Tuesday Storytime: Christmas

It's our last storytime before Christmas, and our last of 2015, so I picked a lovely trio to end us on.  We'll start up in January with lots of books about snow, and hope that Mother Nature gets the hint.

Snowmen at Christmas
Caralyn Buehner, illustrated by Mark Buehner
ISBN: 0803729952
Luminous but cheerful and lighthearted spread paintings of animated snowpeople all festive.

This is actually a sequel to Snowmen at Night, but I like this one better as a Christmas story.  That said, I do have, and might read Snowmen at Night in the next couple of months with all the snowy themes.  This one is nice for Christmas for several reasons:
1) rhyming text means I can get through a slightly more substantial story in much better time.
2) this is one of the least-Christmassy Christmas books out there (only one veiled religious reference)
3) snowman party.


A Short History of Christmas
Sally Lee (consulting editor: Gail Saunders-Smith)
ISBN: 9781491460955
Very primary-grade juvenile nonfiction explaining the historic basis for Christmas traditions.

Really loving this series, and very happy to see them on the shelves.  This one is just as factual as Thanksgiving, and very straightforward, starting with the December festival of Saturnalia, the birth of Jesus, choosing of December 25th by church leaders, Saint Nicholas into Santa Claus, the tradition of caroling, Queen Victoria's German Christmas tree, and modern traditions of charity.  Not bad for just under 250 words total.  I just really wish there were similar books for the less-recognized holidays of the season: Hanukkah, Eid, and Solstice.


Bear Stays Up for Christmas
Karma Wilson, Jane Chapman
ISBN: 0689852789
Bear and Friends series, Bear's friends help him stay awake for Christmas Eve and Morning.

I adore this Christmas book.  It's so sweet and perfect and has just about everything you'd want out of a Christmas book - including the difficulties that children have staying awake for the fun!  Bear is the perfect sleepy focus, and all his friends are genuinely helpful and caring.  This entire series is beautiful, but this one is perfect for Christmas in a way that is deeply satisfying.  I personally would have been fine without an appearance by Santa as well, but that's not a battle I feel motivated about - it's just a slight preference.

Tuesday Storytime: Sharing

These books are all delightful, and I'm glad I had the chance to put them all together.

Mail Harry to the Moon!

Robie H. Harris, illustrated by Michael Emberley

ISBN: 9780316153768

Very expressive faces and cartoony panel/vignette sequences.

Before Harry, there was Just Me.  Now there's Harry, who eats off my banana, who messes with my things, steals grandma's lap, and screams all night.  Our poor nameless narrator is very frustrated, but has a series of great ideas to solve the problem: throw Harry in the trash, stuff him down the toilet, stick him in the zoo, Mail Harry to the Moon!  Until he wakes up the next morning and doesn't see or hear or smell anything from the little guy.  What is there to do but journey to the moon to enact a rescue, and maybe discover that Harry's good for something after all.

On Mother's Lap

Ann Herbert Scott, illustrated by Glo Coalson (original sepia-tone edition)
ISBN: 0070558973 (?)  Published 1972, McGraw-Hill

Serene drawings of an Inuit family share a wise message about mother love.

 Michael is happy sitting and rocking with Mother, but he doesn't want his friends left out of the love, so first Dolly, then Boat, then Puppy, all end up snuggling under a reindeer blanket on the rocking chair with Mother.  But when Baby starts to cry, Michael is adamant that there is just not enough room.  (the facial expressions are priceless here) Mother disagrees, and gently shows that there is always room for everyone on Mother's lap.  Classic for a good reason.

Share

Sally Anne Garland

ISBN: 9781771470056

Sketchy-drawn bunny children in colorful evocative backgrounds.

Bunny's cousin is visiting, and he's not quite as old as she is.  Her mother pleads with her repeatedly to understand and to share, while she tries a variety of activities that the little one spoils accidentally.  Mother explains that he is copying and following and pestering because he wants to be just like her, and commiserates that it's difficult to handle little ones.  The ending is a little confusing, as Aunty retrieves the cousin with the wording "now it's his turn to share" - but he doesn't share anything? just gives her a hug and a thank you, which is nice, but not exactly sharing as a child understands it.  Regardless, still very nice and illustrative for the sometimes strained relationship between siblings or friends of slightly different ages.  

Tuesday Storytime: Winter is Coming

Some lovely nature books for the onset of winter, at the start of December.  Wanted to counteract all of the rampant Christmassing going on everywhere.

Winter is Coming

Tony Johnston, illustrated by Jim LaMarche

ISBN: 9781442472518

Reviewed here, read only exerpts for storytime due to extremely young attendees.

Such a beautiful book.  I trimmed it waaaay down so I could use it with this group - cut 6 spreads completely out.  Because it's sequential, it didn't detract from the narrative flow, just tightened the focus a good bit and moved it along a lot faster so our under-4 year olds didn't get terminal wiggles.  It's still one of the most beautiful books I've seen, but the language isn't as poetic or flowing as the illustrations (and the type is very small), which makes it a bit challenging to read aloud.

Moon Glowing

Elizabeth Partridge, illustrated by Joan Paley

ISBN: 0525468730

Blocky painterly collage elements and a lovely wintry color palette.

I've used this fall/hibernation book a few times in past storytimes, but not recently, and it goes very well with my natural progression of the winter concept here.  We follow three animals; squirrel, bat, and bear, as they prepare over the fall for the onset of winter.  The text is large and highly contrasted to the pages, the images are clear and stylized with crisp colors and sharp minimalist patterns and textures.  The tight focus on the three animals means that the book is super short, but still hits clearly on the natural world's focus in late fall; storing food, preparing shelter, sleeping.  Pretty and much more accessible to a younger crowd, not least because of the much more appropriate length and minimal text.

In November

Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Jill Kastner

ISBN: 0152010769

One day late with this one.  Much like the other two, but with a short coda about Thanksgiving.

This book somehow manages to be super-factual, but impressively lyrical.  While I have no problems at all with Kastner's beautiful illustrations (the contrast between the clear-as-a-bell framing and composition with the muddled and mottled colors and blurry edges of the actual paintings is stunning to look at) I have to contrast this lovely language with that in Winter is Coming, and see how much more apt and flowing it is, and it makes me wish that Rylant would write something natural and poignant for LaMarche to illustrate.  It would probably make me cry. 

Tuesday Storytime: Thanksgiving

A couple of old standards, and a new nonfiction Thanksgiving book.


A Short History of Thanksgiving
Sally Lee, consulting editor Gail Saunders-Smith
ISBN: 9781491460979
Nonfiction, primary-source images and photography.

This is a delightful short (very short) intro to the concept of Thanksgiving.  Just right for this pre-school age group of mine, and I'm very glad to have it in the system.  I'll have to check out the other holiday books in this series as well if they're all done as well as this one was.



Thanksgiving Cats
Jean Marzollo, illustrated by Hans Wilhelm
ISBN: 0590037145
Previously reviewed here


Thanks for Thanksgiving
Julie Markes, illustrated by Doris Barrette
ISBN: 9780060510961
Previously reviewed here

Tuesday Storytime: Bedtime Storytime

It's been a while since I've done one of these.

One Ted Falls Out of Bed
Julia Donaldson, illustrated by Anna Currey
ISBN: 0805077871
Counts from one to ten, and back down again through nighttime adventures of a teddy bear.

Our poor Ted gets dumped from the bed, and the sleeping child is all unaware, so the toys in the bedroom conspire to console him, then to try and get him back into bed.  Adorable, and the counting is a very cute way to organize the story.


Small Elephant's Bathtime
Tatyana Feeney
ISBN: 9780553497212
Pen and ink and a few bright splotches of color illustrate Small Elephant's shenanigans.

Our Small Elephant doesn't want to take a bath, and nothing Mommy does (toys, bubbles, pleading) is making any difference.  Perhaps getting Daddy involved will help matters?  Very cute and short, and love the response from the storytime mamas when the book invoked the Daddy card.



Ten, Nine, Eight
Molly Bang
ISBN: 0688009069
Short and sweet countdown of bedtime with an adorable black father and daughter.

I love this book because it's so sweet and perfect and timeless and universal, and it doesn't have white people as the default.  We count down sweet simple calming bedroom things, with a few quiet jokes: "7 empty shoes in a short straight row" (which of course means one is missing, as it always is) and "4 sleepy eyes which open and close" (meaning Daddy is tired also).  Very sweet, very calming.  A great ending point.


Lots of babies and lots of new storytime toddlers these past few weeks, so I've been purposefully working with shorter and more narratively-simple books to help them feel successful at sitting and listening.  There's nothing worse than having a really fun long book, but trying to present it to a young audience that's just so done with concentrating and books already.

Don't make things hard on yourself - there's always time later to move on to the complicated or longer books.  Focus on each storytime as its own singular interaction, and do your best to make it the best it can be for the majority of the attendee children, and you'll come out on top most of the time.  

Tuesday Storytime: Problem Friends

Making friends isn't easy, and there are often some setbacks and roadblocks along the way.

Too Many Frogs!
Sandy Asher, illustrated by Keith Graves
ISBN: 0399239782
Quirky characters here, in a story about imposing on other people, and getting permission.

Rabbit has a lovely neat orderly life all alone.  He has his routines, and no mess and no fuss.  Until Frog stops by one evening and sort of invites himself in to listen to Rabbit's goodnight story.  Night after night, Frog keeps making himself more comfortable, to Rabbit's growing (but unspoken) chagrin.  The final straw comes when Frog shows up with his whole extended family, and Rabbit finally speaks up.  The ending of the story is not as solid as it could have been, with some unfortunate choices and implications, but the message of clearly asking permission and not taking advantage is still present.


You Will Be My Friend!
Peter Brown
ISBN: 9780316070300
Lucy the bear sets out into the forest to MAKE some critter into her friend.

Lucy is enthusiastic about her new mission: to make a friend.  Enthusiasm isn't everything, and Lucy runs into some pretty extreme setbacks.  She even gets a little bossy and snappy at one point, before collapsing in exhausted defeat.  Still, friendships can come looking for you, even when you can't make one happen on demand.


