the behest of Mac Murchada, the former king of Leinster (mid-1100s), to the Burren, and the penal laws when being Catholic was outlawed (mid- to late-1600s). He explained the importance of peat and the importance of the potato. He talked about the Potato Famine, better called the Great Hunger (mid-1800s), and about the tension between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, including what he has witnessed himself as a tour guide (ongoing but finally, thank God, cooled after the late 1990s).

He was a fabulous tour guide, and I wish I could remember his name to commend him personally!

I learnt more on this tour than I did on any other, from my history classes, from stumbling upon Tumblr posts, or from guidebooks. I laughed at some of the bad puns, and just had to smile at his enthusiasm, while my heart sank with his sadder stories.

Between stories, he played us a mix of more modern Irish bands like the High Kings singing primarily more traditional pub songs.

Meanwhile, out the window, the Irish countryside rolled past. It’s green. Everyone says it, but it is true—and we were in Ireland during a drought, so I imagine I have seen the country less green than it might usually be. There were far more cows than I ever imagined. On earlier train rides through England, I marveled at the number of sheep. Here I marveled at the absence of the sheep and the abundance of cows.

We passed a great diversity of landscapes: fairly flat fields with far off rises, a peat bog, and then rocky mountains like I’ve never seen before: rocky but not in the way that, say, Croatia’s or Montenegro’s mountains are rocky. From a distance they looked like mounds of gray stone rising from green fields. Nearer, you could see the tracery of green breaking through the rocks. And the mountains were crisscrossed by low stone walls: stone walls to nowhere, fencing nothing, built by a starving people to whom the government refused charity and refused “handouts,” making them work for rationed food even if the work accomplished nothing meaningful. That sentiment stung. It rang too familiarly in my ears. I don’t like the idea. And I think those walls will haunt me.  I think we are not far at all from repetition of that same government refusal, though the work left behind by our starving people may be more ephemeral.  In some ways I think we are already there.

These are some of those stone walls. Just outside of this frame, the wall ends without reason.

We stopped to stretch our legs in the small fishing village Kinvara. Just briefly. We walked along the park-edged harbor and turned up the hill along a road called The Quay to catch a quick glimpse of the town farther inland, peering up and down Main Street, before returning to the waterside and walking around the corner from the park. Across the water we could see Dunguaire Castle. True to form, I only took pictures of the boats and the water.

You can see Dunguaire Castle in the distance in this shot.

Our tour continued along the Galway Coast, but we had chosen seats on the wrong side of the bus for there to be photos; sorry.  Driving along the coast we learned about another export of the country, though: seaweed.

We stopped a little while later at an area the tour called “the baby cliffs” near Bothar nA hAillite. I’m not actually sure what Bothar nA hAillite is (it might be the road’s name?), but it was the nearest marker I found on GoogleMaps to the place where we stopped, which I was able to identify in part because one of the photos uploaded onto GoogleMaps showed a Paddywagon bus.  We climbed about on the rocks a little, getting as near as we dared to the sea. I’d done enough research to know that the Burren is home to all kinds of unique plant life, so I was peering into the mossy, grassy, crevices in the rocks too, though I don’t know enough to identify any of the wildflowers.

That’s our bus there in the background and some of our travel companions.

I have no pictures from Doolin, the next place we stopped to stretch and to search out lunch. I thought I did, but I don’t. It was a tiny place. We stopped along Fitz’s Cross, a few shops side by side along the street, two hostels, a pub, a café, a welcome center with a courtyard behind the lot with benches and fire rings and picnic tables. It looked like someone had set up a corner for a celebration when we were there. We grabbed sandwiches for lunch, ate in the courtyard, and hopped back on the bus, finally arriving not long afterward at the Cliffs of Moher.

I was unprepared for how beautiful and rugged and wonderful these cliffs are! I know everyone says that you must see them, but I’d sort of dismissed the hype. Believe the hype. Go see the cliffs. You can’t get anywhere near the water. If you get near the water… I doubt anyone will see you again, but just looking out over these rock faces topped with green grass and lines of people who seem dust specks in comparison with these monstrous heights in photographs—! It’s beautiful.

Our tour guide had told us to walk out towards the right for a better view of the cliffs, towards O’Brien’s Tower. We’d been fiercely warned not to climb over the rock walls or get too near the edge. I’m glad we followed the advice.

