"Pigeon Post" by Arthur Ransome

Every time I read an Arthur Ransome book aloud to my kids (who are now teens, but I still call them my kids), I think I can't possibly love it more than the previous Swallows and Amazons books.  And I am usually wrong.    They tend to be better and better the farther we get in the series.

(We actually didn't like Coot Club much and decided to skip it for now after a few chapters, but that was because it was mainly about Dick and Dorothea, and we wanted to read about the Swallows and the Amazons, not the Ds.)

We adored Pigeon Post.  First of all, it was a jolly good adventure.  One part toward the very end made us all laugh so much that I had to stop reading, wipe my eyes, and blow my nose because I was crying from laughing so hard.  And it took several starts before I could really move on, because the laughter didn't want to stop.  Man, what good stuff.  And the final quarter or so of the book was absolutely thrilling -- I read until I was hoarse and we still didn't want to stop.  

Pigeon Post is all about the Swallows (John, Susan, Titty, and Roger) and Amazons (Nancy and Peggy) and Ds (Dick and Dorothea) deciding to go prospecting and find gold so that Nancy and Peggy's Uncle Jim (aka Captain Flint) would settle down near home and stop wandering all over the world having adventures.  They figure if they find gold, he will be too busy gold-mining to go galivanting.  

Being their typical resourceful selves, they figure out a way to convince their parents to let them go camp far away from the lake to do their prospecting, using carrier pigeons to relay messages every day assuring the Natives that they are well, safe, and happy.  And, in the end, one of those carrier pigeon messages ends up saving the day for more people than just the prospectors.

I'm not sure kids ever have been this awesome and jolly and free to roam around doing cool things.  But I like to believe there was a time and place when it was possible.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some perilous and intense things happening at the end.

This is my 5th book read and reviewed for my fifth Classics Club list.

"Magic for Marigold" by L. M. Montgomery

I read Magic for Marigold for our final Mother-Daughter Book Club meeting of the school year.  It was my first time reading this particular L. M. Montgomery book, and a first time for nearly everyone else in the book club, too, which was really fun.

Marigold is born into the type of large and eccentric family Montgomery excelled at writing.  Her father dies before she is born, and her mother names her daughter after the woman doctor who saves her newborn's life.  Marigold grows up in her family's large old home, with her grandmother and her great-grandmother and an aunt, as well as her mother.  And a bounty of aunts and uncles and the occasional cousin scattered across Prince Edward Island to give advice on how Marigold should be raised.

Marigold is not as dreamy and fanciful as, say, Anne Shirley or Emily Starr, probably because she grows up in a loving home with her own mother still alive.  She isn't as mousy as Jane Stuart, either, probably because her grandmothers are not tyrants and her mother is not an absolute milksop.  And maybe that's part of why I didn't love Marigold as much as Anne or Jane -- because she isn't as extreme.  She's sweet and kind and whimsical, and I did find that endearing, but she didn't lodge herself in my heart.

(from my Bookstagram account)

I also found the book as a whole whimsical and fun, but not a pure delight.  I blame that on how often things just go disappointingly wrong and unpleasant for poor Marigold.  Instead of mishaps coming out all right repeatedly, events that start out well go sour.  Over and over.  I got to feeling very sorry for Marigold over that, for sure.

Is this an unpleasant book?  Not in the slightest!  If you're an L. M. Montgomery fan, you're going to have fun with it.  Even if you aren't, you probably will find plenty to enjoy if you like gentle books about children growing up in bygone days.

Particularly Good Bits:

"If you don't believe things you'll never have any fun.  The more things you can believe the more interesting life is, as you say yourself.  Too much incredulity makes it a poor thing" (p. 86).

"I can't help liking things and I'm glad I do," said Marigold in a sudden accession of common sense.  "It makes life so much more int'resting" (p. 261).

"Keep your dream, little Marigold, as long as you can.  A dream is an immortal thing.  Time cannot kill it or age wither it.  You may tire of reality but never of dreams" (p. 319).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  It's good and wholesome and uplifting stuff, no doubt about it.

This has been my fourth book read and reviewed for my fifth Classics Club list!

"The Golden Hour" by Carrie Brownell, illustrated by Hannah Hill

I don't often review picture books here, but The Golden Hour by Carrie Brownell is a Christmas picture book, and that has made all the difference.  