Don't Copy Me!
Jonathan Allen
ISBN: 9781907967207
Little Puffin does NOT like this game.

Little Puffin is taking advantage of the lovely weather to go for a walk, but he's being followed and copied by the little Gull siblings, and he is not a fan of this game.  Nothing he can think of to do makes them stop copying him; "How annoying!"  Still, he keeps trying, and eventually hits on a strategy that works out.  This one is also very useful for kids having troubles with much younger siblings or siblings of playmates.  

Tuesday Storytime: Fall Weather

We've had yet another weekend of miserable wet weather here, and although I know we need the rain, the combination of dreary drizzly dark days with the sudden arrival of Daylight Savings Time has made me acutely aware that we're solidly into fall.

Fall Leaves
Loretta Holland, illustrated by Elly MacKay
ISBN: 9780544106642
Beautiful (if wordy) nonfiction about the progression of the season via natural environment changes.

This was a bit of a gamble - it's nonfiction and the content text is very small (so hard for a storyteller to read) and very dense (I admit freely that I did a lot of skipping and eliding of content) - but the illustrations are so beautiful, and the clear and grounded progression of the season was so lovely and so delightful in it's dedication to being totally grounded in science and observable natural phenomenon, that I just felt like I had to.  I really like presenting nonfiction whenever I can, because I feel like it gets unfairly ignored by parents who are intimidated by the nonfiction stacks.  That's a real shame, because even very little kids can enjoy a lot of nonfiction content, and there is a lot of that content being created for even the youngest audiences.  Anyway, it's absolutely stunningly beautiful to look at, and the book itself is a delight.  I think it would be a lot better as a one-on-one lapsit book.

 
When Autumn Falls
Kelli Nidey, illustrated by Susan Swan
ISBN: 0807504912
Dimensional collage illustrations with minimal text emphasizing the "fall" in the season.

This is a cute little read, and it's a staple this time of year because it is so short and cute.  We set off through an idealized small town in fall with short direct text: "Leaves on the trees fall..."  "The temperature falls..."  "Ripe apples" and "football players" also.  We learn that "sunlight falls through the almost-bare trees" and "days fall shorter" as we end the day and the book with "We call it fall."


Leaf Man
Lois Ehlert
ISBN: 0152053042
Ehlert's signature bold colors and outlines are interpreted here through collages of fall leaves.

A lyrical story of fall told through the creation of a Leaf Man who blows away in the wind and the reader is asked to imagine where he goes and what he sees on his autumn journey.  The journey imagines gardens and crops, farm animals and flying geese, migrating butterflies and swarming fish in rivers, but all of the illustrations are created entirely through images of various leaves.  It is beautiful and somewhat haunting.  The Leaf Man himself is re-created at the end with a prompt to find your own real Leaf Man out in nature.

Tuesday Storytime: Halloween

Halloween is this weekend!  Yay!

I very much wanted to read the newest Ladybug Girl book from David Soman and Jacky Davis (Ladybug Girl and the Dress-up Dilemma) because Ladybug Girl!  Halloween!  Costumes!  But it was rainy and nasty out, so we had a room full of babies, and it was just too long to suit.  Maybe next year!

At the Old Haunted House
Helen Ketteman, illustrated by Nate Wragg
ISBN: 9781477847695
Takes the venerable "Over in the Meadow" rhyme and re-sets it in a spooky haunted mansion.

Sweet and slightly spooky, we have a house-full of beasties and haunts; everything from black cats to spiders to ghosts to werewolves, all doing various spooky things to the Over in the Meadow pattern of call and response.  The illustrations are cute, and the payoff at the end is quick and a little abrupt - a set of trick-or-treating kids gets invited into a monster party at the house (which is what all the scary actions from before were in preparation for).  Fun and the close relation to the nursery rhyme makes it less likely to give offense.

10 Trick-or-Treaters
Janet Schulman, illustrated by Linda Davick
ISBN: 9780385736145
Another variation of a nursery rhyme has a party of costumed trick-or-treaters slowly dwindling as the night wears on.

This one is adorable.  We have our line of trick-or-treaters, which gets whittled down rapidly as the participants are scared in turns by various animals or other costumed people (or dragged off to bed by their parents) and as the countdown winds to a close, we end with our last brave soul in bed, dreaming sugar-fueled dreams of Halloween.  Again, the very determinedly pastel and lighthearted artwork and the resemblance to the counting rhyme make this a most inoffensive option.

Happy Halloween, Emily!
Claire Masurel, illustrated by Susan Calitri
ISBN: 0448426919
Emily the bunny is a bit concerned about the Halloween Parade coming up.  Will it be too scary?

I like this one because it's very straightforward about the potential for scary things on Halloween, but emphasizes that they're not real, only pretend, and only people that you know already dressing up strangely.  Emily is a little hesitant about the potential for scares at the Halloween Parade, especially since her three friends are super excited about the "horrible monsters" "spooky ghosts" and "scary dinosaurs" that will be there.  Back at home Emily reassures herself and her baby brother (a good audience stand-in) that her witch costume isn't "too scary" before her mother in a very silly bunny-eared ghost costume tries to scare her, and her father does likewise in a scarecrow outfit.  Again, nothing even remotely scary about any of the appearances.  Family all together, they head for the Parade, where her friends are dressed as the scary things they were predicting, but they aren't scary at all.  Even the parade is shown in broad daylight, and all of the costumes are light-hearted and gentle.  I love that it puts attention on the worries of young children, while staying focused on the goal - to keep them from being actually scared of a mostly lighthearted child-centered holiday.

Tuesday Storytime: Prepping for Halloween

I Am a Witch's Cat
Harriet Muncaster
ISBN: 9780062229144
Meticulous miniature dioramas are adorable mundane counterparts to the wild claims in the text.

Previously reviewed here.  Still adorable.  No worries from any parents or kids, and a few chuckles at the conflation of the "mommy book club" with a coven.


Duck and Goose Find a Pumpkin
Tad Hills
ISBN: 9780375858130
(Board Book) Short and sweet in the Duck and Goose tradition, good for audience interaction.

Duck and Goose books are usually just a smidge too basic for me to use in storytimes.  I'm sure the kids would love it, but I try not to subject myself or the parents to very simplistic "baby books" any more than I have to.  This one is an exception because I try very hard for my Halloween books to be lighthearted, family-centric, and generally utterly inoffensive.  Very simple set up has Thistle (Duck and Goose's occasional friend) wandering by with a pumpkin, spurring the young friends to acquire one of their own.  A series of spreads has them looking in all sorts of unlikely places, until Thistle reappears at the end to drop a much-needed hint about the pumpkin patch.

Hedgehug's Halloween
Text by Benn Sutton, concept and art by Dan Pinto
ISBN: 9780061961045
Colorful and blocky collage in textural swathes of bright or moody colors.

I'm not super thrilled about the artwork here, as I feel it's a bit too small for as busy and stylized as it is.  I wish it were a larger book.  That said, the story is adorable, and the pictures are very clear and understandable despite the blocky collage and rough-edged textures.  Hedgehug has forgotten about the yearly Halloween party in the forest, and he and his friends are desperately trying to find him a costume, but his prickles keep ruining things.  As the party begins, and he's still sans costume, he trudges through the forest sadly, but there's a three-headed big thing chasing after him!  It's his friends, with one last super-duper attempt at a costume, but this time they're prepared for the spikes.

 

Tuesday Storytime: Monster Families

I love October.  Halloween for weeks on end.  We have spooky books up on display, and I get to read about monsters and mummies and zombies to impressionable kids from now til November.

Zombelina
Kristyn Crow, illustrated by Molly Idle (Flora and the Flamingo)
ISBN: 9780802728036
Way too sweet to be scary.  A zombie girl learns to be a ballerina, and tackles stage fright.

Previously reviewed here.  Still love it, still the sweetest story, but this time around the theme hit more solidly on the family support of her passion.


Where's My Mummy?
Carolyn Crimi (Rock n' Roll Mole), illustrated by John Manders
ISBN: 9780763643379
Woefully undersized hardcover edition has a cute little mummy meeting traditional "monsters."

Despite using and loving this book, I've somehow managed to not review it yet!  This is a cute little "reversal of expectations" book.  Little mummy is playing hide-and-shriek (which really, with small kids, is roughly the truth) with his mommy mummy, but she's either too busy or really incompetent at the game, so he's off searching in various scary environments for her.  First the graveyard, where he meets Bones, then the swamp where he meets the Blob, then a dark cave where he finds Drac.  The pint-sized roly-poly mummy child is totally unimpressed with seeing these friends or neighbors, who are all prepping for bed themselves (brushing teeth, washing faces and ears) but warn the little tyke of "things" that lurk in the darkness.  Pooped, with still no mommy mummy, he rests at the base of a tree until a mouse appears.  THAT's the scare-jump all the parents were waiting for, and mommy mummy is immediately there to rescue, comfort, and take to bed.  ADORABLE.

Goodnight, Little Monster
Helen Ketteman, illustrated by Bonnie Leick
ISBN: 9780761456834
Sweet lush soft-edged watercolor-looking illustrations of an adorable baby monster at bedtime.

This is such a sweet book, but I have a hard time reading it because the endpapers are COVERED in giant nasty spiders.  I "screwed my courage to the sticking place" as best I could, because it really is a sweet story, and because I more often read the slightly sillier and more upbeat My Monster Mama Loves Me So, but I did that one too recently to repeat.  So, I braved the spiders, and had two mamas ask me if they could have the book afterwards.  Courage is rewarded!  In the story, mama is putting baby to bed, and it's just as traditional and standard as you could ask: from bathtime to bedtime snack to toothbrushing to the under-bed-monsters (er, children) check, and the temporary forgetting of the nightlight.  The pictures really are sweet, once you get past all the spiders.

Tuesday Storytime: Mud Puddles

In case you missed it, South Carolina has been suffering from some pretty intense rainy weather.  We're in good shape in the Upstate, but thousands of people are without power or water, and it's literally been raining for over a week now.  The sun was out today, but I've got some lovely rainy-day books, and wanted to give kids a lighter and more optimistic counter narrative to the news they're seeing every night of flooding and evacuations.

