Also of interest…

These are some of my personal favourite book-related sites, plus some that I thought would be useful to librarians but didn’t quite fit in elsewhere.

Spalding, T. (2005). LibraryThing. Retrieved May 23, 2012, from www.librarything.com

 

While the main purpose of the site is to “catalog your books online”, this incredible resource also has invaluable information about book characters, series, awards, authors, events, etc. LibraryThing’s social network includes an excellent “name that book” group for those vaguely remembered details to jog someone else’s memory. I’ve also enjoyed random features such as “members write book summaries in haiku form”.

 

 

Bookish. (2012). Retrieved May 23, 2012, from www.bookish.co.nz

 

Simultaneously searching more than 30 local and international book retail sites, Bookish provides a real-time price comparison in New Zealand dollars and including postage, listing the cheapest first and giving an indication of stock availablilty.

 

 

Search-cube. (n.d.). Retrieved May 23, 2012, from www.search-cube.com

 

“The visual search engine”. Powered by Google, this engine is particularly useful when a combination of images and video are likely to comprise the majority of a search result. Results are presented as large thumbnails on the faces of a cube, which the searcher can manipulate. Hovering over a thumbnail provides a zoomed image and brief information about the link.

 

 

ICDL Foundation. (n.d.). International children’s digital library. Retrieved May 28, 2012, from http://en.childrenslibrary.org/

 

With the admirable goal of ultimately digitising examples of quality children’s literature from every culture and language, this site is a fun place to discover and read some more obscure books not available in local libraries. The ‘simple search’ allows for browsing the Library using graphics for age groups, length of books, content, and (my favourite!) the colour of the book’s cover!

 

 

Where Is the Green Sheep?

This book’s simple ‘plot’ is conveyed by its title. Each page introduces a new sheep, with a new adjective, which is paired with the sheep on the next page either by opposite[1] or by association[2]. After every rhymed couplet, the question is reiterated[3]. In the end, of course, the tension is resolved as “our green sheep” is found, and contentment prevails.

The appeal of this sturdy, almost-square hardback will endure throughout early childhood. Once familiar, it lends itself to independent ‘reading,’ as few pages have more than six words, most of which are repeated frequently and predictably throughout the text. The unrepeated vocabulary is provided by the illustrations, which are clearly linked to their captions.

Each sheep is exuberantly illustrated, having fun (for example the rain sheep is unmistakably singing in the rain, as it dances around a lamppost twirling a rainbow-coloured umbrella). Older children will find careful observation of the illustrations rewarding, as many details visually connect the sheep pairs. Just before the end of the book, more than twenty of the flock are depicted in one illustration, engaged in a further variety of unlabelled pursuits. There is plenty of thought and discussion to be generated by the words and the pictures, making this an ideal book to be enjoyed either shared or alone.

Fox, M. (2004). Where is the green sheep? (J. Horacek, illus.). Melbourne, Australia: Penguin.

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[1] e.g. “Here is the near sheep. And here is the far sheep.”

[2] e.g. “Here is the moon sheep. And here is the star sheep.”

[3] “(but) where is the green sheep?”

You’re never too old for Slinky Malinki!

… so said my foxy flatmate, when a prospective new boyfriend, on seeing her bedroom for the first time, queried why an undergrad English student had picture books on her bookshelf. Being at that time (though not for very much longer) unfamiliar with Lynley Dodd, the boyfriend thought he might be about to get lucky. As, of course, he was: my flatmate proceeded to read him children’s stories for the next hour.

There comes a time in everyone’s life when some well-meaning adult (usually a parent, teacher, or librarian) will say “you’re too big for picture books now. Why don’t you choose a real book this time?” From that point on, picture books are shunned for recreational reading.

Like my flatmate, I consider this to be a great loss. Picture books have so much to offer, it’s such a shame that they are used almost exclusively to people whose age is in single digits. Accordingly, I periodically throw a “Picture Book Appreciation Day”, where I make a lot of fudge, ransack the public and National libraries, encourage all my guests to bring their own, and we sit around and read to each other and talk about our favourites (and consume vast quantities of sugar). The biggest problem with hosting these events is deciding which images to include on the invitations!

I could give so many reasons why grown ups can appreciate and benefit from picture books, but to me the majority seem so obvious as to be not worth mentioning, so I’ll just close with this one: picture books, being shorter, are more memorable, so therefore easier to quote verbatim. Hardly a day goes by without me feeling the need to enrich conversation by making a picture book allusion. Here are some of the ones I’ve used since starting this blog:

“… and they said, ‘good question!’ / But nobody had a good suggestion.”

“”You should have looked in the matchbox first.”

“The cat from Norway got stuck in the doorway.”

“Unless someone like you / cares a whole awful lot / then nothing is going to get better / it’s not!”

“Hey! Upside down critter! Who are you, and what do you eat?”

“This block of chocolate is mine and all for me!”

“Never try to milk a chicken. It hardly ever works.”

Let’s have a little talk about tweetle beetles

What do you know about tweetle beetles? Well…

When tweetle beetles fight, it’s called a tweetle beetle battle.

And when they battle in a puddle, it’s a tweetle beetle puddle battle.

AND when tweetle beetles battle with paddles in a puddle, they call it a tweetle beetle puddle paddle battle. AND…

When beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle, they call this a tweetle beetle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle. AND…

When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles, they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle. AND…

At this point the narrator is interrupted. This entire extract (including the post’s title) is from Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss. Is this sufficient explanation for the title of my blog? Perhaps not.

My profile picture shows a tweetle beetle with a paddle (but no puddle). If you look closely, you may discern that it is a photograph, not a drawing.

Before I finished primary school, I  learned that I could read this text aloud fluently with ease, and many others (both my peers and those older than me) could not.  At about age 15 I declared I would like to get a tweetle beetle tattoo. I was told not to, because I would change my mind. When I turned 30, I decided half my life was long enough to demonstrate that my mind was made up.

I talk fast, and I have a lot to say. Dr. Seuss is a genius. That’s why I called my blog “tweetle beetle babble”.