This is a lovely story about the wooden angels at Westminster Cathedral in London coming alive for one hour every Christmas night.  They usually spend their hour singing and flying about the cathedral, but one night, one angel sneaks outside and has an encounter with a child... and I can't spoil the rest, I really can't.  The last page gave me goosebumps AND brought tears to my eyes, so yeah, very good stuff here.

The illustrations by Hannah Hill are beautiful without being either too cutesy or too grandiose.  They suit the story perfectly.

This is too long to read to young children -- probably best for kids around 5 and up.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Absolutely wholesome and perfect for kids.

"The Golden Road" by L. M. Montgomery

My kids and I enjoyed The Story Girl so very much when I read it aloud to them last year that we decided to read the sequel together this year.  Happily, I still remembered all the voices I had given the characters, even though I had read a couple of other books aloud to them in between.

This was a lot of fun, and we laughed a great deal over the little magazine that the kids put together periodically, simply called Our Magazine.  We all looked forward to those chapters because they were sure to set us howling with laughter.  But there were poignant things here too, like the repeated foreshadowing that one character would not live long past childhood.  Happily, none of them died during the story, but you knew that one of them was going to in the next few years.

The ending is also bittersweet, as the gang of friends breaks up and goes their separate ways.

We need more children's books like this where it's just a lot of fun adventures had by a group of kids who are friends.  Nothing truly awful happens to them, or anything unbelievable.  They just get into and out of a bit of mischief here and there, have some adventures, have quarrels and make up, and so on.  I love slice-of-life books like this, and you never know, I might write one someday.

Particularly Good Bits: "Nothing is ever lost to us as long as we remember it" (p. 257).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Good, clean, wholesome fun.

This has been my 46th book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list.  Getting so close to finishing off another set of fifty classics!!!

"The Happy Prince and Other Stories" by Oscar Wilde

When I found this book in the children's section at a bookstore sometime within the last year or so, my first instinct was, "This must be mis-shelved."  Oscar Wilde?  In with the books for kids?  But lo and behold, he wrote fairy tales that are totally kid-friendly.  They remind me a lot of Hans Christian Andersen's stories -- most of them are poignant or even melancholy, but also lovely and often funny.

My favorite stories were:

"The Remarkable Rocket" -- a firework thinks he's the coolest thing ever and ends up a total dud.  It's so slyly funny!

"The Young King" -- a new king goes through a series of lessons to become wise and good.

"The Star-Child" -- a fallen star is rescued in the form of a human baby, grows up thinking he's awesome, and eventually learns a really important lesson about appearances and pride.

As I typed those out, I just noticed that all three of those have a very strong common theme.  Huh!

Most of the stories were a bit sad or almost-sad, but most of them also had really funny things in them, as you might expect from Oscar Wilde.

Particularly Good Bits:

"But I have imagination, for I never think of things as they really are; I always think of them as being quite different" ("The Remarkable Rocket," p. 47).

They did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier ("The Birthday of the Infanta," p. 105).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for some really sad bits.

This has been my 45th classic read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list.

Top Ten Tuesday: It's About Time

This week's prompt from That Artsy Reader Girl for Top Ten Tuesday is "Books Set in Another Time."  I'm using that to talk about my ten favorite historical fiction books.

I think of historical fiction as fiction set during a time before the author's adult life.  For instance, an author born in 1930 who writes about the 1950s isn't writing historical fiction... but if they write about the 1850s, or even the 1930s, then it's historical fiction.  (For another example, Jane Austen's books are not historical fiction because she wrote about the early 1800s while she was living in the early 1800s.)

So!  Here are my top ten favorite works of historical fiction, along with links to my reviews and a little info into when and where they are set:

1. Shane by Jack Schaefer (1889, Wyoming)

2. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows (post-WWII, Great Britain)

3. The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King (1915, Great Britain)

4. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins by Dr. Seuss (Medieval England)

5. Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1751, Scotland)

6. Speak Easy, Speak Love by McKelle George (1920s, USA)

7. Up from Dust by Heather Kaufman (c. 30 AD, Judea)

8. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle (Medieval England)

9. King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry (1700s Morocco, France, and England)

10. A Flame in the Dark by Sarah Baughman (1500s, Germany)

Have you read any of these?  Any here that surprise you?

Or, did you do a Top Ten Tuesday post this week?  Please share in the comments!

"Winter Holiday" by Arthur Ransome

In my defense, it WAS winter when I started reading this aloud to my kids!  I started it in January, but it's been challenging to fit read-aloud time into the general chaos that has been our lives for the first few months of this year.  In fact, I finished reading it to them in the van on the way home from a road trip to Indiana to view the total solar eclipse this week.  I think the characters in this series would have approved of that.