O’Brien’s Tower

Cliffs later in the day

Past the Tower too, the stone walls and paved walkway abruptly ended, and a well-worn dirt track along the height of the cliffs replaced them. There was a less-trodden trail below this. Perhaps the trail we took for most of our journey out was meant to be the top of an earthworks divider between a tourist and the cliff, but everyone else was walking it too, and it was still some distance from the edge. It took a steady foot, though; not for the fainthearted and not for the wobbly. We came back along the lower trail when we’d felt that we’d gone far enough, letting those unacquainted with the views stay up higher to gawk.

Can you see the itty bitty people in this photo walking the earthen trail?

Looking back towards O’Brien’s Tower.

We ducked into the museum, but frankly, it wasn’t much, though the structure of the museum within a hill is in itself intriguing. We sat to watch a digital animation of the fauna of the cliffs, in the air and in the sea, but it wasn’t very impressive, frankly. And we didn’t stay to read plaques for the exhibits; outside the museum was too pretty.

So we struck back out along the left side of the cliffs, climbing up the top of the iconic view. We didn’t go far that way, though, because we were coming close to our deadline to be back on the bus. We perused the stalls set up by the museum’s exit, and overheard a couple from our tour group admitting to their friends that they’d become engaged on the cliffs.

This is right about where the paths split. Can you see the large cave? I want to explore the large cave.

A view from the tops of the cliffs, looking out towards the ocean

Looking back toward O’Brien’s Tower you can see the paved trails that line some of the cliifs.

Our tour guide found out too, and every song remotely about a man and woman in love was dedicated to the couple from there on out.

Clambering back on the bus, we struck back east again, passing Dough Castle, a heartbreaking monument to all those but particularly the children who died in the Great Hunger, Bridge Street in Ennistimon, and the ruins of Clare Abbey. We stopped again to stretch across the street from Bunratty Castle, though there was not much time to explore the area around the castle—or any time to enter the castle itself.

Not all that far from the Cliffs

Clare Abbey

Bunratty Castle

Though we were still a good ways away from Dublin, I haven’t any more pictures from that day until after getting off the bus that evening. Maybe I slept. I know we listened to more Irish music. I was awake long enough to hear the story of one man’s discovery of his link to President Barack Obama. We passed the town, Moneygall, that was home to Barack Obama’s great-great-great grandfather, where now a rest stop is named for the former president, owned by a distant relation.

At any rate around 8 PM, we got off the bus on the north side of the Liffey near O’Connell Street in Dublin after stopping one last time at a rest area for toilets—I think that a requested stop of one of the other travelers, to which I’m glad our tour guide acquiesced, not because I needed another stop, but because it’s nice that a stop can be added because of a need.

I can’t swear that this was our route, but this was our route, the best I can figure using GoogleMaps and my photos.

We ended up shopping at some of the tourist shops on the northside that evening, meeting a man in one of the shops and having a long conversation. We crossed over the pedestrian Ha’penny Bridge (built 1816) around sunset though, where I snagged this stunning photo looking west, crossed through the beautiful pedestrian streets of the Temple Bar area, and found our way back to Dame Street, ate some delicious, fancy, branded burgers (Greek-flavored lamb for me, Cajun-flavored chicken for my sister) at BóBós Burgers and sat long into the night after a bit of confusion about whether or not we asked for the check, but it was pleasant to sit, pleasant to talk, and no one seemed fussed about us sitting.

*I want it noted that it IS possible that I am misremembering which tour guide gave us which information, but I do remember that this was the more eloquent of the tour guides, particularly about more ancient history. Both talked a good deal about their own experiences in Ireland and recommended places to visit. More on the second tour guide in the next Travel Notes post.

Book Reviews: August 2018 Picture Book Roundup: Science, Eating People–Or Not, and a Kitten Like Me

Science!

Two Problems for Sophia by Jim Averbeck and illustrated by Yasmeen Ismail. Margaret K. McElderry-Simon & Schuster, 2018.  Intended audience: Ages 4-8.

