It's Monday - Books Read I Loved

              Visit Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts to see what they've been reading, along with everyone else who post their favorites. 
              Wishing everyone peace and joy during this holiday season, and a lot of restful reading time, too.

         Sharing a couple of new and loving Christmas books. Thanks to Candlewick Press for Oliver Elephant.

        Lou Peacock's shopping trip in rhyme makes a sweet story of a mom and her two children, the oldest bringing along Oliver, his stuffed elephant. What fun the boy and Oliver have while Mom shops! They purchase all the things on the list, get ready to go, but sad to say, Oliver, who also had fun playing, was missing. Helen Stephens' illustrations are soft watercolor, loving depictions of this Christmas story. 

         Lovely illustrations and another tale that brings happy Christmas feelings of a little tree that lives by a railroad track, soon chosen to go home to be a Christmas tree in a little boy's home. She is lonely, but Santa soon fixes that, bringing the boy a toy train. The tree is happy again, hearing that train chugging beneath her. You'll find the ending comes full circle in this sweet imaginary tale. It brought my own memories of putting a train around our tree when my children were young. My husband's father was a train engineer and trains were an important part of our lives with the kids growing up.

         Thanks to Candlewick Press for this wonderful story, too. Knitting together "A Christmas Carol" with a modern-day family made a lively, heartwarming tale. It's real and magical all at the same time. Harry Gruber plays the role of Scrooge in his school's production of "A Christmas Carol," and the challenge is that his father is coming, not leaving to work just a few more hours as he often does. The thoughts of Harry as he plays out his part are poignant, and Rosen allows us to know the feelings of the mother and the sister from the audience, and also of that father with a last minute business emergency. I hated to see the story end, wonder if kids could persuade their own parents to read it for its important message?

        I took a long time reading this book. A gift from a friend, I savored the story, what Ky Maclear was doing, finding out how life works, how nature helps, a reflection for everyone. She writes the questions, fills the answers out with her own questions and her interesting quotes of people in literature, some long passed, some continuing to write today. I read it in small parts, and though it took me less than a year to read (Maclear took a year to tag along with a well-known birder to learn, she was not sure what.) I marked many passages to continue to remember, to return to.) "What if we could imagine a lull as neither fatal nor glorious? What if a lull is just a lull?" Number one in her list toward the end of things she learned during this year and from her guide: "There are no big reasons to live. Just little reasons." I imagine I will re-read it in parts, wondering about her questions and pondering answers. 

               An amazing personal graphic biography of this photographer, Graciela Iturbide, for anyone interested in an artist's life and how photography made them whole. It will be inspiring for young photographers. The story told through this medium made it even more special.

Reading: Sy Montgomery's How To Be A Good Creature and planning to start Endling #1 - The Last by Katherine Applegate.