This is book four in the Swallows and Amazons series, and I think it ties with the first book as my favorite so far.  That's partly because I love snow, and this involves a lot of snow, and partly because it felt kind of new and different because of the setting and the addition of new characters.  To the usual Swallows (John, Susan, Titty, and Roger) and Amazons (Nancy and Peggy) and Captain Flint, we add the Ds (Dick and Dorothea).  The Ds are NOT great at things like sailing and camping and climbing mountains... but they are willing to do their best and try their hardest, and I grew to love them for their gumption.

Because the Swallows and Amazons are both spending their winter school break at the lake where they usually hang out in the summer, they decide to get together an expedition to the North Pole.  They meet Dick and Dorothea after the Ds try signalling with lights to the house at Holly Howe where the Swallows are staying, only they don't know Morse Code, so the Swallows and Amazons promptly teach it to them.  And then let them tag along as they build an igloo of sorts, and make plans and preparations for their polar expedition, and so on.  The Ds enter fully into the very real spirit behind the somewhat imaginary expedition, and end up having a truly thrilling adventure of their own before the end.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG for children getting into dangerous situations.  No one is ever permanently or seriously hurt, however.

This has been my 24th book read and reviewed for my fourth Classics Club list, and my 11th for the 2024 Mount TBR Challenge.

"The Bell Family" by Noel Streatfeild

This was such a charming book to read aloud to my kids!  The Bell family live in London.  In the shabby but respectable part.  Alex Bell is an optimistic, kind, firm clergyman.  His wife Cathy is sensible, practical, but also joyful and sweet.  Their oldest son Paul wants to be a doctor but worries he should choose a more profitable career path so he could help his family financially before long.  Jane is a talented dancer who yearns for good dancing lessons.  Ginnie is a free spirit who gets into a lot of mischief because she never stops to think twice about consequences.  Angus is cute and funny, with a wonderful singing voice and some talent at dancing too.

Together, the Bell family has many little adventures that all tie together around the theme of trying to get better dancing lessons for Jane.  This was originally a radio serial for BBC that ran for six years, and then Streatfeild put some of their adventures into a book too.  Streatfeild grew up in a big, fairly poor family with a vicar for a father too, and I expect that's what gives this book its feel of grounded authenticity.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Good, clean, wholesome, uplifting, and funny stuff. 

This is my 15th book read for my fourth Classics Club list and my 30th from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2023.

Join the Classic Children's Literature Party

My blogging friend Carissa is hosting a bookish event this month: The Classic Children's Literature Party!  Carissa says her goal with this event is "that your imagination would be sparked and that you would just feel warm and comfortable and joyful as you proceed through your reads."  Doesn't that sound jolly?

I've got a dozen or so classic children's books on my TBR shelves, so I plan to focus on those for my reading this month.  Being an inveterate mood reader, I don't know exactly what I'll be reading yet, but I'll be choosing from these to start with:

• The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
• The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Moonfleet by John Meade Falkner
• The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
• A Vicarage Family by Noel Streatfeild

How many of those will I read?  Well, one at least!  Maybe all of them!  We shall see :-)  I do have a couple adult books already started, so I want to finish one of them before starting another read.  But that should give me plenty of time in April to read one or two of these, if not more.

If you want to join this fun event, check out the kick-off post on Carissa's blog for more details!

"Mary Poppins" by P. L. Travers

I liked this book SO MUCH BETTER than I did when I was a kid!  I read two or three of the original Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers when I was young, and I just didn't find them very fun.  And I found parts of them downright creepy.  Or bizarre.  Or dark and weird.  I much preferred the Disney movie.

Don't get me wrong -- I still love the Disney movie.  But this book makes me laugh aloud multiple times now!  I used to think Mary Poppins in the book was kind of mean, and she IS much sterner and less cuddly than Mary Poppins in the movie.  But now, as an adult, I just see her as a woman tasked with caring for other people's children who has no use for fools and no time to waste.  She's not mean, she's just busy and tired.  And funny, but not in a way that kids would get.