There was a lot to love in this story about Sophia, her pet giraffe Noodle, and the problems that Noodle causes for Sophia’s multi-generational, interracial family, in which each character has a pretty stunningly unique voice for characters in a picture book. It opens with Sophia being “happysad” which I love because it acknowledges an oft-felt but not oft-acknowledged emotion. Noodle snores, and Noodle’s kisses with his long, blue tongue are sloppy and wet and particularly irk Grand-mamá, whom Noodle seems particularly fond of—in the way that cats will always find the one person who doesn’t want to pet them. Sophia’s Mother, whom I suspect from the language that she uses and that the authors use to describe her actions works in the courtroom either as a lawyer or judge—probably a judge—“render[s] her verdict. Noodle is guilty” and she “order[s Sophia] to find a perdurable solution.” Several times in this book the adults drop some heavy words. ‘Perdurable’ is not a word that I knew when I read this book, and I’ve near 30 years of life experience, an English degree, and a penchant for books with lofty language. Sophia tries several ways to silence Noodle’s snores or to make them more palatable, consulting the Internet for ideas, building contraptions herself, and consulting experts in the field, including an acoustic-engineer who tells Sophia that Noodle’s “neck-to-lung-capacity ratio creates a giant echo chamber.”

Noodle’s sloppy kisses are always preceded by the same phrase, which was fun to repeat but also let the anticipation build before the blech! of usually poor Grand-mamá appearing covered in giraffe spittle. “His eyelashes danced a little fuzzle, then his nose swooped in for a nuzzle.”

This is apparently a sequel to a book called One Word for Sophia that I’d not heard of previously but now want to find.

****

Cece Loves Science by Kimberly Derting and Shelli R. Johannes and illustrated by Vashti Harrison. Greenwillow-HarperCollins, 2018. Intended audience: Ages 4-8.

I was pleased to see a surprisingly honest comment from Derting on Goodreads admitting that her four-year-old grandchild struggled to make it through this book. My story time audience was a bit squirmy through this long story too—but they made it, and they made it through Two Problems for Sophia on the same sitting. Assigned to complete a research project, Cece with her friend and assigned research partner Isaac set out to experiment on Cece’s dog Einstein to see if dogs eat vegetables. They try offering Einstein vegetables in various forms, which he won’t eat, causing Cece to question her credentials as a scientist, but she persists, and eventually they do find a way to get Einstein to eat veggies. I’m not sure about the ethical implications of trying to get your family dog to eat foods outside of his normal diet without consulting a veterinarian first—I don’t recommend doing it at home—but I have known dogs who like carrots, so I’m fairly sure that this experiment won’t harm Einstein. The book ends with a glossary of science terms and scientists.

***

 

ABCs of Physics by Chris Ferrie. Jabberwocky-Sourcebooks, 2017. First published 2014.

General Relativity for Babies by Chris Ferrie. Jabberwocky-Sourcebooks, 2017. First published 2016.

Quantum Physics for Babies by Chris Ferrie. Jabberwocky-Sourcebooks, 2017. First published 2013.

My dad is a high school math and physics teacher, and I sent these along to him not long ago. The one on quantum physics, he says, peddles an already discredited model—which I sort of knew; I think Niels Bohr’s model was being phased out of classrooms when I was in high school around 2006/2007—but before it starts discussing where in rings an electron can be around a nucleus, I think it’s solid—though he would know far better than I. I particularly liked the ABCs of Physics. There was more to this book than there was to the for Babies titles. Not only is it an alphabet primer, but the words used to illustrate the letters are all related to physics, with three levels of information for growing toddlers: first the word, then a simple one sentence explanation, then a longer, more in-depth sentence or two at the bottom. I like the simplicity of these primers.  I like that Ferrie takes on such hard concepts and thinks he can impart some understanding of these topics to infants and toddlers.  They say if you can’t explain your subject in terms that a complete outsider to the field would understand, you don’t know your subject. Imagine explaining it in terms that a toddler could understand! I think general relativity was more clearly explained here than I’ve seen it elsewhere. I may not be a toddler, but I get it. Or I get the small part of it that Ferrie is discussing in these books.

****     ****     ***

That is Frowned Upon in Most Civilized Societies

We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins. Hyperion-Disney, 2018.  Intended audience: Ages 3-5.

