[Jared's List]

Here is a sample online of the Rootabega stories.

 

http://www.josephperry.net/rootabaga/index.html

[Jared's List]

Another interesting list there! I don't include the picture books that I read (as a children's librarian, doing storytimes a couple of times a week, I would have a massive list!), but include anything that I read in "my" time. I see there is quite a lot of "classic children's" stuff there too, and a few I don't know. I guess they must be American?

 

Brooks: Freddy the Detective, Freedy goes to Florida, Freddy and the Ignoramus

Abel's Island: Steig

The White Mountains Trilogy

Carl Sandburg: Rootabega Stories

 

Yes they are american, and really really good stuff. All except the White Mountains Trilogy which is sort of a kids science fiction (and decidely British), al beit with better developed characters, and not so allegorical.

 

I too read at least 30 picture books a week, and it would be crazy to list those, but suffice it to say there are some great reads in there.

 

Definately check out the Rootabega stories. Thay are awesome. Being a poet, Sandburg tells the stories in a rather poetic way, with lots of repetitions. And characters include talking brooms, corn fairies, Rootabega kings, and a kid that plays his "spanish spinish splishy guitars made special" with his mittens on, because of the cold bitter cold. A wacky world where the plot is dreamlike, and the characters even more so.

[Jared's List]

Poetry the past few months (mostly a lot of classic stuff). Poetry is something I go back to a lot, and don't nesessarily read straight thru like a book. I ommitted the classic romans and greeks mentioned already above.

 

 

Robert Frost

Emily Dickenson

Walt Whitman

John Dryden

ST Coleridge

Gertrude Stein

ALexander Pope

WH Auden

Rudyard Kipling

William Shakespeare

Robert Pinsky

Carl Sandburg

Philip Levine

John Donne

Robert Lewis Stevenson

William Blake

Charlotte Bronte

Louise Bogan

T. S. Eliot

Langston Hughes

 

 

 

 

I read children's lit in a similar manner at poetry. I could never mention all of them, since I read like 10-15 picture books a day to my kids. But I will mention the ones I have read for myself lately, many of which are returns or frequent returns. A few are new reads.

 

Brooks: Freddy the Detective, Freedy goes to Florida, Freddy and the Ignoramus

 

Dahl: Matilda, The Twits, the BFG, James and the Giant Peach

 

Abel's Island: Steig

 

Pippy Longstockings (all three books)

 

Aesops Fables

 

The White Mountains Trilogy

 

Barrie: Peter Pan

 

The complete Hans Christian Anderson

 

The complete Grimms tales

 

All of L. Frank Baums Oz books and Wonder tales

 

Lewis Carrol: alice books and poetry

 

Rudyard Kipling: Just So Stories

 

Carl Sandburg: Rootabega Stories

 

Edith Nesbit: Treasure Seekers, Railway Children

 

All the Beatrix Potter books

 

Oscar Wilde's children's stories

 

Kingsley: Water Babies

 

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales: Jon Scieszka

 

Complete Brer Rabbit (both the original version and the modernized)

 

and many many more I can't think of offhand

[Jared's List]

Last few months (omitting poetry and children's lit):

 

Just out of interest - any chance of a post with the poetry collections you have dipped into and the children's stuff you have read?

 

Sure; they will be long, and I work a lot so I will have to get back about that.

[Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach]

This was the big "rage" to read in the seventies... I happen to pick it up again, and now some of it makes sense, or at least can draw a good parallel with religions.

 

Of course, I immediately started to write the next part. I have a general idea what should be "next", but I would love to hear first what you think JLS should be doing/experience.

 

I once heard a tape of Richard Bach reading his classic JLS. His really lispy wimpy voice changed my whole image of the tough pilot I thought he was when I read his books (in jr. high school).

[Autobiographies and Biographies]

As I said in another thread I am reading the ultimate, and arguably first, biographer (Plutarch).

 

I recently read a biography on Johannes Brahms which I forgot the name of. It was a very good read, and the same author, if memory serves right, did a bio on Charles Ives which I started but didn't finish.

 

I am at work so I cannot look it up at the moment.

[Emma by Jane Austen]

I recently re-read Emma (I think around last November or December).

 

I fell in love with Emma Woodhouse and her doting, homebody father. I had to be somewhat forgiving of certain antiquated assumptions and resignations (based on Austen's time of being, and place), but also felt as if some of it was very applicable even for modern times.

 

I fell in love with, and dated, a girl who was far above me in "class" in high school. It had its inevitable drama (her mother loved me at first, then realized I was from total poverty and came to hate me and forbid me to be around her daughter).

 

Though this is not the story of Emma, I felt for Harriet Smith, who was subject to her class designation. Though she, more resigned to living out her social purpose than I.

 

Mr. Knightly was loveable too, in his honest mannerisms.

 

This is my favorite Austen book by far.

[Jared's List]

I highly recommend going back to classics you read at earlier ages.

 

I have learned so much and have experienced them so differently as an adult, as to make them seem like totally different books.

 

The Iliad, for example, I hated in high school, because I felt it was all just war, and a total boy-book (though I am a boy).

 

But after reading it this time, I found so much more in there. I also really appreciated Homer's depiction of his heros-which were more fallable, human and petty than even most modern literature, and therefore more truthful in some ways (even though they often exibit superhuman strength and such).

 

The way the gods influence people is fascinating too. There are times I can look around me and wonder if Aphrodite is still using cupid to make people do totally insane things for love or to fall in love with the most unsuspected of subjects.

[Jared's List]

Last few months (omitting poetry and children's lit):

 

Epic of Gilgamesh

Tale of Sinue and other egyption poems

Pindar: The Odes

Petronius: The Satyricon

The Code of Hammurabi

Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe

The Annotated Mother Goose

The Annotated Alice

Strunk & White: The Elements of Style

Sapho-various translations

Alcaeus-various translations

Euripides-complete plays

Sophocles-" "

Aeschylus: The Oresteia

Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Gengi

Kobo Abe: Kangaroo Notebook

Aristophanes: Complete plays

The Zanzibar Chest: Aiden Hartley

Thucyclides: The Peloponesian War

Herodotus: The Histories

Dante: The divine Comedy

Matthew Arnold: Essays in Criticism

Rudyard Kipling: Kim

The Columbia History of the World

 

 

 

 

See a theme

[Freddy the Pig]

Just reissued. Freddy the pig is the American answer to Winnie the Pooh, or maybe the answer to Wind in the Willows.

 

I am new to these, written from the late 1920s and on, these 26 books are really great. Ok I have only read about 6 of them, but so far I love them all.

 

Check out the Freddy home page. http://www.freddythepig.org/

[Historical Fiction]

 

I like the original historical fiction writer (well, play-write anyway).