I also love how you can kind of read the magical parts of this book two ways.  You can take them the way Disney does -- as magical events caused by a magical person.  Or you can take them as adding imagination and wishing to ordinary events.  Do they all really have a tea party floating in the air, or did they just have so much fun laughing and telling jokes and laughing some more that they felt like they were floating?  Did Mary Poppins and her friend Bert really jump through a painting and have a free picnic in Fairyland?  Or did they make up a fun "pretend we're doing that" story together because neither of them had enough spare money to go have tea in a shop?  That absolutely fascinated me, and I LOVED IT.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Don't you know," she said pityingly, "that everybody's got a Fairyland of their own?" (p. 32).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: PG because that part where Mrs. Corry snaps off her fingers and feeds them to children is really creepy, even if you tell yourself she's pretending to do it and giving them cookies instead.

This is my fiftieth book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list!!!  I am finished again!!!  Look for a wrap-up post about that soon.

"Swallowdale" by Arthur Ransome

Awwww.  This book is just plain charming.  Funny and exciting and real.

I read Swallowdale aloud with my kids over a few weeks, and we all enjoyed it so, so much!  I think we may have liked it even better than Swallows and Amazons, which I read aloud to them last summer.  We all agreed that we wish we could have had childhoods as uninhibited as these kids, sailing and fishing and hiking and getting into a little trouble now and then, but being resourceful and brave and getting out of trouble again without too much help from adults.

This series is such a delight that I'm tempted to read the next book aloud to them this summer too.  I love how the kids in it aren't perfect and aren't horrible.  They aren't unrealistically good at stuff, but neither are they hopelessly bad at it.  They squabble and quibble and rescue each other and are just... absolutely awesome.  I love them.

This book concerns four siblings, aka the Swallows, who camped out on an island the previous summer (in the first book) and eventually made friends with two sisters (the Amazons) who had similar attitudes toward important subjects such as piracy and fairness and adults.  They are all hoping to be reunited for more jolly adventures this summer, but a horrible Great Aunt and a sailing mistake change all their plans and create new kinds of adventures for them instead.

Particularly Good Bits:

...Roger, who took things as they came and was content so long as things kept on coming (p. 91).  (Roger might be my favorite...)

That was Susan's strong point.  She never allowed excitements such as sleeping in the open half-way up a mountain, or a naval battle, or a dangerous bit of exploring, to interfere with the things that really matter, such as seeing that water is really boiling before making tea with it, having breakfast at the proper time, washing as usual, and drying anything that may be damp.  Really, if it had not been for Susan, half the Swallows' adventures would have been impossible (p. 308-09).  (Susan is my spirit animal.  I identify strongly with her pretty much all the time.)

This has been my 44th book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list, and my 28th read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.

"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll

Well, I've discovered that, like The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, this book is pretty fun to read out loud, even though if I read it silently to myself, it annoys me.  So I did enjoy reading this aloud to my kids over a couple weeks, mostly because I got to do lots of silly voices.  Though, by the end, I was running out of new silly voices for all the characters!  So, yeah, that was an interesting challenge, and did make it fun for me.

But, on a whole, this book is very silly and nonsensical and I am... not a fan.  There's no actual point to the story, aside from "will Alice ever get to be a normal size again?" and it turns out to all be a dream, so even that isn't an actual point.  And I just don't enjoy pointless stories.

(Mine from my Instagram account.)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Nothing unacceptable for kids here.

This is the 19th book I've read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list.

"Swallows and Amazons" by Arthur Ransome

What a perfectly marvelous book!  I absolutely loved this story and these characters, and I can't wait to read the next book in the series.  Read it aloud to my kids, I mean, which is what I did with this one.

Four siblings (John, Susan, Titty, and Roger) visit the Lake District in Great Britain with their mother and baby sister while their father is busy working.  Because this is the early twentieth century, they get permission to sail out to an island and camp there for several weeks, and have many adventures, both on the island and on their boat, the Swallow.  They make friends with two sisters who sail their own boat and call themselves the Amazons, and after having a merry war, they make peace and continue having adventures together.  Believable, jolly, sometimes exciting adventures that I just loved.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Clean, wholesome, and sweet.

This is my 18th book read and reviewed for my 3rd Classics Club list, and my 15th read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2021.

"My Side of the Mountain" by Jean Craighead George

I read this book over and over and over as a kid.  Between it and The Black Stallion by Walter Farley, I also spent a huge amount of time imagining I was living alone in the wilderness and surviving off the land.  (I also went through this phase of eating random flowers to see if they were something I should keep an eye out for if I ever needed to live in a flower-strewn meadow.  Know of any meadows where there are a lot of carnations?  I liked them.)

Well, now I've read it as an adult, and I have to say... it still sounds like a pretty idyllic lifestyle.  I read it aloud to my kids, and they really liked it too!  My son had already loved it for several years, but my daughters hadn't read it, so it was a fun new adventure for them.  And my son still enjoyed getting to hear it read aloud and experience it that way.

