Karl's Reading List

Published by Wm. Collins Sons and Co. Ltd: London and Glasgow, date unknown. A book I remember from when I was a child (along with Swiggo ), this book is old enough and has 'seen enough' that its cover is now missing - the picture here is from it's inner title page. Minny Car is quite dated - one of the main characters is a gollywog! - but still cute and well illustrated. The story begins with Minny Car broken down on the side of the road. A group of toys rescue her and reattach her wheel. In return, Minny Car takes them on a journey through the highlands. First, they encounter the Loch Ness monster, then they have a picnic that gets rained out, and then eventually they face off against a bad-tempered Highland Bull!  It's all told in rhyming verse, with each character getting a chance to shine; Golly actually turns out to be the most practical of the group! I enjoy the story, and it certainly has that nostalgia factor for me, as well. Karl's List First Flight ; Good...

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 by Imagine That Publishing Ltd: Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2020. Omnibus edition featuring: 'I Love You SO Much, Grandma' by Susie Linn and (illustrator) Gail Yerrill; 'Can You Count the Stars?' by Susie Linn and (illustrator) Gabi Murphy; 'I Love You Because...' by Susie Linn and (illustrator) Gavin Scott; 'Daddy Loves Me' by Georgina Wren and (illustrator) Gabi Murphy; 'Mummy Loves Me' by Georgina Wren and (illustrator) Gabi Murphy; 'Goodnight, I Love You' by Oakley Graham and (illustrator) Gareth Llewhellin. This is a selection of six short picture books that work well together (although I believe each is available individually), and fit the theme of being short bedtime stories for young listeners.  All of them are very wholesome and loving, and three focus in on specific family members: Daddy, Mummy and Grandma (Poor Grandpa, Uncle, Aunt, Sister, Brother, Cousin etc get neglected). They are sweet, and show good bonds between the f...

Published by Hodder Moa Beckett Publishers Limited: Auckland, NZ, 1997. First published by Barry Crump Associates Ltd, 1988. A collection of short stories and poems by Crump. Some elements are a little dated/offensive by modern standards, but otherwise they are an interesting mix of stories, covering a lot more genres than I expected.  'Warm Beer' is a ghost story with a punch of an ending. 'That Way' is a dark drama involving a ruthless man quick to kill his pets. 'Cave' is a slightly supernatural poem involving possible time travel. More than one story has a protagonist contemplating, if not outright committing murder!  And of course, there are a number of the humorous slice-of-rural-life yarns that Crump was well known for. My favourites include 'Overheard in the Pub' which tells a shaggy dog story about a live fish being transported in a four-gallon kerosene tin through the outback, 'Double Scotch', in which the protagonist believes his publi...

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing: London, Berlin, New York, 2008. This short poetic book is the sequel to the short poetic book  Love That Dog, a book I have previously read (though apparently long enough ago that it's not on any of my reading lists!). In Love That Dog we are introduced to Jack, a student who struggles to engage with English in any way (it appears he is somewhat on the spectrum). His teacher, Miss Stretchberry, introduces him to poetry through having him write a journal (which we read as the book) and through looking at poems about dogs (which Jack loves). Hate That Cat picks up the following year, with Jack once again writing a journal in Miss Stretchberry's class, once again resisting writing poetry about anything but dogs (especially not about cats, which a Jack hates ) and now grieving the loss of his dog, Sky. Of course, his teacher slowly stretches him into learning new poetic features and challenges his assumptions about cats. As with Love That Dog, t...

Published by Pan Books/Pan Macmillan: London, 2017. An abridged version of A.A. Milne: His Life, first published by Faber & Faber in 1990. I don't normally read abridged versions of things. I always want to read the full version of a work in order to get the full perspective of the work in question. This one tricked me. It is a 'full version' of Goodbye Christopher Robin, but the text is taken from the longer work, A.A.Milne: His Life, by the same author. I didn't really enjoy the book. And I think the biggest reason is that it was not what the title made me expect.  So, although I haven't seen it, I am aware that Goodbye Christopher Robin is a book about the relationship between Alan Alexander Milne and his son, Christopher Robin Milne. The younger Milne became immortalised in fiction when his father used his name for one of the main characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and Christopher at times resented the intrusion that becoming one of the 'most fam...

Published by Penguin Books: London, England, 1977 (1951). Translated by Nevill Coghill. First published in Middle English in the 12th Century. Overall, this is not a book I'd recommend. It is interesting in some ways, giving an insight to the different social strata of 12th Century England, as well as discussions about the sorts of things considered socially acceptable(!), but it is also (in some of the stories) very bawdy and in fact rather coarse. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that old books will have more 'conservative' sensibilities, but although this is somewhat true if you go back to, say, Victorian Literature, going too far back comes out the other side of that era of history and back into the ribald. The structure of The Canterbury Tales is that a group of travellers, making pilgrimage to the grave of St Thomas Beckett in Canterbury, are challenged by their first-night host - who will be travelling with them - to each tell two stories in order to win th...

Published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.: Carol Stream, Illinois, 2007 (1996). Also: New International Version (Anglicised), Audio Edition, published by Biblica, Inc., 2013, narrated by David Suchet. Found online at https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/audio/?recording=nivuk-suchet This may be the longest I have taken to read a book without leaving it for an extended period of time. At the start of the year Elise mentioned a desire to read the Bible chronologically using this version that she had purchased some time in the past. We desired to do this together, pacing ourselves by keeping roughly to the reading plan outlined within. As a Christian, I deeply value the Bible. I try to read at least a few verses most days (although realistically it is sometimes less often than this) and often I find that the different verses I read will either speak into whatever situation I am going through at the time, or come back to mind at a future time. I believe that God speaks through His ...

Published by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.: New York, 1979. This tale is a modern "prose adaptation" of "a poem written about 1400 by an unknown author" (page ix). It tells the story of Gawain, a knight from King Arthur's court, and his encounter with the magical Green Knight. The knight arrives at King Arthur's court and challenges someone to give him a single blow with an axe, which he will return a year and one day later. Gawain takes up the challenge, removes the knight's head with a single stroke and is then horrified when the knight picks up his severed head, reminds Gawain of his promise, and leaves. The story follows Gawain as he seeks the whereabouts of the Green Knight to honour his promise, and spends a lot of time at a castle he encounters on his travels where the queen seeks to seduce him! The story is a fairly simple one, but there are times you can tell the original text was written in a very different time to our own. Durin...