Muddigush
Kimberly Knutson
ISBN: 0027508439
Marbled-paper collages look almost like Japanese papercuts.  Language is intensely poetic.

This one is a bit of a challenge to read, because the language here is just straight up poetry.  I love all the onomatopoeia going on, and the rhythms of the wording are just lovely.  Here's a bit:

The riverbed slime
is shivery and quivery,
bubbly and wiggly,
cold and jiggly.
Spread it, pat it,
till it's shiny and flat.
Smack and whack that
smucky mush
smacky mush
squooshy slooshy muddigush!

So fun to read.


One Duck Stuck
Phyllis Root (Oliver Finds His Way), illustrated by Jane Chapman (Bear books with Karma Wilson)
ISBN: 0763603341
Counting up to ten in the swamp with animals trying to help a duck with his foot buried in mud.

This is a fun and quick counting book.  There's lots of text, but it reads very quickly, and even with lots of expressive pauses, it still just hums along.  ONE duck is stuck, and then TWO fish come over and try to help, then THREE moose, and so on.  My favorite part is the different creative ways the animals try to help - all failing until ten types of animal have assembled, and all work together to rescue the poor duck.  Cute, fun wordplay, simple but bright and vibrant paintings, and a good message.  Also mud.  


Red Rubber Boot Day
Mary Lyn Ray, illustrated by Lauren Stringer
ISBN: 0152053980
Previously reviewed here.

Still one of my absolute favorite rainy-day books.  It's just such a perfect marriage of luminous paintings and child-focused interest.  There's only so much a creative child can do inside when it's raining before they just have to go outside and run around in the wet.  Super short, super attractive, and an absolute joy from start to finish.

Tuesday Storytime: Going to School

Because it isn't QUITE October, and I don't want to waste any of my lovely Halloween/Monster/Spooky/Creepy books yet.

Ninja Boy Goes to School
N. D. Wilson, illustrated by J. J. Harrison
ISBN: 9780375865848
Pop-art with a dual-story: artwork explains the reality, while the text gives the viewpoint of our ninja.

This one's cute, but a little on the advanced side for my group, especially with all the older ones gone off to real school now.  Still, the parents enjoy being in on the joke, even if the babies don't quite follow, and the younger toddlers, know something's up, even if they can't quite figure it out yet.  The text is short and clear, describing character traits of a ninja, and challenges in a ninja's life.  The illustrations on the other hand show a very different interpretation of the events as they unfold, and make for some fun beats and contrasts.  The art is vivid and blocky, and our little ninja kid is cute.

The Bus For Us
Suzanne Bloom
ISBN: 1563979322
This very repetitive book rises above its format due to the artistic choices and diverse cast.

Short and sweet.  Gus and Tess are waiting for their bus to take them to school, along with an ever-growing line of extremely diverse children, as well as other drivers and pedestrians.  Each spread is prefaced by a question: "Is this the bus for us, Gus?" and a hint of the upcoming vehicle.  Inevitably, the vehicle is NOT a bus: it's anything from an ice-cream truck to a fire engine to a backhoe (why is a backhoe on the road in the first place?).  The bus does come at the end, for a full line of waiting school children.  I also like the totally unscripted side-drama involving a menagerie of pets and strays.

Minerva Louise at School
Janet Morgan Stoeke
ISBN: 0525454942
Minerva Louise is a curious chicken, and in this installment, she's visiting the neighboring school.

This chicken may get things wrong, but she's no dumb chick.  She's visiting the neighboring school for the first time, and really admires the things that this "big new barn" has on show.  While she doesn't see any animals (the kids are just now getting off the bus in the morning) she does see the farmer hanging out the laundry (a teacher or principal is lofting the flag) and she's gotten lots of inspiration from this great place.  It's cute and silly, and lets even the younger toddlers be "superior" to this silly chicken, without ever being meanspirited.  The series overall is a less tongue-twisty and much younger-skewed Amelia Bedelia, with blocky colorful deceptively simplistic artwork.

Nonfiction: Thirty Million Words, Dana Suskind, MD

Thirty Million Words
Dana Suskind, MD
ISBN: 9780525954873
Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns.

Suskind is a specialist who fits patients with cochlear implants.  She is also, after a lifetime of watching some of her patients thrive and others flounder, a staunch promoter of language readiness.

Suskind uses this book to promote the overwhelming (and currently irreplacable) responsibility of parents and caregivers to use the first three years of a child's life to introduce them to the language they'll need to thrive and succeed in life.  The thirty million words in the title refer to the landmark longitudinal study of parents from different socio-economic status: by the end of their third year, the well-off child has heard thirty million more words than their less fortunate schoolmates, and this difference profoundly handicaps the kids on the low end of the scale.

The first half of the book explains why Suskind got into this passion project, and details the science behind her drive.  The second half breaks down the three Ts involved: Tune In (pay attention to and work in concert with the child's interests) Talk More (the more language you use the better, and specifically the more descriptive language and names of things and concepts), and Take Turns (language learning works best when the kid and the adult are in it together, and the adult isn't "teaching" or lecturing, or simply narrating to the kid).  

Tuesday Storytime: Bugs!

All bugs, all the time.  We're getting into fall (hello equinox!) and that means that the temperatures around here get - lets go with "variable."  This means that the bugs are desperate for some consistency in their lives, which means that they all head indoors, where people invariably shriek and scream and call pest control companies to save them from the multi-legged invasion.  And so, my storytime for this week is born.  Also I'm working up to Halloween, so I have to do all the creepity storytimes while I can.

I Wish I Were a Butterfly
James Howe, illustrated by Ed Young
ISBN: 015200470X
Atmospheric watercolors aren't the best for keeping attention, but the story is so sweet.

A young cricket is convinced he's ugly, until he speaks to his old friend the spider, who convinces him that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that everyone's better off if you choose to believe the beholder who is actually your friend.  A sweet message of beauty, friendship, and self-confidence.  It is hella long tho, and the moody, dark, atmospheric paintings don't help hold the attention very well.

I Love Bugs!
Emma Dodd
ISBN: 9780823422807
Bold outlines and cartoonish proportions focus on all different types of bugs, including spiders.

Our narrator wants us to know how much they love all types of bugs in this super-short rhyming narrative that is heavy on the descriptive adjectives.  By the end, we sort of get the idea, but our closer is a celebration of the thrill that comes of being just slightly scared of something.  I like it because it presents fear of something (in this case, spiders) as humorous and thrilling, instead of something to be ashamed of or work through.

Some Bugs
Angela DiTerlizzi, illustrations by Brendan Wenzel
ISBN: 9781442458802
Funky big-eyed bugs feature heavily in what looks to be heavily textured collage scenes.

On first glance, this book OUGHT to be a lot shorter read than Dodd's I Love Bugs! but when I pre-read it, it didn't turn out that way.  Granted, the text IS shorter, but the problem that I faced was that the pages are so busy and vibrant, and the text is placed in the smallest-possible empty space, and those spaces are placed in such very different areas of the page spreads, that I had troubles finding the text reliably with each page-turn.  So this one was more of a stilted, stop-and-go, pause-ful read.  Not that it mattered, because the images are so vibrant and lively that the kids just wanted to look at all the bugs anyway, but it did bug me a little (haha, get it?) that I couldn't read it fluently page to page.

Nonfiction: Living the Secular Life, Phil Zuckerman

Living the Secular Life
Phil Zuckerman
ISBN: 9781594205088
Presents studies and historical counterpoints to the pervasive belief that secularism is dooming civilization.

Really appreciated the emphasis on studies and research, and on historical figures.  The "case studies" with interviews from various secular people were also very interesting.  Thought that it was a little bit of a gloss over a complex and interesting societal shift, but in a pop-science book clocking in under 300 pages WITH notes, bibliography, and an index (made my researcher heart so happy to see all of those) I can't really blame the author for a bit of glossing over sticky points.

A good read for anyone interested in the growing percentage of religious "nones" living in America (and to a lesser extent, in other countries, but the supermajority of the focus is American life and mores).

New Arrival: Picture Book: The Emperor and the Kite, Jane Yolen & Ed Young

A very pretty new arrival today, in the form of a lovely collaboration between the very talented Jane Yolen and the equally talented Ed Young.

The Emperor and the Kite
Jane Yolen, illustrated by Ed Young
ISBN:  9780399214998
Young's colorful and precise "papercut" artwork counterpoints Yolen's savvy and streamlined phrasing.

This is in the form of a Chinese fable, but I don't know if it actually is.  I do know that this particular story is older, and this is a newly-released edition with updated (and absolutely stunning) artwork.

Our Emperor has strong and able sons, and they are like the suns in the sky.  He also has beautiful and proper daughters, and they are like the moons in the night.  He has (but has pretty much forgotten) one final small girl child, who is young and small and quiet.  When hardship falls upon the Emperor, his lauded sons and beloved daughters weep and mourn for his dire fate (from a safe distance, of course), but the youngest actually gets up and does something for him.

Sweet and pat, of course, but that's a fable for you.  

Graphic Novel Book Club: Superman Red Son, Mark Millar & Dave Johnson & Kilian Plunkett

Superman Red Son
Mark Millar
Artists:
Dave Johnson & Andrew Robinson (Red Son Rising & Red Son Ascendant)
Kilian Plunkett & Walden Wong (Red Son Ascendant & Red Son Setting)
Colorist: Paul Mounts (seriously good work here)
Letters: Ken Lopez (not so fond of the stylized capitals, but otherwise excellent)
ISBN: 9781401247119 (soft-side trade collecting all three volumes: Red Son Rising, Red Son Ascendant, Red Son Setting, with intro, marginalia, and process art)

Another month, another graphic novel for the club.  This time we went with a well-regarded alt-universe Superman fan-fic: Superman Red Son.  The premise (and a twist at the end) has our Kryptonian ubermensch landing in a Ukrainian communal farm instead of in cornfed central USA.  The idealistic and straightforward hero absorbs and internalizes the ideals of the communist party, and sets the world down a very different path.

