A Certain Slant of Light

This week's Caldecott winner is May I Bring a Friend?, but before we discuss it, a pause for Caldecott related business. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is having an exhibit called Make Way for Ducklings: The Art of Robert McCloskey, an artist who won the Caldecott twice (most notably for, well, Make Way for Ducklings.

If only I had a teleportation device! I'd love to see the exhibition. There's a slideshow of some of the highlights on the website, but it only whetted my appetite.

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In any case! This week's book is Beatrice Schenk de Regniers' May I Bring a Friend? (illustrated by Beni Montresor), which I felt a bit dubious about - it's one of those books with black line drawings filled in with colors like a coloring book, and I wasn't feeling the color palette chosen. (Pink, orange, yellow, and red, with splashes of olive green.)

However, the story is totally charming. The king and queen invite a young boy to tea, and in response he asks, "May I bring a friend?" Well, the king and queen have excellent manners, so of course they say yes, and the little fellow brings... a giraffe.

One might expect this to put them off further invitations, but in fact they keep inviting him, and he brings a a hippo, an elephant, a troop of monkeys, and a pride of lions in quick succession. Cute and funny.

But I think my very favorite thing are the little vignette illustrations of the king and queen when they're alone together: picking flowers, dancing, fishing, catching butterflies, rolling a ball of yarn together. (The king holds a great bundle of yarn on his outstretched arms as the queen rolls it up.) Now there's a happy couple.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price, which I imagine I might have liked more if I read it as a kid. As it was it all felt a bit too goofy to me: the first story involves Homer defeating four burglars with a skunk, for instance.

I also finished Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds, which was moderately interesting but mostly reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species for ages now. My reading challenge for August is “a book you should have read in school,” and Darwin counts for that, right?

Actually I’m not sure anyone reads Darwin in school. Oh well, I think it’s a good idea, and I shall pencil it into my reading calendar for August.

What I’m Reading Now

Mike Dash’s Tulipomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused, which is about the tulip bulb financial bubble in 17th century Holland. I guess I have sort of a thing for tales of financial bubbles. So far this one isn’t blowing me away like Zac Bissonnette’s The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, but then we’re still discussing the history of tulips and haven’t even gotten to Holland yet.

I’ve also started Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death, which I think may take me a while, given that it’s so full of death and everything. Yalom kicks it off with the disconcerting fact that most therapists are not trained to deal with anxiety about death, like, at all, which seems like a pretty big oversight in therapy training, frankly. Surely it’s not uncommon for patients to fling themselves on the therapy couch and say “Doc, the fact that I will one day cease to exist fills me with an overwhelming terror.”

What I Plan to Read Next

evelyn_b picked Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist as my book for the next challenge on the 2016 Reading Challenge, so I’m waiting for the library to bring that to me through the magic of interlibrary loan.

I’ve also been poking around the library’s disconcerting range of Darwin editions. I’m leaning toward David Quammen’s illustrated edition, because 1) pictures, and 2) after more hunting than I feel should be necessary, I’ve ascertained that it contains the unabridged text of the first edition, which is apparently clearer and more elegant than subsequent editions, which Darwin tried to emend to meet his critics’ objections.