Dinosaur Books

Dinosaur books isn't exactly a book topic you come across everyday, and it's a fairly small genre, let's face it, but there are some really great ones out there.  And, since Alex decided to introduce me to one of them this week, I'm going to introduce you to a few more of my favorites.

It wouldn't be a list of dinosaur books if I didn't include Jurassic Park and The Lost World by Michael Crichton.  They're the first ones anyone thinks of (mainly because of the movies) and there's a good reason they've become literature staples.  They're intense and interesting and exciting and just plain fun to read.

Tea Rex by Molly Idle is one I actually came across just recently at my job.  It's a children's picture book about a T-Rex coming to a tea party and the proper manners you should have when having a dinosaur at your house.  It's an adorable book and incredibly well illustrated and, I think, subtly teaches something like manners without beating the kid over the head with it.  Since the book is being so silly about the whole thing, the kid reading it doesn't feel like they're being talked down to.  They just think it's a funny book about dinosaurs.

You can't have dinosaurs without a little bit of humor somewhere.  All My Friends Are Dead by Avery Monsen is a short little picture book that starts out with a dinosaur saying "All my friends are dead" and the second page has a picture of an old person saying, "Most of my friends are dead."  You can guess where it goes from there.

Those are just a few of the dinosaur based books out there.  What are your favorites?

By Its Cover: Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Despite my opinion of the content of this book, I actually quite like the cover. I like that the font is Courier, also known as "the typewriter font," because Israel's forged letters were written on a typewriter. I like the red proofreading pencil underline, because it fits the theme, too.

I particularly like the author line, with the names of people she forged letters from crossed out and her real name signed at the bottom. (I learned from this book that a TLS is a "typed letter, signed" and that's the look we have here on the cover.) I thought that was clever (more clever than anything I read in the book, anyway).

My copy was hardcover with a dust jacket. The dust jacket had a lovely bumpy texture like an aged letter might, and it added that little bit extra that made me want to read this book (although I changed my mind after having done so).

Review Me Twice: Can You Ever Forgive Me by Lee Israel

So, in theory, I should really dislike this woman.  I mean, she made money for years off of imitating the letters that other writers wrote.  When her writing career took a nose dive, she started drafting up a litany of fake letters, supposedly written by a whole lot of dead people, but were really just her creations based off of real letters that she read in libraries.  (And, to be fair... I DO kind of hate her because she got a slap on the wrist and she's not even sorry.)

And when her fakes were starting to get exposed, she started STEALING the real copies & replacing them with fakes.

Terrible.  Absolutely terrible.

And yet... you can't help feel that she had an inordinate amount of FUN writing these people... these characters, really, because that's what they were.  They were characters.  It was like the earliest form of fan fiction.  And while she greatly regrets the fact that she stole the originals (which, to her knowledge, have all been returned to their respective libraries), she mentions that she can't help but love those years she was forging letters.

It's a fast and interesting read.  It gets right into the nitty-gritty; not a lot of preamble with Ms. Israel.  I kind of liked that.  I didn't really have to wait to find out what happened and what she did.  However, I also realize that her writing style is not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

My Bottom Line 3 1/2 out of 5

Do you know any of those people who name-drop like crazy, thinking it makes them sound important even though you don't recognize more than half the names they're saying? Or maybe you've met someone who expects you to know who they are, or know things about them based solely on their name, except you don't know who they are, and they won't offer up any information about themselves that might help you figure it out? Ooh, I know... perhaps there's someone you know who gets in trouble for something, and even though they claim to know that what they did was wrong, and they might even say they deserved to get caught, they still say their punishment was BS and they have a generally blase attitude about the whole process of serving justice?

That's how I feel about Lee Israel. When I first heard about the book and read a summary, I thought, "Wow, this should be really interesting... she did all these great forgeries, got caught, and learned her lesson, and now she's writing about it." And then I read the book.

I understand that there are some people, like Estee Lauder and Bette Davis, that should need no introduction. But I can count at least twenty names in the first dozen pages that I don't recognize (and therefore don't care about). I can only assume that Israel is writing this book for the very narrow audience of the people she directly impacted with her crimes.

And the way she talks about why she committed forgery, how she got caught, and what it was like being punished for her crimes, it makes me feel like the title is sarcastic. "Oh, could you ever forgive me for committing such horrible crimes that totally weren't as bad as everyone made them out to be?" Maybe I'm misreading the tone, but that's what I'm walking away with.

ReviewMeTwice- The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson

This week we're doing something a little different and fun!  We're reviewing a picture book.  My mom read this book to me when I was little, always around Christmas time.  I remember lovingly looking at the pictures and listening to the story and just sitting in my bed as she read.

****Just so you know, I'm going to tell you the end of the book.  But I don't feel so bad about it because it's a picture book and you can go read it in about 2.5 seconds.******

Now that I read it as an adult, I can view it with a little more of a critical eye.  The story is still fabulous, don't get me wrong.  Hans Christian Anderson is a master of tales and story telling.  I love that the ending wasn't changed.  It's a heartwarming and tragic story, all at the same time.  It shows a little girls hopes and dreams, at the same time, showing us how awful her life really is, how hard life really is.  But even though she dies in the end, it's still very hopeful, that death somehow frees us all.

This version is my favorite, mainly because it was the one read to me as a kid.  But Rachel Isadora does an amazing job illustrating this book.  Throughout the book, the little match girl sees all these wonderful things as she's slowly freezing to death.  Isadora manages to use the illustrations to give us a clue as to what's going to happen.  If you look closely, in one of the pictures, The Little Match girl is completely blue and curled up into a corner, a prelude to her freezing to death.

I really love this book, and love the illustrations that go along with it.  They're beautiful and mesmerizing   I also like the story.  Hans Christian Anderson wasn't one to shy away from terrible topics, in fact, most of this fairly tales were incredibly depressing, but I think this one has just the right amount of heartbreak and hope.

To the surprise of many, I did not know the story of the little match girl before Cassy suggested this book for review. I do love it, though. I know old fairy tales (and stories of that ilk) tend to be darker, then they are shined and polished and made "family-friendly" (usually by Disney), so I really appreciate it when one survives intact, like this.

As Cassy told you, this story has a sad ending. (Although I see it as a happy ending. At any rate, your protagonist dies, and she's a little girl, so it's pretty sad no matter how you slice it.) That's not something you see a lot of in children's books... particularly picture books. I love when children are treated as thinking people, not as delicate little faberge eggs that can't be exposed to anything scarier than the sound of the washing machine.

On top of that, the illustrations by Rachel Isadora are beautiful. Just look at that cover up there at the top of the post! Lovely. As an aside, here is a small bio of Isadora from Harper Collins.