This is very much a alternate-universe "what if" scenario, driven almost entirely by plot gears, with only the bare minimum of characterization to flesh out our main cast: Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman (holy hand grenades, Batman!) Lex Luthor, Lois Lane Luthor (still a Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist), Bizarro, Brainiac, the Green Lantern Corps, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few here and there.  Before reading this comic, everyone should be familiar with those characters and their basic archetypes, because that's pretty much all you're going to get as they karoom around this inverted world and everyone makes pretty much uniformly bad decisions (often from good intentions) that drive the plot deliciously down an interesting path to destruction and difficult choices for all.  A few well-placed heel-turns, a bit of shoe-horning in of characters (I thought especially Batman was shoveled in by main force and then tragically underutilized), and a bit of hazy plotting (was the somewhat extended Green Lantern diversion really actually necessary to the development of the plot?  Discuss.) the story was overall interesting and fast-paced enough to keep me entertained.  Besides, it's essentially an "elseworlds" story, so even if it was horrid, it's easy enough to fling back into the murk and forget about it.

The art was delicious, the forms and poses were classical and clear and well-defined.  People had faces that aged and changed over decades of time, and even through the change of artists, the characters looked like themselves all the way through.  A special shout-out to Paul Mounts for some really stellar coloring work here.  There was a lot of black and a lot of grey and a lot of red, plus loads of stark contrasts that very easily could have slid into melodrama or cartoon, and he held the line excellently.

Overall, a fun excercise in "what if" that stands well clear of politics or economic realities to focus on the fun story potentials in a world only slightly different from our own.

Tuesday Storytime: Knights and Dragons

Yay!  I finally have enough good knights and dragons books to do a storytime!

The Bravest Knight
Mercer Mayer
ISBN: 9780803732063
Mayer's signature art style populates a young boy's vivid imagination of knights and battles.

If we're going for straight favorites, There's an Alligator Under My Bed is my absolute favorite.  However, for the knights and dragons angle, The Bravest Knight is so cute.  We start with a trash can lid-toting boy, as he elucidates the many reasons he would love to live "a thousand years ago" (exaggeration starts early) when there were knights and castles and dragons and trolls.  Until of course his imagination (and the fearsome troll) gets to be a leeeetle bit too much for him, and he's quite happy to be back in the safety of the present day.

King Jack and the Dragon
Peter Bently, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury
ISBN: 9780803736986
New Arrival, reviewed here.

Short and sweet, and full of imaginative play and cooperation and all the knights and dragons and beasts any kid could wish for.  Perfect for storytime.

Me and My Dragon
David Biedrzycki
ISBN: 9781580892780
Technically no knights, but a sweet story about the logistics of pet dragons.

I've used this one before in pet-oriented storytimes, and it's so cute.  We walk through a boy's fond imaginings of how life would be with a pet dragon, from adoption and vet visits to obedience school and seasonal activities (kite flying probably not a hit, melting snow from neighbors' sidewalks super easy).  The dragon is bright red and expressive, with big eyes and a floppy rounded body, while everything else is drawn in a realistic style.  I also have to say that I'm really happy to see that our narrator is an indeterminate brownish color instead of being white.  A small touch, and never even mentioned, but it's gratifying to see.

Tuesday Storytime: Sibling Relations

Another one that I have missed this year - I think this is my worst year to date for missing storytimes.  I took care to give my replacement a good fun set of reads.

Mission: New Baby
Susan Hood, illustrated by Mary Lundquist
ISBN: 9780385376723
Vignettes and "snapshots" of life with a baby sibling, with a military/special ops flair.

Our main character is a tousle-haired white boy and his family, but we get vignettes from other diverse "recruits" as they also assist with their new siblings.  Everything from bathtime to storytime is presented as a military or espionage exercise, with the conceit that the established "operative" (the new big brother/sister) has been tasked with training the new "recruit" (the baby sibling) by teaching them the ropes.  There's not much to it, but it's super cute.

Rodeo Red
Maripat Perkins, illustrated by Molly Idle
ISBN: 9781561458165
Previously reviewed here.

I still love this one, and it's the reason I went with this particular theme.  I'm happy to report that the storyteller and the audience loved it to pieces as well.

Peace, Baby!
Linda Ashman, illustrated by Joanne Lew-Vriethoff
ISBN: 9781452106137
Diverse characters, soft colors, and expressive poses and faces.

This one sits up with Llama Llama for the very clear, child-level message - choose kindness, choose to work together, choose to be gentle, choose to forgive.  This one isn't entirely about family and siblings, but the lesson certainly applies there, and several of the scenarios pictured could be of sibling sets.

The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, edited and annoated by Leslie S. Klinger

The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft
Editor, annotator: Leslie S. Klinger
Norton & Co
ISBN: 9780871404534
852 pages.
Collection of most of Lovecraft's "Arkham Cycle" stories, from Dagon to the Haunter of the Dark.
Read ALL FREAKING SUMMER

Confession.  I've never actually read any Lovecraft, other than At the Mountains of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu.  This is a fantastic way to have remedied that oversight.  The collection puts them all in roughly chronological order, and only includes the stories that have major elements of what Klinger calls the "Arkham Cycle" of nebulous mythology.  (Interesting discovery that the idea of a coherent and complete "Cthulhu Mythos" was more likely the hero-worshipping tendencies of the young author who oversaw the preservation of Lovecraft's legacy.)

Anyway - if you like Lovecraft, or enjoy a good annotation (don't be ashamed to admit it - I've got my eye on that Laura Ingalls Wilder annotated autobiography Pioneer Girl next...) then this is an excellent collection.  Just be warned.  It's a freaking TOME, and it's heavy and awkward as hell.  This is a desk read if I ever saw one.


Stories: great fun, occasionally a bit overwrought.  Not actually frightening, which was a bit unexpected.  He name-dropped his own mythos and his own stories (and to be fair, the mythos, characters, and stories of other authors) with truly astounding frequency.  Not much for subtlety.

Annotations: usually very interesting, occasionally a bit too densely architectural or local-history-centric.  Really drove home the amount of research (or, alternatively, the really terrifying amount of arcane science and historical knowledge) that went into writing; setting these stories in superbly realistic, everyday, mundane surroundings, up to and including citing recent scientific discoveries and having accurate moon phases referenced ALL THE TIME (I'm giving Tolkien a dirty look here).

Author: (ie Lovecraft) blazing racist asshat with really severe anxiety about progress and "otherness."  Lots of weird fascination with the size and scope of the universe, and of our solar system, and humanity's relative un-importance in relation to that.  Lots of body horror.  Overly concerned with inhuman things coming out of the ocean or from space, from what we now know as the Kuiper Belt.


So, that's Lovecraft for me done.
Now I really want to go out and hit up Klinger's Annotated Sherlock and Annotated Sandman. I'll leave you with a lovely link to a really nice interview by Klinger and Neil Gaiman about Lovecraft and the New Annotated collection.

Fantasy: Short Stories: Old Venus, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

Old Venus
Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
Stories by Allen M. Steele,
Lavie Tidhar,
Paul McAuley,
Matthew Hughes,
Gwyneth Jones,
Joe Haldeman,
Stephen Leigh,
Eleanor Arnason,
David Brin,
Garth Nix,
Michael Cassutt,
Tobias Bucknell,
Elizabeth Bear,
Joe R. Lansdale,
Mike Resnick,
Ian McDonald
ISBN: 9780345537287
Short Story Collection:
Read June 2015

This collection asks modern fantasy and sf authors to imagine that Venus was actually the
steamy jungle (or water) world it was imagined to be in the pulp sf years, and write new stories set in that mythical world.  And did they ever deliver!

Allen M. Steele's Frogheads takes us to an ocean world where the locals are very fond of chocolate, and the Russian bureaucracy is still shaking off the accumulated inertia of failed communism.  We follow a jaded and taicturn PI searching for the missing son of a rich shipping magnate, and he finds that the son isn't exactly missing.

Lavie Tidhar then gives us the seriously creeptastic and more-than-slightly-Lovecraftian The Drowned Celestial, where our hero is dragooned into a sinister cult, but on the flip side, manages to find a lover!  Bonus points for the Aztec link.

Paul McAuley's Planet of Fear pits a tenacious scientist against a war-mad general who is convinced that the evil Americans are plotting against him.  And of course a science outpost filled with evidence of crazy people, and lots of dead pigs.

We get my favorite story of the collection, Greeves and the Evening Star, from Matthew Hughes.  This was a Jeevsian romp through the most politest of society gentlemen as they attempt to wrap their heads around the amorous advances of a most persuasive and persistent Venusian.  Hughes language nearly killed me in this story, and it's the only one that I've gone back and re-read.  Just as enjoyable the second go round.

A Planet Called Desire, by Gwyneth Jones, was strange.  It had the bones of a white colonial "Crocodile Dundee" sort of story, but the lead driver of the action was an enigmatic scientist mired in regnal red tape, and it resolves itself with a lingering creepy hope.  Extra points for being one of the only stories to delve into teleportaton.

Joe Haldeman gives a short creepy first-contact sort of story set in a truly nasty jungle Venus.  Living Hell is a perfect descriptor of a place where everything seems designed to do horrible damage to humans.  We arrive mid-crisis, as our rescue pilot attempts a desperate rescue of a science outpost that has been cut off due to a giant solar flare.  Our pilot is about to get real close and uncomfortable with the biota.

Bones of Air, Bones of Stone, is Stephen Leigh's contribution to oceanic Venus lore, with a strange tale of a pair of ex-lovers united and driven apart by the urge to conquer the extreme - do what's never been done.  Here, it's the Great Darkness, a huge pit of deep black water that laughs at the Marianas Trench.  Complicating matters is the lore of the locals, who believe that oceanic darkness to be their sacred resting place, and forbid anyone from diving there.