I really admire stories of people being resourceful and figuring out ways to do things like store food, build a home, and even make clothes.  It does seem pretty unbelievable to me that Sam Gribley's parents would have said, "Sure, go hitchhike your way to our family land in the Catskills and live off the land.  Have fun!"  But... it was the '50s.  Perhaps it could have happened.  That's far harder for me to believe than that a resourceful boy could learn enough from books that he could live in the wilderness just fine.  

And yes, I have this movie-tie-in edition.  I remember seeing the movie once, as a kid, and being thoroughly disgusted with it, though I don't remember why anymore.  But this is the edition I found at a yard sale when I was in grade school, wrote my name inside in pink cursive, and read repeatedly.  So I must keep it.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Let's face it, Thoreau, you can't live in America today and be quietly different.  If you are going to be different, you are going to stand out, and people are going to hear about you" (p. 198).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  A clean and lovely classic.

This is my 14th book read and reviewed for my 3rd Classics Club list.

"Roverandom" by J.R.R. Tolkien

I hadn't even heard of this charming little book until earlier this year.  So if you hadn't heard of it before either, don't fret!  It was first published in 1998, though Tolkien had actually hoped to publish it after The Hobbit.  But his publishers didn't want more funny and whimsical fantasy stories for kids in general, they wanted more of The Hobbit in particular.  So Tolkien shelved Roverandom even though he had revised it repeatedly and made lovely illustrations for it, and wrote The Lord of the Rings instead.

This story began, like The Hobbit, as something Tolkien made up for his children.  His second son, Michael, lost a little toy dog that he loved dearly while they were at the beach, and Tolkien made up a whole series of adventures for the dog to help his son process the loss.  His sons all enjoyed them so very much, he told them over and over, and expanded on them, and eventually wrote them down.

I learned all of that in the extensive introduction in the hardcover volume I have, as pictured here.  The introduction and end notes make up about half of the book, as Roverandom only has 5 chapters.  In it, a real dog falls afoul of a wizard, gets turned into a toy dog, is bought for a little boy who then loses him on the beach, is rescued by another enchanter and sent to the moon to have adventures, then has more adventures under the sea before everything winding up very happily.

A lot of this book reminded me of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  That same exuberant make-believe feel about fantastical realms coexisting with our own, you know?  But it lacks the melancholy of The Little Prince, which suits me just fine.  I like dog books that end happily, and I'm very glad this one did.

(From my Instagram)

Particularly Good Bits:

"You never know what will happen next, when once you get mixed up with wizards and their friends" (p. 67).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.  Nothing potentially objectionable here whatsoever.

This is my third book read and reviewed for my third Classics Club list and my 36th for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020.  And it is also a contribution to this year's Tolkien Blog Party :-)

"Mr. Bliss" by J. R. R. Tolkien

This is the most adorable little picture book!  Tolkien wrote it for his kids, somewhat inspired by his own distaste for automobiles.  In it, an eccentric man named Mr. Bliss, owner of a giant girabbit (half giraffe, half rabbit) and wearer of a very tall hat, decides to buy a snazzy yellow car and proceeds to have a series of comical, absurd adventures as a result.  Those include talking bears, missing garden produce, and the girabbit.  I loved it.

Tolkien's distaste for complicated machinery and love of open countryside definitely is on display here!  I wish I'd had this book when my kids were younger because it would have been such fun to read to them while they snuggled on my lap.

This is my 34th book read from my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020 

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G.

"The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett

It's been decades since I read this book last.  I read it multiple times when I was a kid and in my teens, but haven't had time for it since.  Until now!  I nabbed one of the gorgeous hardcover copies from Barnes & Noble when they were having a sale and decided it would be a perfect book to read aloud to my kids.

And we definitely enjoyed it!  I had fun trying to do the Yorkshire accents (which I'm sure I butchered atrociously) and they had fun watching Mary and Colin turn from selfish brats into nice people.  Because I love gardening and my kids get to help me in our flower and vegetable gardens, they could relate really well to a lot of what happened in this book.

But I had either forgotten or just not paid attention to the mystical ideas of Magic in this book.  We had some good discussions about how Magic does not make flowers grow or people get well, and how misguided these poor kids were because the adults in their lives weren't teaching them the truth about God.  There's also an emphasis on the power of positive thinking, basically, and some pretty humanistic stuff about people becoming good by trying to be good.  I was a bit disappointed by all that, to be honest, as I hadn't remembered it at all.

