Friday, December 4, 2009

Kate DiCamillo

Last week, our family shared coughs, fevers, ear infections, sinus infections and lot of time for reading. During that time, I became ambitious. I love reading children's books, almost as much as grown up books. Or maybe more? I guess that's a whole different blog post but anyway...

During our week of sickness, I began a Kate DiCamillo marathon. I decided I would read all of her books (not including the Mercy Watson series or Because of Winn Dixie which I had already read) and post here about them all. I envisioned a long and insightful post. I even thought this post could turn into an essay. I took notes. I underlined. I noticed striking similarities between each of the books and wondered if all authors share such strong themes among their books.

And then this week began. After being out of commission for a week, the week of catch up left little time for reading. I have spent the week trying to finish The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane while crafting my witty essay in my head.

The competitiveness in me requires that I write this post now- minus the wittiness in order to record that I have, in fact, read many more than one book this week.

While each of these books deserves a post of it's own and a reading by anyone who appreciates beautiful writing, each book will appear instead in a list to document that this week I read:

The Tale of Despereaux
Tiger Rising
The Magician's Elephant
And most of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

3 comments:

  1. hope all are feeling better in your house... you did some good reading this week !! i loved tale of despereaux (sp?)

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  2. I'd be interested to hear more about how you liked Tale of Despereaux. When it first came out, I screened it for my daughters and found it to be so dark and dreary that I had them wait on reading it, even though they had received it as a gift. Several years later when my older daughter did read it, she found it similarly depressing and did not like it at all. Both of my daughters loved The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, though.

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  3. We love Kate DiCamillo in our house as well. Since we go away often in the summer, we have developed an audio book habit. We rent one or two from the library for the drive, depending on the length. We had read all of the Mercy Watson books to our 6 & 7 year old daughters, but we rented them too because sometimes it's just nice to sit back and hear a professional read it. In any case, since I am behind reading these posts, I wanted to mention that the audio book of Edward Tulane is just excellent. We had the book here for quite a while without developing the initiative to read it (going through a big fairy stage), but hearing it was wonderful. We still talk about it. If you haven't read it (or if you have) I recommend it!

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