My Side of the Mountain (Jean George) **** as good as when I was a kid
I brought My Side of the Mountain to Singapore, and I'm so glad I did. On returning to my hotel after a day pumped full of stress, this book was detox. Sam's adventures purge those nasty stress hormones and gear the brain down toward the dreamless. You've probably read it. It's as good now as it was then.
Sam Gribley is a 12-year-old boy in New York who runs away to the old family land in the Catskills, which was abandoned three generations ago. He has a pen-knife, an axe, some chocolate, flint and steel, string, and an obsessive amount of knowledge from the public library. He burns a hollow in a tree, steals a peregrine nestling, and lives off the land. He's such a sweet kid, and he never has to use the bathroom once in the whole book. I love it.
Ever since the first time I read the book, I have wanted to know if you really can boil water in a cabbage leaf. Sam says that the leaf will burn down to the water line and stop there. For 18 years I've wondered if this is true, but I never seem to have a campfire handy.
The weird thing is that Me-sub-now has picked up a surprising amount of botanical knowledge over Me-sub-10, so when I look at the author's illustration of a wild potato plant, I nerdily think, "That's a sweet potato, not a potato. Latin name Ipomoea, looks like a morning glory." Maybe that's why this book lit my nerdy imagination when I was 10.
Sam Gribley is a 12-year-old boy in New York who runs away to the old family land in the Catskills, which was abandoned three generations ago. He has a pen-knife, an axe, some chocolate, flint and steel, string, and an obsessive amount of knowledge from the public library. He burns a hollow in a tree, steals a peregrine nestling, and lives off the land. He's such a sweet kid, and he never has to use the bathroom once in the whole book. I love it.
Ever since the first time I read the book, I have wanted to know if you really can boil water in a cabbage leaf. Sam says that the leaf will burn down to the water line and stop there. For 18 years I've wondered if this is true, but I never seem to have a campfire handy.
The weird thing is that Me-sub-now has picked up a surprising amount of botanical knowledge over Me-sub-10, so when I look at the author's illustration of a wild potato plant, I nerdily think, "That's a sweet potato, not a potato. Latin name Ipomoea, looks like a morning glory." Maybe that's why this book lit my nerdy imagination when I was 10.