In 2018 I went on a bucket-list trip to Antarctica and saw penguins. Always a fan of the adorable little birds (I mean, come on, that waddle!), I’ve become sort of obsessed. This new-found penguin mania resulted in a Sphenisciformes-themed Christmas, including a hard copy of the delightful 1938 children’s tale, Mr. Popper’s Penguins. I say delightful, but I might have easily said batshit crazy. I want whatever the Atwater couple was smoking when they wrote this. For context, Mr. Atwater died before publishing Mr. […]
Don’t let this one fly right by you.
Karma Wilson is an author you love or hate. They have a signature style and do not vary from it. And like their other books, we have a story about positivity, bravery and spunk. You cannot get away from the feeling of Happy Feet or Happy Feet 2 (the first is where a penguin wants to do the unpenguin thing and dance; the other the penguin wants to fly but then finds his wings another way) in Don’t Be Afraid, Little Pip. Here Pip wants […]
Takes Two to Make a Tango
This is my Fahrenheit 451. To this day I have a hard time understanding the minds of people who ban and challenge books. You do not like it? Great. There are another 4 billion books out there. Find one you do like. But do not tell me I cannot read a book. Justin Richards, Peter Parnell and Henry Cole came together to make And Tango Makes Three. The story is a true story about two penguins in the New York Central Zoo. These two love […]
Done like Myspace. Done like wristbands for causes.
Two themes have emerged for my 2017 Cannonball progress: 1) being pleasantly surprised by books written by celebrities (Cravings, Bossypants, Troublemaker), and 2) clearing my 24 page Goodreads to-read list of a bunch of “humor books” I added in 2009 when they were kinda new and I thought they were funny. You know the kind I mean: People of Walmart…as a book! Or something that wasn’t so horrifically exploitative in the first place, but just majorly stops being funny after half a decade and […]