Weekly book shelf, 8/24

What Calvin read to himself this week...

Goodnight, Owl! made our favorites list when Calvin was a toddler. All the owl wants to do is sleep, but his tree is filled with diurnal birds who are keeping him awake with their litany of calls. No worries, he gets revenge at night! The large, clean font is easy to see and follow, the illustrations are textured and warm, and the story has an enjoyable rhythm, and it's fun for both reader and listener to make all those bird sounds.

Sam the Sea Cow is a great mixture of story and factual writing. You meet Sam shortly after his birth, then follow him as he learns to live life as a manatee. When he gets caught in a pipe he has to be rescued by the nearby aquarium, rehabilitated, then released. Sam is endearing, the illustrations are very sweet, and the writing is structured for younger children, but there is a lot of great information shared here, too, and the manatees are made loveable without the intrusion of personification. Calvin absolutely loves Sam and his story.

Creatures of the Desert World is a National Geographic Society pop-up action book. Each page of this book presents different flora and fauna from Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Like most pop-up books the focus is not on the text, which is mainly used to describe and label the animals and plants that are depicted in the beautiful, realistic illustrations. The pop-up actions are well made and Calvin really enjoys them.

Eve of the Emperor Penguin is part of the Magic Tree House series, but it's one of the Merln Missions so it mixes in a bit of fantasy (more so than the time travel, that is). Jack and Annie are whisked away to Antarctica, presumably in the current era, to find a secret needed to save Merlin's life. They travel part way up Mt. Erebus, fall through the glacial ice, and meet a group of Emperor Penguins before traveling home. Calvin loved this one so much he read it twice, once to himself and once to me. I continue to be pleased with the series because it doesn't hide the factual information inside the story but presents it as information as Jack and Annie look it up during their travels. You can read Calvin's review here.

What we read out loud...

We finished reading The Tale of Despereaux this week and you can find our review here. I was disappointed, but Calvin enjoyed it well enough. Our next book is going to be The Secret Zoo, by Brian Chick.

And on my shelf this week...nothing has changed. I've spent so much of my time this past week on looking into curriculum and preparing projects for Calvin that I'm only half way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, only about 50 pages further in Proust, and haven't made any progress in Raising our Children, Raising Ourselves.