Still, it's a lovely story of selfish people learning to care for things and people beyond themselves, and I do still enjoy it.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.

This is my 48th book read and reviewed for my second Classics Club list.

"The Railway Children" by E. Nesbit

I loved this book when I was a kid.  Guess what?  I still love it now!  I read it out loud to my three kiddos this month, and they just ate it up.  I read them the Usborne Illustrated Original edition pictured here, and the illustrations by Ji-Hyuk Kim are GORGEOUS.  Especially everything involving the trains.

Three children and their mother have to leave their London home to go live in a small cottage in the English countryside because their father... has had some trouble befall him.  Trouble you don't learn about for a long, long time because the children don't know what it is either.

They live not far from a railway and make friends with the people who work at the local station as well as some of the engineers and passengers.  And they have many adventures involving the train and its environs, including one thrilling day when they actually save a train from being wrecked.  It's an utterly charming book, and I'm not surprised that my kids loved it too.

(From my Instagram account)

Particularly Good Bits:

Grown-up people, even Mothers, often make remarks that don't seem to mean anything in particular, just for the sake of saying something, seemingly (p. 52).

There was a pleasant party of barge people around the fire.  You might not have thought it pleasant, but they did; for they were all friends or acquaintances, and they liked the same sort of things, and talked the same sort of talk.  This is the real secret of pleasant society (p. 215).

However nice the person who is teaching you may be, lessons are lessons all the world over, and at their best are worse fun than peeling potatoes or lighting a fire (p. 351-2).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G, for it is good, clean, sweet, lovely, and wholesome.

This is my 46th book read and reviewed for my second go-'round with the Classics Club.  Almost to my goal of 50!

"The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien (again)

Friends, a miracle has happened.

I read The Hobbit out loud to my kids over the past few weeks, and I enjoyed it!!!  For real!  I did!  I didn't merely like it the way I did last time I read it, I flat-out enjoyed it.  It was fun.  I looked forward to reading more.  That has never happened for me with this book, and I am so excited that it did now!  At last!

And I think it's totally because I was reading it out loud.  So I was hearing the narration in my own voice.  Not in the voice of a "a kindly but slightly condescending uncle telling a story to his nieces and nephews because they're all stuck at a family reunion and he feels he should be nice to them," as I put it in my review 6 years ago.  I had fun with it, I enjoyed it, I liked it.  Huzzah!

I mean, I still think Thorin is a twerp.  And the plotting is too pantsy for my taste.  And I wish Bard was in it 90 times as much as he is.  Beorn too.  Gandalf too.  But I still truly enjoyed it, and this is just... huge for me, y'all.  I have felt so bad for so many years that I don't love this book, because I love The Lord of the Rings so very deeply.  Well, I may be on the road to loving it, and I'm at least far past liking it, into the realm of truly enjoying it.  I count this as a huge win.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for a lot of suspense and action and too many spiders.  My 8-yr-old handled it fine.

"Old Ramon" by Jack Schaefer

This is a short, wonderful book.  I picked it up on a whim because I love Jack Schaefer's book Shane and was surprised to see he'd written for kids too.  And it's a Newbery Honor Book, at that!  I'm so surprised I'd never heard of it before, especially since I soaked up dog books when I was a kid.

A boy accompanies an aging shepherd named Ramon on a sheep drive, taking sheep to green pastures far away.  The sheep belong to the boy's father, Ramon's patron, who wants the boy to learn from Ramon because he spends too much time reading books and not enough out experiencing real life.  Ramon has two dogs with him, one as wise in the ways of shepherding as Ramon himself, and the other young and still learning.

Together, the old man, the boy, and the dogs face many dangers: sand storms, wolves, heat, thirst.  The boy learns much from Ramon about not just tending sheep, but about life, how to love others, and what it means to take on responsibilities.  This book is very short, just a hundred pages, but it packs so much wisdom and beauty into those pages!  I loved it.

Also, if they'd ever made a movie of it, Gilbert Roland would have been magnificent as Ramon.

Particularly Good Bits:

"Ramon does not speak just to make words.  What a good dog decides, a wise man accepts" (p. 14).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some perilous scenes.  

This is my 4th book read for #TheUnreadShelfProject2020.  I'm also counting it as my 43rd book read and reviewed for my second go-'round with The Classics Club because it fits my criterion of being older than 50 years and being written by someone known for writing classic stories.  It should be better known today!