This book came out in June, and I’ve already read it three times—twice in story times. It keeps getting better. I really enjoyed reading it aloud this most recent time. I feel like I got the inflection right on the narration and the dialogue. This competes with Be Quiet! for me as a favorite Higgins book, but this is so much more accessible to my story time audience than is Be Quiet!. This is a back-to-school book with a female dinosaur protagonist and a multiracial classroom full of children, including a hijabi sitting beside a boy who appears to wear a yarmulke. Penelope Rex is your typical T-Rex. She’s excited and nervous to go to school, but she has a big lunch packed by her dad, and a new backpack with ponies on it (ponies are her favorite because ponies are delicious). She was not expecting to be part of a classroom full of children, and upon discovering this, she eats them all whole then spits them out at the behest of her teacher. That does not endear her to her classmates, and every time she tries to be nice, her appetite betrays her. She saves a seat for her classmate, Griffin Emery—but that seat is on her now empty plate. She tries to play with them on the slide—but waits at the bottom with an open mouth. Her parents spot the problem quickly when she complains that she hasn’t made any friends, and remind her not to eat her classmates. “Children are the same as us on the inside. Just tastier.” Penelope can’t control her appetite and keeps eating kids. Because all the children are afraid and won’t be her friend, she tries to befriend the class goldfish, Walter—who bites her finger. Knowing now how terrible it feels when someone tries to eat you, Penelope learns to control her own appetite. She stops eating her classmates, and she does make friends.

*****

Eat Pete by Michael Rex. Nancy Paulsen-Penguin Random, 2018.  Intended audience: Ages 2-5.

When a monster comes in through Pete’s window, Pete isn’t scared; he invites the monster to play with him. And though the monster came to eat Pete and wants to do so, the games that Pete suggests look fun, so he puts off his appetite for little boy and joins Pete in his games. Though he lasts through several games, the monster’s desire to eat Pete does win, and he gobbles up Pete whole. Without Pete, though, the games just aren’t much fun, and the monster relents and spits Pete back out. Pete tells him that wasn’t very nice, the monster apologizes, and Pete suggests that they play another game—a wonderfully forgiving child is Pete. The monster though doesn’t want to play. The book gives the impression that the monster is again struggling with his desire to eat Pete, but the anticipation dissipates not with a repetition of the phrase and the monster’s slathering look of hunger, but with a hug between the two protagonists; he wants to… hug Pete.

****

People Don’t Bite People by Lisa Wheeler and illustrated by Molly Schaar Idle. Atheneum-Simon & Schuster, 2018.  Intended audience: Ages 4-8, Grades PreK-3

In singsong fashion, this book spells out the things that it is good to eat, but admonishes against biting people. “It’s good to bite a carrot. It’s good to bite a steak. It’s BAD to bite your sister! She’s not a piece of cake.” “People don’t bite people. It’s nasty and it’s rude! A friend will never bite a friend. BITING IS FOR FOOD!” It’s a kind of judgmental book. I mean, I know you shouldn’t bite your hair or your nails, and the book acknowledges that these are lesser sins than biting another human, but… all in all, I think this book was perhaps just too didactic a story for a general story time. It would be a fun addition to Martine Agassi and Elizabeth Verdick and Marieka Heinlen’s Best Behavior books (Teeth are Not for Biting, Hands are Not for Hitting, Feet are Not for Kicking, etc.)—and it is a fun text—but just… not fun, not silly enough—not for general reading without the express purpose of imparting a needed lesson.

***

And Look! I Found Me!

Katie the Kitten by Kathryn and Byron Jackson and illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen. Little Golden-Penguin Random, 1976. First published 1949.  Intended audience: Ages 2-5.

I had to read this book—and I actually bought it—because I am a catlike Kathryn who once went by the nickname Katie. The illustrations and adventures of this little kitten are fairly realistic. She sleeps, wakes up, chases a fly, hisses at a scared dog, but is scared of a mouse, chases a toad, chases a bird, hops on a table, but falls off into a pail of water, drinks milk, eats a fish, and curls up to sleep again. She’s just cute. She’s a kitten. And she’s a playful, clumsy kitten. The text uses simple words, and some rhyming but overall the text does not rhyme; it reads less like a forced singsong and more like just the account of an hour or two of a kitten’s day.  I recommend this for people who like watching cat videos.  Which I think is not-so-secretly everyone.