Eleanor Arnason also likes the idea of Communists on Venus, and Ruins gives us a National Geographic meets Washington Post intrigue featuring a team of scientists and explorers, and yes, a National Geographic photography team, complete with "Autonomous Leica.  My model name is AL-26.  My personal name is Margaret, in honor of the twentieth-century photographer Margaret Bourke White.  You may call me Maggie." which juust about killed me.  They're headed into the back country in search of a persistent rumor about ancient ruins, but they discover something a lot more sinister.

The Tumbledowns of Cleopatra Abyss by David Brin was my second favorite story, and also the second-best serious tale in the bunch.  I was in awe of this story the whole time I was reading, and I'm still in awe at how well it all flowed.  I can't say much without destroying the impact, but the tale reminds me that even when things go badly wrong, life finds a way.  So very very good.

Garth Nix gives military sf a whirl with By Frogsled and Lizardback to Outcast Venusian Lepers, which, really, that title is just about all you need to know about this story.  Oh, and clones.  And military draft rules.  And really colorful personal fungi.

The Sunset of Time didn't quite work well for me.  Michael Cassutt gives it a good shot, and the story is interesting, but the weird parentheticals took too long to be explained, and the characters never quite gelled for me.   Earth has gone all Handmaid's Tale, and deviants are shipped out to exile on sinful Venus.  The natives are prepping for their regularly scheduled End Times, but humanity just keeps tootling along, although our protagonist Jor is beginning to have his concerns.

We follow that one up with a gut-punch of a story, beautifully and hauntingly told by Tobias S. Buckell.  Pale Blue Memories has a light-skinned black member of the exploratory astronaut team narrate the horrible, but oh-so-human consequences of his team's ill-fated Venus landing.  Painful to read, but so very well done.

Elizabeth Bear follows this one up with a tale of a bruised spirit who takes refuge in death-defying exploration - far away from her perfect and overbearing co-worker and lover.  The Heart's Filthy Lesson balances the pain of jealousy with the overwhelming ecstasy of discovering new places and pushing your limits.

The Wizard of the Trees is John Carter of Venus, and god bless Joe R. Lansdale for giving him to us.  Unlike Carter, our hero is plucked from his world by a slimy glowing thing, and chucked into a muddy hot pool.  Things don't get much prettier from there, but Jack Davis, our intrepid US Buffalo Soldier, isn't afraid of a challenge.  He even has a kick-ass princess encounter of his own!

Mike Resnick works from the same basic story structure as Tidhar, but The Godstone of Venus is a lot less Lovecraft and a lot more Indiana Jones.  A merc and his partner are picked up by really strange clients in a run-down bar.  The partner can't read the lady's mind, which is odd, because he can read anything's mind.  They're on a quest for an artifact that can't exist, and things only get weirder from there.

Our last story is, in my opinion, the absolute best.  Ian McDonald delivers to us Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathangan.  It was absolutely and incontrovertably perfection.  I loved the conceit, I loved the execution, the story was gripping, and the mystery was lovely.  Utterly, utterly delightful.

Fantasy: From a High Tower, Mercedes Lackey

From a High Tower (Elemental Masters)
Mercedes Lackey
ISBN: 9780756408985
Fantasy: mash-up of Rapunzel with a German wild-west tale.
Read June 2015

These last few books have struck me as odd for various reasons.  This time around, I was perplexed by the jacket copy that gave away the entire story to the 3/4s mark.  I was floored when I began reading and the story never picked up the pace - I was expecting the info in the jacket copy to be the set-up for the story, not the largest portion of the story itself!  That just struck me as very strange.

Once I got over that, I did enjoy the tale.  These are mostly light-hearted stories about good men and women who are masters (or adepts) at working with elemental spirits, and who stand against evil people who wish to use the elemental power (here presented as overwhelmingly neutral to human morality and affairs) for evil.

This particular story also involves the last heroine from Blood Red who has grown into her role as a legit ass-kicking guardian warrior, which was gratifying.  There was also a sub-plot involving a tribe of Pawnee enduring racism and caricatured portrayals of themselves in an attempt to earn money to purchase titles to their ancestral land.  I thought that was handled with skill and grace, but I am not native, so there may be issues I don't see.

Another fun little story, and a new set of interesting characters to add to the roster of interesting people in the overall series.

Nonfiction: The Home Creamery, Kathy Farrell-Kingsley

The Home Creamery
Kathy Farrell-Kingsley
ISBN: 9781603420310
Nonfiction: cheese history, and recipes for soft cheeses, butter, cream-cheese, yogurts, and more.
Read July 2015

This was a prize for our Summer Reading Program, and it was a lovely fit.  I have family that makes and sells cheese, and when I was young, my mother was big on colonial life and back to basics living, so we suffered through some overly enthusiastic and much less organized bouts of butter, yogurt, and cheese-making.  I remember it being complicated, smelly, and generally resulting in failure, but the clear tone and reassuring directions in this handy guide make me want to give it a try once more.

The only thing I would have liked would be some pictures.  There are a few very stylized illustrations, but an actual photo or a lifelike drawing would be a great help in determining if I'm doing things right.

Overall a lovely book, with clear descriptions of the tools needed, and directions for making all of the following: yogurt, kefir, butter, Piima butter, buttermilk, creme fraiche, quark, sour cream, cream cheese, cottage cheese (also farmers cheese and pot cheese),ricotta, goat cheese (feta), mozzarella, and marscapone.

There are also some really nice recipes in the back.  Highlights for me were the Cheese Blintzes, the Wasabi Rice Crackers, the Marinated Feta, and the Marscapone-Stuffed Dates (although I despise dates and stuffed the cheese into strawberries instead..., Penne with Herbed Goat Cheese and Tomatoes, and the Chicken Curry with Yogurt.  Yum.

Nonfiction: The Backyard Beekeeper, Kim Flottum

The Backyard Beekeeper (3rd edition)
An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden
Kim Flottum, photographs mostly by Kim Flottum
ISBN: 9781592539192
Nonfiction: a really exhaustive and heavily illustrated (and photographed) guide.
Read July 2015

I enjoyed the slightly snarky, tell-it-like-it-is tone that Flottum takes with her readers.  She's dispensing valuable and clear-headed wisdom and history about bees and beekeeping, and clearing up a lot of misconceptions as well.

The edition is important to note, because this particular version has been written after the devastation of Colony Collapse Disorder, and even after the studies concluded that there wasn't a single cause for the terrible losses.  Her guide takes into consideration the negative impact of pesticides, and has lots of advice for strengthening the hive and for maximizing the health of the bees, and for naturally (or as minimally-toxic as possible) ridding them of pests that would stress or weaken them.

Lots of good info, but I would also say that the photography and illustrations are not to be overlooked here.  I am a visual learner, and having this wealth of really beautiful and very well composed, clear, illustrative photograpy to study is extremely helpful.

Nonfiction: Forensics, Val McDermid

Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and more tell us about crime.
Val McDermid
ISBN: 9780802123916
Nonfiction: lots of case histories, each detailing the use (or development) of a forensic technique.
Read June 2015

This was an EXCELLENT book.  I read it on vacation, and freaked out my co-vacationers, but it was a lovely read all about murders and killings and decapitations and mouldering bodies and bones and blood and decomposition and maggots and it was delightful all the way through.

Tuesday Storytime: Counting with Ducks

And yes, there are enough duck books in the picture book world for there to be a three-book storytime specifically about ducks and counting.

Nine Ducks Nine (previously reviewed here)
Sarah Hayes
ISBN: 9780763638160
9 watercolor ducks hatch a plan to outwit a pursuing fox through an idyllic countryside.

This is essentially the same story as Do Like a Duck Does (Hindley and Bates, 2002 Candlewick hardcover ISBN: 0763616680), where a family of ducks outwit a fox and the fox ends up taking a swim.  To be perfectly honest, I like the cadence and the illustrations of that story better than this one.  But, this one has numbers and counting, and this one is also a longer read.

Quack and Count
Keith Baker  (Big Fat Hen, 1994 HMH hardcover ISBN: 9780152928698)
ISBN: 0152928588
Colorful and textural collages (even the words!) follow permutations of 7 ducklings.

I've used Baker's Big Fat Hen in a counting storytime before, and he's a stunningly talented artist.  This is less a counting book, and more of a math concepts book, but whatever.  It totally counts.  We start with 7 ducklings all together, and then Baker creates a clever series of rhymes for each sum of seven: starting with "Slipping, sliding, having fun / 7 ducklings, 6 plus 1."  Then 5 + 2, 4 + 3, and so on.  What's fun is to compare the different scenes with reversed sums: so we also have "7 ducklings, 1 plus 6 / In the water playing tricks" to compare with the first rhyme.  The pages are all in full spreads, with the seven ducks divided up between the two pages to match the sum in question.  Really pretty book, and really clever concept.

Five Little Ducks
from the nursery song, illustrated by Ivan Bates
ISBN: 0439746930
Colored pencils and watercolors. Bright expressive characters foregrounded against soft scenery.

Ivan Bates is a beautiful illustrator, and I love his work so much.  I try not have repeats of an author or an illustrator within a storytime, which is the other reason I didn't choose Do Like a Duck Does for this trio.  This is a simple illustration of the first verse of the rhyme, but there's a cute little story hidden within the illustrations about just why the ducklings aren't coming back each time.  So adorable.


This ended up being on the very short end on things, but I actually try to choose shorter sets of books for the early fall.  Families are coming in with their younger kids only (the older ones have headed off to preschool or kindie) and without the older kids to model good storytime behavior, it's harder for the little ones (and to be totally honest, the parents) to keep from squiggling around like mad.  This is the sort of thing you figure out over time, watching the pattern repeat every fall, and you just learn to work around it - shorter stories, more obvious transitions, really expressive stories with very narrative illustrations.    

Nonfiction: Surprise, Tania Luna & Leeann Renninger

Surprise
Tania Luna and Leeann Renninger
ISBN: 9780399169823
Nonfiction, psychological benefits of being surprised, and how to add surprise to your life.
Read August 2015

Short and simple, Tania and Leeann both were working on different approaches to surprising people (for their own good, of course) and when they learned they were working on the same general idea, they teamed up to work together to create a foundation (and a book) to encourage people to seek out surprise to keep their brains and emotional selves in good working order.

