We've reached another Caldecott book that I'm familiar with from childhood! (And in fact we'll run into quite a few of them for the next twenty years of Caldecott books or so.) My parents actually owned Peter Spier's Noah's Ark, so I was quite familiar with it, although I must say it never was a favorite: the ark gets awfully dirty from having so ( Read more... )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, which is so good, you guys, I am resisting the urge to walk around thrusting it into people’s hands crying “Read it! Read it ( Read more... )

I found G. A. Bradshaw's Carnivore Minds a great disappointment. For a book that purports to be about the fact that carnivores of all kinds are not unthinking automatons but in fact have lively and variable personalities, there's very little about individual animal personality at all, and quite a bit of repetition of the fact that animal brains ( Read more... )

It's snoooooooowing! Or rather, it was snowing earlier, and if there is one thing better than sitting inside toasty warm watching the snow fall outside the window, it is arriving home after a long drive and then being inside toasty warm watching the snow that you are no longer driving through fall ( Read more... )

I walked to the library yesterday, which is rather a long walk and mostly alongside a busy street; but I found a couple of picturesque scenes along the way.

Like this ( Swing )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain. I complained last week that I thought Bryson was getting a bit cranky, but then Brexit happened and his contention that Britain might very well be headed to hell in a handbasket seemed less cranky and more alarmingly prescient ( Read more... )

I found one surpassingly cool picture book today: Leslie McGuirk's If Rocks Could Sing: A Discovered Alphabet, which is entirely illustrated with photos of ocean-shaped rocks that McGuirk found on the Florida beach near her home. Not just rocks shaped like letters, although that's cool enough - how often do you find a rock shaped like a K? - but ( Read more... )

Spring is here! The crocuses are in bloom!


( Read more... )

poeticknowledge asked: What are the top 10 best films you have seen this year (or in the past year, either one ( Read more... )

For greenet: 5 things you really like about summer! Or winter! you can pick whichever one most appeals ( Read more... )