***

These reviews are not endorsed by any of the authors or publishers or anyone else involved in the making of these books. They are independent, honest reviews by a reader.

August 6: Evening in Dublin

Click on the photos to embiggen and to read captions where available.

This trip began with a long wait, and then a lot of dashing.

When delays on my first flight, supposed to be just a quick hop from the local airport to a larger, international hub, caused me to miss my original flight to Dublin, the American Airlines representative at the airport was admittedly very quick to find me the next possible flight, which had me in Dublin the same day, but later in the afternoon rather than the early morning.

 

I was not supposed to take off at sunset….

Somewhere over England I think. I was never supposed to fly over England.

I did not land in Dublin itself to nearer 4:00 PM. Getting into the city, my sister and I dashed to Trinity College. When she had left me to do most of the planning for our stay in Ireland, I had asked her what bucket list items she had to check off in the country. I had none—or had only one that I learned was a scant possibility too late to plan. (I wanted to visit the island where Luke Skywalker hides himself in this newest trilogy, but never dreamed that island was in as accessible a country as Ireland. Next time I’ll have to find my way to Skellig Michael; this time it was not possible to squeeze in. And I did not want to cross the border into Northern Ireland, just to keep things as simple as possible, but I would too one day like to see Giant’s Causeway.) Seeing the Old Library of Trinity College was one of those things.

Trying to figure out the bus system proved confusing for both of us, tired as we were from a day on planes and in airports. We’d found a manned booth outside of the airport’s exit. We overheard one of the employees giving directions to a less expensive bus into the city, and we first sought out that stand, but then couldn’t quite figure out the machines to know what ticket to buy. So we returned to the manned booth, and bought the ticket for the waiting bus.

We arrived at Trinity College with only maybe twenty minutes to the exhibit’s close (heads up: it and practically every other museum close at 5:00 PM), paid our €14 entrance fee, and fairly ran through the exhibit on the Book of Kells. The information on the maze of walls was undoubtedly interesting, but we peered at the items in display cases without much time for reading. There was a case explaining how the monks achieved some of the vibrant colors on their manuscripts, then a case with four open books, two of which were sections of the famed Book of Kells and two of which were books of similar age. The Book of Kells was written around the beginning of the 9^th century, the Garland of Howth was written around the 8^th or 9^th century, and the Ricemarch Psalter c. 1079. The detail and the color and the preservation of the books was itself pretty stunning, but what really stole my breath was the Old Library: two stories of bookcases in niches, clearly a library in use with tomes tilted where books were missing and a few books laid haphazardly on top of others. Busts lined the hall between the shelves, first of important figures of literature and science and philosophy, but later names we did not as readily recognize, local figures maybe or figures of importance to the college itself. We’d looked before leaving for the trip for ways to get into the Old Library bypassing the Book of Kells exhibit and the €14 entrance fee, but we hadn’t been able to find any way to do so without either making friends with a student or having a legitimate reason and approved letter for permission to study within the library; we had time for neither.

 

Shakespeare needed a photo obviously.

Can you see the books laid atop others in this photo?

As the Library was closing, we next wandered the grounds of the college. We were trying to find the psychology building, but never did. My sister had at one point looked at going to Trinity College herself, so she had wanted to see what she might have had, where she might have lived. It is a large, beautiful campus, and looking at a map now to see where was the psychology building, I think we didn’t stumble into maybe but a third of it.  It feels a bit like a city unto itself, with its own park and its own back alleys and streets, buildings old and ivy-covered and new.  My sister and I both attended more rural undergrad universities, and I think both of us had prettier campuses.  I didn’t spy any water feature on this campus–not the part that we made it to; she had a large duck pond and waterfall into a river on her campus, and we had a number of creeks and a much smaller pond.  We both had more grass.

 

Arnaldo Pomodoro’s sculpture “Sfera con Sfera”

Eilís O’Connell’s sculpture “Apples and Atoms”

We meandered a bit on our way to our dorm, and stopped to duck our heads into Christchurch and the entrance to Dublinia when we passed it and to explore the area around Dublin Castle. Maybe someone can explain to me: In both we saw red, yellow, blue, and green used side by side. Being me, I recognize the four Hogwarts House colors pretty quickly, but why were they used together in Dublin?