New Arrival: Nonfiction: Marvel, The Avengers Vault, by Peter A. David et al

Marvel, The Avengers Vault
Peter A. David, designed by Katie Benezra
ISBN: 9781626862999
Hardcover pop-art history book with lots of lose-leaf inserts and reference materials.

This was a fun browse through Marvel history.  I loved the design of the cover and of the book, but the fun of finding the little pages inserted randomly into the book was sadly ruined because we're a library, so we have to keep them all accounted for and noted.  

The book itself has a fun flow, but it's organized in a way that makes it a little difficult to reference if you were looking up specific information.  (There is no index, for example, and it could really use one.)  First we get a brief tour through the history of the Avengers, then a chapter each on the current big four: Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk, and then a final chapter about Avengers on TV or in movies.  There's even a roster of who was on the team when, and a breakdown of all the different major Avengers teams.

All of this of course in the current gaudy primary-color comics splash art style, with little sidenotes and bits of trivia sprinkled in.

New Arrivals: Picture Book: A Leaf Can Be... by Laura Purdie Salas & Violeta Dabija

A Leaf Can Be... ("sequel" to the beautiful A Rock Can Be... reviewed earlier in the year)
Laura Purdie Salas, illustrated by Violeta Dabija
ISBN: 9780761362036
Soft-edged watercolors with bright splashes of natural colors, and lots and lots of green.

I have to admit up front that I didn't like this one as much as I loved A Rock Can Be, but it's still a really lovely book.  I wish it had shown up a week earlier, as I would have used it in my most recent storytime.

Like the previous installment, we're looking at quirky (and rhyming!) uses of leaves, benefits of leaves, characteristics of leaves, and even emotional resonances of leaves.  It's quite lovely, and reminded me strongly of the simple feel of A Tree is Nice.

Fiction: The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, Caroline Preston

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt
Caroline Preston
ISBN: 22960000470467
Actual vintage ads and articles and ephemera collected and scrapbooked into a fictional narrative.

This was an interesting book.  I wasn't so hot on the Grace Livingston Hill, modern girl finds a good man storyline (ok, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was a little schlocky) but it was pretty common for books set in the 1920s, and the main character does want to write, and her new husband seems ok with her doing so...

Anyway.  Frankie Pratt is a whip-smart 'modern' girl who wants to go to college, but can't afford it, even on a partial scholarship.  So she works as a home aide for a local retiree, until said retiree's rakish (and married) son becomes obsessed with her and starts an enthusiastically-encouraged romance.  Poor Frankie.  Her mom finds out, busts up the lovebirds by blackmailing the old lady, and Frankie is packed off to Vassar posthaste.

The whole story is basically all of the cliches of those early romances-disguised-as-morality tales, but every cliche is passed along in a fairly dry and somewhat winking manner, through ironic (and sometimes poignant) art and advertising clippings, bits of ephemera, and other assorted paper bits and drabs of a life lived interestingly.

Really a very fun concept, and while the story is a little meager - what can you expect from a scrapbook diary?  I loved every minute of it.

Romance: Better Homes and Hauntings, Molly Harper

Better Homes and Hauntings
Molly Harper
ISBN: 9781476706009
Modern day ghost-story/light-hearted paranormal with characters getting sucked into reliving a historic family tragedy.

LOVED this book.  So funny, so cute.  The characterization for our heroine was a little hit or miss to begin with, and something about the first chapter was really really rocky, but once it hit its stride, the characters were fun and interacted interestingly, the mystery was mysterious and somewhat twisty, and the creepy factor was just enough to add a fun little edge - nothing truly frightening or disturbing (other than murder and ghosts, I mean).

Super fun, and I would love to read another that was similar.  Made me think of Austenland with ghosties.

Romance: Lord of Fire and Ice, Connie Mason, with Mia Marlowe

Lord of Fire and Ice
Connie Mason, with Mia Marlowe
ISBN: 9781402261855
Read May 2015
Viking setting, enthralled noble with fire magic, and eldest sister running homestead.

Not the most polished writing, but enjoyable and the storyline was fun, the bad guys were appropriately bad, and there wasn't any nasty nonconsensual nonsense going on.  Liked the character touches with the various siblings, and the light touch with the history and inclusion of magic.  A fun summer read.

Juvenile Fiction: Short and Shivery, Robert D. San Souci & Katherine Coville

Short and Shivery
Robert D. San Souci, illustrated by Katherine Coville
ISBN: 0440418046 (Yearling paperback)
Re-Read August 2, 2015

I had this book as a child, so when I saw it in the "freebies" bin at a local used book store, I couldn't help but snatch it back up and re-read the stories.  I was especially interested in revisiting this now that I've been working on my own storytelling.  I seem to be edging towards southern versions of tales, and there were three in particular that were very interesting: Tailypo (of course), The Witch Cat, and Scared to Death.

Short summary and thoughts on each "shivery" in the collection:

1) The Robber Bridegroom, from the Brothers Grimm.
A classic fairy tale set-up with a greedy merchant and a lovely, clever, and resourceful daughter who rescues herself and an old crone from being sold into marriage slavery to a sadistic robber.

Some interesting modern parallels here with the recent high-profile long-term kidnapping cases, and to the Boko Haram / ISIS focus on terrorism through sexual slavery.  Some nasty things in the world, but they aren't new things.

2) Jack Frost, from the Russian folklore tradition.
Another classic fairy tale.  A mother with a daughter and step-daughter, of course the step-child is the good one who is despised and ill-treated.  Mother sends her out into the harsh Russian winter to freeze, but the girl is so good and sweet that even cold-hearted Jack Frost is touched, and gifts her with furs and diamonds.  Mom sends the sulky real daughter out to get her own share, but the girl can't resist being a snot, and is frozen to death by morning.

Love the parallels here with Diamonds and Toads, and the faint feel of Vasilisa and Baba Yaga stories.  There are some interesting links possible with this story.

3) The Waterfall of Ghosts, from a Japanese folktale.
This one was interesting, because it was mainly women characters.  A group of weavers in a town below a haunted waterfall sit up late one night talking boasts, and one girl gets carried away, boasting that she'll travel to the shrine at the base of the waterfall and back that very night, and bring the donation box back with her as proof.  The other girls all pledge their day's weaving if she does.  She travels out, but is overcome by greed and steals the coins from the box, bringing a nearly-empty box back to the others and bemoaning the sad state of charity in the world.  Later that night, she's hunted down by the ghosts of the waterfall, and returns the money to the shrine, along with all her winnings from her boast.

I was mainly interested that this story has the boastful claims entirely among women.  Usually it's a group of men who are trying to one-up each other.  This made for a nice change.

4) The Ghost's Cap, from a Russian ghost story.
Another boaster, but this one is a girl who is trying to show off for the boy she's after.  She brags that she'll go to a haunted graveyard and return with the name of the ghost that people have seen there.  She goes and scoffs at the ghost (believing it to be her boy) and snatches the cap from his head to take back as proof she went.  She gathers her winnings, and tosses the nasty cap into the river.  That night, she's visited by a presence wanting the cap back, but she hasn't got it.  A sad ending for her, as the priest tries an exorcism, and the vengeful ghost takes the girl back with him, leaving nothing but her hair and jacket behind.

This one has fun shades of Tailypo there, and that Lovecraft story about the gem from the Dutch grave - in that losing the item the ghost wants dooms the person.

5) The Witch Cat, from Virginia, USA.
A widower and his young daughter go against local advice and settle in an abandoned farmstead next to a pond.  The widower is soon courted by a willowy young lady from the plot next door, with bright green eyes and long sharp nails.  His daughter is afraid of the lady, but the father is smitten, until the girl begins to take ill and complain of something stealing her breath at night.  The farmer sits up one night to trap the intruder, and is shocked to chop the arm off of an enormous black cat creature.  The next morning, the lady is also missing an arm, and the farmer finally figures it out.  Too late for him, as the confrontation kills both him and the lady, leaving the daughter an orphan.

This one is great fun.  The nice touch for me is the townspeople warning them away from the suspiciously empty homestead, without ever coming out and accusing anyone of anything.

6) The Green Mist, from Lincolnshire, England.
This is one of the only fae tales in the collection.  I also know it as Crown of Cowslips.  A village girl is very ill one winter, and is about to die, but she declares that if she could live "just one summer like the cowslips, she'd be content."  Her mother hushes her quickly, but that night the healing spring "green mist" flows over the land and the girl recovers.  That spring she is lively and happy, and falls in love as spring begins to mature into summer.  Her lover spots the stand of cowslips beside the door and plucks them to make a summer crown for his love, but when she sees the cut flowers she shrieks and bars the door, leaving him alone and confused.  She dies that night during the Summer festival.

There are a lot of things going on with this one.  Firstly, the fae influence is slight but present.  Her declaration is understood to be heard by a bogie and granted as an evil mischief.  I'm also interested in the specificity that she's only to live as long as those specific cowslips (and why, if the mother was so worried about anyone messing with them, she didn't just put a sign up beside them).  I also feel really bad for our unnamed suitor, who did everything right, and got shut out and abandoned at the end with no explanation.  If I were telling, I think that would be the main thing that got changed, or I'd use it to start some sort of Orpheo & Eurycide sort of quest.

7) The Cegua, from Costa Rica.
A traveler-beware tale; a version of the nasty hitch-hiker.  A young man is traveling late at night and sees a beautiful maiden by the side of the road.  He offers her a ride, and she slowly morphs into a nightmare being with a skeletal horse's head and long talons.  He's saved by arriving at the busy hacienda he was traveling to.

I always get a little grumpy about these - when the mysterious old man tells you at the cafe before your trip that seductive strangers are actually demon creatures, why would you then immediately let the sweet seductive girl onto your horse with you?

8) The Ghostly Little Girl, from gold-rush California.
A group of girls makes a new friend: a girl from the settlement of fishing shacks along the ocean.  The girl is excited to be going to school with her new friends, but makes one last trip out with her father - and that night is a terrific storm, and they never come back.  The girls worry about their new friend, and head down to the now-abandoned shack to see if they can find her - but find her waterlogged ghost instead.

