Rebecca Reads

The Arrival by Shaun Tan is the story of all immigrants. By relying solely on pencil illustrations, Shaun Tan attempts to capture the emotions and the story of not just one man leaving his family to enter a new world but the story of all immigrants entering a new life. I was not completely convinced [...]

I didn’t understand The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at all. I guess I’m not a child.

I loved the Bookworms Carnival on fairy tales, and I put so many books on my TBR list. After reading through HTR&W’s prologue all about irony and metaphor, I’ve turned to some of these great fairy tales this week for an escape to the world of imagination.
My community library only has a few of the [...]

I was looking for a nonfiction picture book for my son at the library the other day when I saw Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference by Lynne Truss. I enjoyed the grammar guide (Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation) by Lynne Truss so this caught [...]

While I loved the gorgeous illustrations in Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret and I was entertained by the story, I found the writing amateur and the developing plot overdramatic. In the end, however, I liked this children’s novel, as “unbalanced” as it felt.

In his introduction to a 1912 translation by V.S. Vernon Jones of Aesop’s Fables (available online here via Project Gutenberg), G.K. Chesterton claimed that Aesop’s fame “was all the more deserved because he never deserved it.” Chesterton continued:
“The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots at uncommon sense, that characterise all the Fables, belong [...]

I love Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, so when I saw Eric Carle’s Fairy Tales and Fables, I thought I’d enjoy it too. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy his retellings of Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm.

There are hundreds of book blogs reviewing The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I didn’t really read any of them before I began this book. What I did read was my cousin’s suggestion that I read it, along with some comments she had. She wrote:
It addresses orphans and hunger and family separation and Jewishness during [...]

I read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories because I wanted to read this Nobel-prize winning author and also because I remembered the imaginative premise of his magical world and wanted to experience his world as an adult. I very much enjoyed reading them again, although there are some “politically incorrect” stereotypes in them I hadn’t [...]

I thought I was going to love Beatrix Potter’s tales. Who doesn’t love Peter Rabbit? To my surprise, however, I didn’t love her stories.