Books: Many, Including Toddlers

[woodwardiocom]

The Emotional Life Of The Toddler by Dr. Alicia F. Lieberman

A very good and useful book, which I recommend for all toddlers. It helps a lot in unpacking why toddlers do things that seem inexplicable to adults, and provides good ways of dealing with the consequences.

Kill All Monsters by May, Copland, Brisson

A Kickstart'd comic book, reasonably entertaining for fans of the genre, though it doesn't break any new ground, and is a bit short. Part 2 is allegedly on the way.

Witch Doctor by Seifert, Ketner

The title gets my hackles up, but since the term is barely used in the book, I can tolerate it. This is a pretty good comic book about a medical doctor who puts his skills to work fighting monsters, with quite a bit of success, despite their supernatural origins. He's got a bit of a House M.D. quality to him, not to mention a surprising amount of destiny attached. Recommended.

Earth by David Brin

In the near future, the Earth is on the brink of ecological collapse, and people are finally doing something about that... and then they discover that it might be moot, since there's a micro black hole loose in the Earth's core, and the world might end in a couple months. The back-cover-quote from Locus describes this as "The Moby-Dick of the Whole Earth Movement," which is pretty fair. There's a lot of semi-digested eco-lectures in there. This does not make it a bad book, and I even recommend it, though expect a lot of nutty-crunchiness, and a kinda deus ex machina ending.

Tom Swift And His Diving Seacopter, Phantom Satellite, and Ultrasonic Cycloplane by Victor Appleton II

Three Tom Swift, Jr. novels, with science that ever waffles back and forth between realistic and pulpy nonsense. The third also gets a wee bit racist. Apart from that, enjoyable, for nostalgia value, mostly.

Polly And The Pirates by Ted Naifeh

A graphic novel about a teenage girl growing up in an alternate 19th century America, who learns she might be the daughter of a great pirate queen... when she gets kidnapped by her mother's ex-crew. A nice addition to my daughter-motivated collection of graphic novels about young girls having adventures, though I don't get why the teenagers in this book are being draw so darn short. Recommended.

Princeless: Save Yourself by Whitley, Goodwin

I picked up this comic for reasons similar to the above. It's a deconstruction of princess-in-tower-guarded-by-dragon-rescued-by-prince tales, in which a princess (who is black, so don't call her "fair") makes friends with her dragon, rescues herself, and sets out to free her sisters from their towers, recruiting a half-dwarf blacksmith's daughter along the way. Recommended.

The Starlight Barking by Dodie Smith

Mildly silly and nigh-plotless sequel to The Hundred And One Dalmatians, in this novel all the dogs of the world are given magical powers by an alien, who offers to take them away from Earth and thus save them from the possibility of nuclear war. While this novel explores a few of the themes of its predecessor pretty well (notably the question of whether technological progress is good or evil), it suffers, as I said, from having little plot, no villains (Cruella makes an extremely brief appearance, asleep), and the superpowers the dogs get remove any need for the ingenuity they showed in the previous book. Not especially recommended.

The Haunted Stars by Edmond Hamilton

In the near future, humanity discovers alien ruins on the moon. By deciphering the aliens' language, they learn that the (human-like) aliens lost a war with mysterious non-human aliens, who forbade them from traveling in space. Our heroes proceed to journey into space on their own, with the intent of learning whether that menace is still out there, and why it makes war on so many starfaring species. A solid novel of its era, very out of print, but mildly recommended.

The Silver Dream by Gaiman, Reaves

This is a sequel to the YA novel Interworld, about an organization devoted to keeping peace among the myriad alternate universes. (Their enemies being a Borg-like technological threat, and a demonic magical threat.) In this novel, our hero meets a mysterious girl, from an organization not so much opposed to Interworld, as orthogonal to it... Recommended.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The bit in Earth that I always remember is the secondary character (I think the protagonist's mother?) whose job is editing films: Taking an unbearable slow 90-minute film and getting it down to the 50 minutes that modern audiences are able to tolerate. It seemed nicely satirical back then; now I wonder if 50 minutes might be an order of magnitude too long.

[minkrose]

Regarding books for daughters, I loved this 70's feminist picture book (though I haven't been able to track down a copy for my friends who hosted me in Ann Arbor -- YET). Turns out there are several stories, though I grew up reading a complete/solo copy of The Practical Princess. The art is not child-like, and I love that. Here's a link to the complete set on BWB (because fuck amazon):
http://www.betterworldbooks.com/the-practical-princess-and-other-liberating-fairy-tales-id-9780590313155.aspx

Highly, highly recommended.

[fanw.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That emotional life of the toddler book sounds rather interesting! Any chance we could borrow it?

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Bey needs to read it next, but after that, surely.