Extra creepy because of the inclusion of grade-school kids for the cast-members.  Love the morbid descriptions of the moldy old fishing shack and the wet slap of the ocean waves.

9) The Midnight Mass of the Dead, Norse folktale.
A very pious elderly lady attends mass every day, and is excited to attend the very first early Christmas mass, so she sets out her best clothes, and says a prayer for her best friend, who died earlier in the year.  Awakened by a strange light, she fears she's late for church, and hurries to the chapel, where a strange priest and oddly-familiar parishioners fill the building.  She's even more upset when the sermon and verses are all about death and punishment and hatred of the living.  When she realizes that the only sound coming from the pews is from her, she realizes her mistake.  Her newly-dead friend warns her to run before the service is over, but she is too slow, and loses her coat to the vengeful dead old neighbors as she flees.  Returning to church the next morning, the shreds of her coat are too much to bear, and she flees once more.

The sweet dead friend giving her a warning was a nice touch, but I wanted to know why the dead are so unhappy on Christmas particularly, and why they were so evil and confrontational to begin with.  There's also a sloppy bit at the ending where the wording is contradictory and confusing.

10) Tailypo, rural USA.
An old man lives in the woods with his hunting dogs, but he's been on lean times - nothing to hunt or fish for weeks.  So when he spies a strange critter in his cabin and evicts it by hacking off it's long luxurious tale, he isn't too proud to stew that tail right up and eat it for dinner.  That night he hears a whisper "where's my tailypo?" and he sends a dog out after it.  The dog doesn't return, but the voice does.  Next dog goes and fails to return, and the voice is soon back.  Last dog is now in bed with him, but he sends it out and it's gone with a horrible yelp - and the voice is now inside, and now on the bed.  He finally claims "I don't have your tailypo!"  and the voice rejoins "Oh yes you have!" and eats him right up.

This one has been around for ages. It would be interesting to see if it could be linked up with some other tales and made longer or more elaborate without ruining the arc of the horror about the thing creeping up to exact revenge.

11)  Lady Eleanor's Mantle, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
This one claims to be based on a true story.  Lady Eleanor is from England, so she's miles better than any of the hick rube Americans in this stupid Boston town.  She insists on wearing her fancy mantle from the continent, and likewise insists on scorning a young suitor who had followed her across the ocean.  A ball was held in the Lady's honor to welcome her, and all noted her reserve and weary aspect, but also noted the beauty of the English mantle.  Halfway through, the ball was cancelled abruptly, when the Lady's absence was noted.  That next morning, the fearsome warning ran through the city - a smallpox outbreak, and the Lady's house was quarantined.  The stinger has the young man braving disease to race to his Lady's side, where he finds a hideous pocked figure in her bed, and goes quite mad.

A very strange early entry in the world of medical suspense thrillers.

12) The Soldier and the Vampire, a folktale from Russia
Another traveler-beware tale like The Cegua, and a Clever-Jack sort of story.  A Russian soldier is on leave to attend his sister's wedding, when he's warned about a wizard who recently died in a nearby village.  He travels home without seeing anything amiss, until he reaches the house and discovers his sister, anemic and near death.  The soldier, being a man of the world, knows that the wizard is using vampirism to steal the life from his sister and return from the dead.  That just can't be allowed, so he races off in the night to find the wizard's grave and kill it for good.  Along the road, he is joined by a silent figure, who he realizes is the evil one himself, and the soldier passes himself off as an apprentice wizard.  They then walk and camp in companionable nature, until the wizard reveals that he was not taken in by the soldier's ruse, and they fight until dawn, when the evil one collapses, then morphs into a writhing mass of insects and grubs that the soldier has to individually exterminate to truly kill the monster.

Nice touch with the bugs at the end.  Would have liked to get more than one sentence about the sister recovering.

13) The Skeleton's Dance, from Japan.
Two friends head off to the big city to make their fortunes.  One works hard and becomes wealthy, while the other falls in with gamblers and druggies.  They both decide to travel back to their hometown to get Mr Bad Life Choices away from his temptations, but BLC realizes he has a chance at a new life, and kills his friend in a mountain pass, then claims his friend's life as his own.  After running through all his friend's money and accrued goodwill, he heads back to the city, and is accosted by his friend's bones laying in the path where he was killed so many months before.  The bones rise up and offer to provide a means of easy employment - the bones will dance for free (needing no food or support) and the friend can collect easy money from people gawping at the spectacle.  This works great for Mr BLC until he's famous enough to be hosted by the local lord, whereupon the skeleton fails to act, is abused, and finally calls BLC out on his treachery and murder.
A really nice and satisfactory delayed-justice story.  Loved the way that BLC just walked right into his own doom and didn't see it coming, because he was too wrapped up in his own selfishness and feeling like everyone owed him.

14) Scared to Death, from Charleston, USA.
Another braggart tale.  This one has a young debutante trying to steal a beau away from his current girlfriend, a shy and mousey girl.  In an attempt to impress the young man, the young lady swears she'll go to a haunted grave in the nearby graveyard, and snatches the gentleman's walking stick to leave at the grave as proof.  She heads out alone, makes it over to the grave, and slams the walking stick into the soft ground, but she's nervous and jittery in the spooky darkness.  Her fears are realized when she tries to leave and she's held back by a mysterious unseen force.  She freaks out, falls down, and is found dead the next morning, her cloak pinned to the ground by the walking stick she slammed down her own self.

This one also is nicely karmic - if you're going to be a snotty braggart, don't be stupid about it.  It also has a nice common-sense touch to it.  Everyone's had a not-so-proud moment when you worked yourself up or scared yourself about something that turned out to be completely harmless or normal.

15) Swallowed Alive, a British folktale.
A sneaky washerwoman is always around when things go missing, and she' accused by her neighbors of being a thief.  She calls upon God and the Earth as her witnesses that she's an honest woman, even when she's pretty much caught in the act.  The earth opens up like a whirlpool and sucks her in up to her waist, and the priest begs her to repent and be saved, but she insists that she's not a thief, whereupon the whirlpool sucks her entirely in, and subsequently spits back out the stolen items.

This one reads like the awful heavy-handed morality tales I got fed as a child from the Uncle Arthur books.  Yikes.

16) The Deacon's Ghost, an Icelandic folktale.
A Deacon lived on one side of a fjord, and his love on the other.  They fell in love one winter, and he promised to come back and fetch her for a wedding the next winter as soon as the fjord ices over again.  Sadly, he's killed on his way back in a freak accident, and she doesn't know it.  When he returns to fetch her, he acts strangely, but she's simply glad to see him again.  They get to the church, but it's late at night, and he's not headed towards the church itself, but to the churchyard, where there's a single disturbed and empty grave!  She fights free, and is guarded by the villagers every night from the undead lovesick deacon, until a priest from the closest city arrives to put him down for good.

This one was very sad.  I felt sorry for the poor deacon and the poor girl who was left alone, and then frightened out of her wits afterwards.  Sad ghost stories are harder, because they really drive home the utter unfairness of life and death.

17) Nuckelavee, from the Orkney Islands.
Short and shivery indeed.  Nuckelavee is a weird cross between a kelpie and a demon, and it terrorizes the islanders, but is easily avoided by crossing fresh running water.  This short bit tells of a local man's bad night when he found Nuckelavee coming towards him on a long empty road, with no running water nearby.  A brazen approach, a quick sprint, and a tiny rivulet defeats the monster.

Not much too this one, but it's a fun little story that I can totally see a grizzled old man telling in a pub as a sort of "big fish" story.

18) Adventure of the German Student, Washington Irving.
Our German student has arrived in Paris to rid himself of a gloomy obsession; a demon is after his soul.  Unfortunately, his timing isn't so hot, as he arrives just as Revolutionary fervor is hitting it's peak, and the smell of blood from the guillotines hangs heavy in the air.  Understandably, his morbid fancies aren't much improved, and he hides out in his garret trying to avoid the masses of frenzied Parisians.  He does have to head out for groceries, and tries to do so in the early mornings or late evenings when the streets are less crowded.  One night walking home he spies a weeping lady on the steps of the guillotine.  He rescues her and takes her home, and over the night falls in love with the wild young mourner.  They pledge their hearts and souls, and he heads off the next morning without disturbing her to look for a bigger apartment.  On his return, he finds her beheaded, and the officers confirm his worst fears - the lady was a victim of the guillotine the day before, and he's now pledged his everlasting soul to a dead woman walking.

This one needs a better name, to be honest.  The French Lover would be at least slightly more descriptive.  I love the association with a specific place and specific events, and the descriptions of the poor lady and the besotted (although not so bright) student are lively and morbid all at the same time.  One of my favorites from the book.

19) Billy Moseby's Night Ride, from New England, USA.
Billy lives with his grandparents out on their rural farmstead, and everyone keeps clear of old Francis Woolcott - rumor is that he's a wizard.  Billy is overcome with curiosity, and spies on the neighbor's bonfire one night, and is kidnapped on a wild ride through the countryside as the man releases spirits and hexes to torment his neighbors.  When the night is over, Billy is encouraged to leave well enough alone, but now he's really inspired - he wants power like that himself.  When he finally gets his courage up to go apprentice himself, he's too late.  Woolcott is lying near death, and Billy watches helplessly as the demons that Woolcott worked with return in force to fetch his unwilling pitiful soul off to hell.

Another of the morality tale sort, but at least it has a younger protagonist, and an interesting look at the predjudices of old farm people.  This one might be an interesting pairing with the Witch Cat - Woolcott and the cat lady would be an interesting pair.

