Karl's Reading List

Published by Harper & Row Jr Books/Evil Eye Music, Inc: New York, NY, 1974. Elise, Ezekiel and I were recently house-sitting for my parents, and I came across it on one of their bookshelves. It is a book I first read when I was five (this particular copy of the book, as well, which has a written dedication to my family in the front from the person who gave it to us), and I loved it, and learned a lot of it by heart. I can still quote numerous poems from it verbatim. I don't read a lot of poetry. By now, anyone who has read my reviews regularly will have picked that up! This book, however, is a favourite of mine. How come I love this so much, when a lot of poetry leaves me cold? Well, Shel Silverstein is a very funny poet, along with being quite witty, and at times, surprisingly deep. So, we get a silly poem like 'The Battle', which in its entirety, reads: "Would you like to hear Of the terrible night When I bravely fought the -  No? Alright." And we recognise ...

Published in an omnibus edition by Penguin Classics: London, England, 1998. First published individually 1865. 'The Centenary Edition' includes 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' with commentary and short stories. You know, I've never read Alice in Wonderland before!  The closest I've come is a memory I have of a relief teacher in primary school reading out an excerpt from the chapter 'A Mad Tea Party', including the unanswerable riddle about a raven and a writing desk, a clock that tells you what day it is, and a story about sisters in a treacle well who draw treacle. It is very odd, but I remember thinking that the puns were clever, and thus, my impression of the Alice stories have been - from childhood - just that: odd, but clever. Maybe I had built it up too much in my imagination. This first Alice story is certainly odd! But clever...? Maybe...? The edition I read has many endnotes, many of which try to ti...

Published as an audiobook by Naxos Rights International Ltd./Naxos Audiobooks, 2008. Narrated by Neville Jason. Originally published in 1938. This is a apparently a very well-known version of the King Arthur legend, and is the basis for the 1963 animated Disney movie of the same name. Elise suggested that we find an Arthur version, I suggested this one, and we gave it a go. If you've seen the Disney movie (I have, Elise has not so far) you would know that its quite different to many versions you've heard before: Merlin refers to modern (by 1960s standards) knowledge, Arthur is known generally as 'Wart', much of the runtime is spent transforming Arthur into various animals in order to teach him life lessons, and Merlin also does battle against 'Madame Mim', rather than one of his more traditional enemies like Morgan le Fey. So, going into the book I expected it to be somewhat different, but still to have a recognizable 'Arthurian' story to it. The book is...

Published by HarperCollins Children's Books: Hammersmith, London, 2007. When I was younger I used to write blog-novels with a friend , each taking turns at creating a chapter and taking the story in a new direction - I've mentioned them before in my Grimm's Fairy Tales review. This novel reminds me of those novels for a few interesting reasons. Firstly, this novel is very funny, in a very silly way, and I've always enjoyed 'silly-funny.' Secondly, our fourth blog-novel was titled And Starring Erstwhile Rogers As Himself , and followed our protagonist Erstwhile Rogers as he got involved in a strange mystery and had to, detective-like, try to solve it. Of course, Erstwhile Rogers was not as well-written as Skulduggery Pleasant is, but the idea of a strangely-monikered 'detective' getting involved in a somewhat fantastical world sounds oddly familiar to me. And for the record, Erstwhile Rogers was finished two years before Skulduggery Pleasant came out. Ju...

Published by Souvenir Press Ltd.: London, 2001 (1994). This ridiculous and very short book retells a number of classic bedtime stories in a tongue-in-cheek version of "political correctness." As an example of what this looks like, when introducing the three bears, our narrator comments that "they all lived together anthropomorphically in a little cottage as a nuclear family. They were very sorry about this, of course, since the nuclear family has traditionally served to enslave womyn, instil a self-righteous moralism in its members, and imprint rigid notions of heterosexuality roles onto the next generation. Nevertheless, they tried to be happy and took steps to avoid these pitfalls, such as naming their offspring the non-gender-specific 'Baby'." (page 39) The stories within are all like this, and many diverge from the plot of the original quite substantially - usually in a manner that makes a joke about what 'politically correctness' might deem to b...

Published by William Heinemann Ltd: London, 1977. First published 1945. Translated from the French by Katherine Woods. A cute, quirky, whimsical, oddly melancholic little book. The nameless narrator talks about his early forays into art, then, after his plane breaks down, forcing him to land in the Sahara, he meets the titular Little Prince. The Prince has arrived at Earth from his home on Asteroid B-612, a tiny world with three tiny volcanoes (one extinct) and a vain flower. He befriends the narrator and asks him to draw a sheep. After a few attempts which are criticized by the Prince, the narrator pleases the visitor by drawing a box and tells him the sheep is inside it. The Prince plans to take the sheep home with him, but is struggling to figure out how. This is not a long book, but it does have moments that seem somehow profound, and is very abstract in its ideas. The ending also builds on the feeling of melancholy that has been felt throughout, with the Prince 'finding a way ...