 

The outside of Christchurch

Inside the bridge between Christchurch and Synod Hall, where is the Dublinia exhibit

 

The Dublin Castle near the Dubhlinn Gardens

The Medieval Tower and the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle

The face of St. Patrick on the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle

We stayed at a place in an area known as the Liberties. When we’d gotten into a friendly conversation with a man in a shop, and he asked where we were staying, he was appalled by that answer. Though the dorm was farther out from the city than was necessarily ideal, it seemed safe enough—after we had found it, and knew our way. Finding it was a problem. I had to pull out my Maps app to get us there. A paper map didn’t do us enough good; streets are not marked as clearly I feel in the UK as they are in the US—or perhaps I don’t know where to look for street signs. Too, there was construction not far from the dorm—on the next building across the street. Perhaps the trouble was more that he lived North of the Liffey, and we were staying far to the South; he was not alone in mentioning that there was loyalty to North or South Dublin among their residents.

The dorm itself, Destiny Student – New Mill, which I think is used during the school year especially as student housing, was really quite nice, with a lot of shelves around the desk and around the bed. The bed had padding on both sides that were against the wall, and there was a cushioned bench at the end as well as a comfortable desk chair. The window was most of the fourth wall of the room and overlooked the courtyard and facing buildings. There were doubled blinds, which made the room plenty dark to sleep in at night. There was a locked gate. And the help desk was open 24-hours, so that we needed to check out quite early was no problem. By booking the room through the website, I was able to get a free towel for us, and we were given soap and shampoo as well. The bedding was included, two comfortable pillows, clean sheets, and a white duvet.

A view from our dorm room of the courtyard

It was directly across from the Dublin Liberties Distillery. The distillery itself was not yet completed and not open to the public when we were there. The general manager says that he has plans to make it so.

For now at least, the area was quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Even the construction didn’t disturb my sleep.

Shelfie: July 27, 2018: Next Week in Wales

Time for my announcement!

This will probably be my last post for a little while as I am preparing next week to leave on a plane that will take me first to Ireland where after a few days I will I board a ferry and finally make it to Wales, a corner of the world that stole pieces of my heart long ago–probably as long ago as the first time that I read Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising Sequence, which I’m fairly sure was some time before or around 2001, when I was but a wee thing not even introduced yet to Rowling’s Harry Potter.

Almost every free day that I had in July and the last bit of June has been taken up with more and more frantically researching, Pinning, and Google searching various places and things to do in both countries, skimming travel books, comparing prices and itineraries of this or that tour, trying to plan travel routes that will get us in any timely manner between one destination and another, emailing tour companies and hostels and B&Bs and student housing facilities with questions, finding the appropriate currency, finding the appropriate bags in which to pack for two weeks abroad, knowing that I intend to carry everything I bring with me up and down two different mountains, trying to plan a trip that will tick bucket list items for both my sister and I while being as inexpensive as is possible and while she and I are 5 hours off one another, my lunchtime her dinnertime so by the time I want dinner it’s nearing her bedtime–  Breathing has been difficult.  Forget writing.

This is really the first international trip that I am taking where I will be doing most of the planning–accompanied by my lovely sister, who is currently living in one of these two countries, but who wishes to see sights on this trip that she has yet to see, so where we’re both going a bit blindly.

You might remember my trip to Japan, where a great friend met me in the country where she lived and took me to her favorite sights.  I relied on her quite heavily to get me to where she wanted us to go, and did very little research, and had very few expectations prior.  I had to.  (I’ve learnt more Welsh more solidly than I had learnt Japanese before that trip, but I think my Welsh will be less useful, and frankly I still can’t say much, though I can convey that I like tea, and I have hello, goodbye, and thank you down pretty solidly–all of which are important.)

To create this post, I went through the house and found all the books I had that I read that were set in either of the two countries (and allowed one that leans very heavily on Welsh history and mythology but actually takes place here in the mountains of Virginia.  I will be in the same town where Owen Glendower set up a Welsh parliament.  My sister’s university also has a building named after the rebellious Prince).  I have read surprisingly few books set in Ireland; this might have to be mended when I return.

When I return, I hope to turn this blog into a travel blog for a little while, so that I can share with you all my adventures and some of my pictures, all of which I hope will be magical.