20) The Hunter in the Haunted Forest, compiled from three Teton Sioux tales.
A brave hunter must venture into the haunted forest to feed his starving family, even though he knows that powerful spirits run rampant there, and have no love for the living.  First he is overtaken by a powerful storm, and tries to shelter in a clearing, in a convenient teepee, but he overhears voices inside planning dark plots, and races away from them.  When he camps deeper in the woods, and old man comes to his campfire, and reveals himself to be a ghost.  The ghost offers a wager - if they wrestle and the hunter wins, he'll find plentiful game and a peaceful forest, but if the ghost wins, the hunter will be haunted and his whole family will die from hunger.  The hunter wins (with a nice trick) and turns the ghostly old haunt into ashes, and then is delighted to find that the pact holds true, and the game is plentiful thereafter.

It's easy to tell that these are disconnected snippets, but I think that they all flow together decently well - they're more of a sequential narrative than a single arc, but they all hang together well, and give a nice picture of how frightening it must have been to be a hunter alone in the fall woods, knowing your skill is all that keeps your family alive.

21) Brother and Sister, a folktale found in Kenya, Zambia, and Malawi.
Another nasty-bridegroom story.  A sister is promised in marriage to a man claiming to be from a rich neighboring tribe, but her brother is supicious of the strangely-acting man.  He follows the wedded couple to the man's home, and quickly realizes it's a den of hyena demons.  While the demon family is outside changing form, the boy races into the hut to warn his sister.  They block the entrance to the enclosed yard with thorns, and barricade themselves in the hut, then as the demons continue to advance, escape out a window and into the nearby trees, where they flee frantically as the hyenas pursue them (destroying the trees as they go) until they reach a wide river.  The bridegroom hyena continues to swim after them, even after the sun rises and he changes shape back to a man, but the siblings pelt him with rocks until he turns back.

A nice sibling story, but a little frustrating that all of the escape ideas are from the brother.  Ah well.

22) The Lovers of Dismal Swamp, from Virginia, USA
A young pair of lovers lived on the edge of a swamp, until one day the young lady took sick and died.  Her lover was utterly distraught, and refused to believe she was dead.  As time went on, he began to obsess that she was alive, out in the swamp, and needed him to rescue her.  He rushed out into the swamp one day, convinced that he saw her in the mist, with a lantern in her hand.  He built a homemade raft and poled out towards her, and that was the last anyone saw him alive.  Now hunters and fishers in that swamp claim you can see the duo poling a rickety raft along the waterways at dusk.

Short and shivery indeed - just over two pages long!  The tone of this one is interesting, because there's no malice or evil ascribed to the boy or girl, even as ghosts.

23) Boneless, Shetland Isles.
Villagers were terrorized by a creature they called "Boneless" or simply "It" because no one could agree on what it looked like, or even what sort of thing it was.  It gave off an aura of evil and terrorized households and farm animals simply by it's presence.  One Christmas night, a farmer had enough.  After a night of It bumping against his doors and scaring his cattle, he resolved to kill it for good.  He raced out into the night and hurled an axe at it, killing it near the sea-cliff edge, and then burying it for good measure.  That spring, a folklorist was curious about the legend, and learned where the burial spot was.  He began to dig it up, until he noticed the "curdled light" and the milky fog seeping out of the hole. He ran for his life, and watched as It seeped out of the hole and headed towards the ocean.  Two nights later, as he was wandering the cliff edges, he saw It in the water, long and stretched out, and formless.  He turned to run, but it overtook him in an instant, and wrapped misty tentacles around him, dragging him over the edge of the cliff.  He prayed desperately aloud, and the thing recoiled, took fire, released him, fell, and sizzled on the surface of the water below.

This sounds like a folktale that might have influenced Lovecraft back in the day.  The insistence on the thing being unformed and indescribable, of strange oil-shimmer colors on white fish-belly hue, and the affinity to water - sounds like a baby shoggoth to me.  The fact that a folklorist is the one to poke at it and get punished for his temerity is also very Lovecraftian.

24) The Death Waltz, New Mexico
Elizabeth was newly come to Fort Union, and she was a beauty from back East.  Everyone adored her, and all the soldiers and ranchers courted her, but she was too good for any of them, and laughed at them.  The handsomest and best social match was Frank Sutter, who was smitten with him.  She was perfectly happy to be courted by such a fine officer, and when they had to leave on a raid and he asked her hand, she agreed - and upped the deal by promising that even if he died, she'd never wed another.  Of course, the obvious happens.  During the raid, someone saw him go down, but his body was never recovered.  The fort gossips noted that Elizabeth didn't seem too perturbed by the death of her forever love, and tongues wagged even more harshly when she became engaged to a man from back East, who was leaving the fort to return there.  At the wedding reception, the night turned stormy and wild, and the doors slammed open to reveal Sutter, muddy and corpselike, with terrible wounds all over his body.  He grabbed the new bride from her husband, motioned to the band, and began a terrible waltz with her - by the end of it she was dead.  

This was another of the ones I remembered from childhood, because I always thought the "bride" was a silly heartless thing to take advantage of someone and make stupid promises, especially to a soldier in wartime.  Serves her right.

25) The Ghost of Misery Hill, California, USA.
Old Tom Bowers worked the mine on Misery Hill, until he passed away.  He was an ornery and private man, and even after he passed, no one could bring themselves to jump his claim - even after death.  That is, until Jim Brandon's debts got so bad he had no other choice.  It started calmly enough, with him noticing that his tools and equipment were misplaced every morning.  Then he started noticing someone using his sluice to pan gold.  If that wasn't bad enough, then the notices started going up, claiming the mine in Tom Bower's name.  Then he saw the ghost and his nerves vanished, and he shot it - which of course made Old Tom mighty unhappy, and the now-vengeful ghost came after Jim with his pickaxe.  No one ever saw Jim again, but they did find his gun - pinned to the ground by a faintly-glowing pick driven straight through the barrel.

A good old wild-west gold-mining ghost story is such fun.

26) The Loup-Garou, a French-Canadian folktale.
Another short one, of the evil-thing-chasing-you-in-the-woods category.  Pierre lives in a lovely cabin in the woods, and he and his wife are very happy there, until she gets sick and he has to ride through the woods after dark to fetch a doctor for her.  He sets off, and while they're making good time at first, suddenly the horse slows down as if he's pulling a heavy load.  Pierre looks behind him - straight into the eyes of an enormous wolf.  Pierre freaks out, and he and the horse begin the run for their lives, but it's no use - the thing catches them.  Pierre draws his knife and manages to draw blood before the wolf eviscerates him, and the loup-garou (as tradition dictates) is forced to change back into human form and flee.  Pierre gets while the getting is good, and he and the doctor make sure to bring crosses with them as they pass through the woods on the return trip.

This one really isn't much, but the requirement to change to human and flee if blood is drawn is an interestingly specific limitation.  I am very curious about that part.

27) The Golem, an original tale based on Jewish folklore.
A merchant learned of the mysteries of the golem, and hired a rabbi to create one for him.  He immediately began abusing this perfect servant, treating it like the dirt it came from.  But the golem kept growing, and it slowly got less obedient, and even began to act sullen and unhappy.  The merchant refused to admit that he had a problem, and kept on abusing his magical servant, until one day he woke to find the golem systematically dismantling his house.  He flees to the rabbi who teaches him how to destroy the golem, but when the merchant manages to do so, the golem collapses into a mass of inanimate clay that falls onto the merchant, crushing him to death.

LOVED this story, and the just desserts of the pompous asshole merchant who thought he had the perfect slave to abuse.

28) Lavender, raodsides, USA. (see also Seanan McGuire's Sparrow Hill Road's base ghost story)
Two guys were headed to the dance, and they see a pretty girl by the side of the road, dressed in a lavender party dress.  They stop and pick her up, and one of the boys lends her his jacket.  They have a great time at the dance, but when it's time to leave, the girl is distraught and demands to be let out on the side of the road, close to where they found her originally.  The boys are convinced she was just "letting them down easy" because she didn't want to go steady with either of them, and they head down the dirt driveway to visit her the next day.  The door is opened by an ancient woman, who weeps when she hears their story.  Her little girl's favorite color was lavender, and she's been dead for nearly 50 years now - every spring she goes out to dance with the boys, and every time she almost gets back home before she fades away.  The boys think this is a set-up or a trick and leave affronted, until they see the graveyard next door, with Lavender's gravestone draped with the letter jacket from last night draped over it.

Sweet and sad, and one of my favorite ghost stories. Love how it's so universally USA - it doesn't need a time or a place or any identifying details to be haunting and mystical.

29) The Goblin Spider, a legend from Japan.
Raiko, the famous samurai, is sent by the lord to kill a ferocious goblin that is shaped like a giant spider, and is terrorizing the countryside.  On the way there, he is directed by the floating skull of a former victim of the spider.  They find a deserted palace, inhabited by a creepy bug like ancient crone.  She warns them away, then shifts into a mist and sinks through the floor as a legion of demons attack the samurai and his companion. They fight for hours, until the sun begins to rise, and the demons vanish.  Then a beautiful pale maiden appears, but blinds them with unwholesome light, and shapeshifts into a creepy elongated monstrosity that oozes sticky white threads.  She also changes to mist and seeps into the floor, and the samurai realize that she bleeds white sticky blood.  The sun has fully risen, and now the samurai realize that there is a cavern or hollow beneath the flagstones.  They pull them up, angering the mighty spider (who was the hag, and then the fair maiden) who attacks them brutally.  The samurai fight valiantly, and finally slay the hellish spider beast, and take it's head back to court for their rewards.

Ew.  Spiders.

30) The Halloween Pony, a folktale from France.
Grandmother warned the boys to stay inside on Halloween night, but the lively lads are determined to have some fun.  They run out and find a neighbor's pony has gotten loose from it's pen.  They all pile on, and strangely, even 4, 5, 6 and more boys seem to fit comfortably on the small pony.  The pony doesn't even seem to mind the weight, and frolics and cavorts around, until he reaches the seaside, and the boys try to slow it down.  It refuses, and they then try to dismount, but they're stuck.  The boys can do nothing but watch in terror as the pony descends into the sea, and none of the village boys who were out that night were ever found.

So, the French version of kelpies, essentially.  Plus a little morality guilt laid in on top.

I would have preferred this collection to stop at 28, and just skipped the spider and the silly morals, and ended on a high note with Lavender.  Ahh well.