Emperor Pickletine Rides the Bus

by Tom Angleberger
September 2014

This is the last (?) book in the Origami Yoda series. Tom Angleberger ended on a great note.  The kids are on their school field trip to Washington D.C.  But Principal Rabbinski has banned all origami!  What will the 7th graders do on that long bus ride?
Leave it to Dwight to find a solution - enter Fruitigami Yoda, made with a fruit roll up.  And thank goodness for him because Harvey has snuck in a contraband Emperor Pickletine, complete with a real pickle face and red hot eyes.
The series could easily end here. Angleberger wrapped up a few things in a satisfying way. But his "The End" was with a question mark.  I'm not sure if he should write more. Too much of a good thing can get old.  But how can we not want more of Tommy, Dwight, Mike, Kellen, Murky, Quavando, Rhondella, Amy, Sara and even Harvey.


This book was so funny I laughed out loud sitting all by myself at home.  It was stooky!

Road Trip

by Gary and Jim Paulsen
January 29, 2013

What a cute and funny book.
I'm on a quest to read as many Juv and Teen books published in 2013 as I can so that when it comes time for the "best of" lists and the Newbery/Printz discussions I will be in the know.

This one probably won't be in either category.  I liked it a lot, but it isn't in "The Best" category.

Jim Paulsen is Gary Paulsen's adult son.  One day he got a new dog. Gary, for some reason, wrote a piece of a story about a dog, a boy, and the boy's father and sent it to Jim.  Jim wrote back, continuing the story. This went on and on, back and forth, until the two Paulsens had a book.
They didn't start out to write one, but Road Trip was the result.



"Dad and Ben haven't been getting along recently and Dad hopes a road trip to rescue a border collie will help them reconnect. But Ben is on to Dad's plan and invites Ben's thuggish buddy, Theo. The family dog, Atticus, comes along too and the story is told by Ben and Atticus. When their truck breaks down, they commandeer an old school bus, along with its mechanic, Gus. Next, they pick up Mia, a waitress escaping a tense situation. Only sharp-eyed Atticus realizes that Theo is on the run—and someone is following them. " Description from Amazon


Some of the chapters are told from the viewpoint of Atticus the dog. I thought these were kind of unnecessary. They did help us learn the motives behind some of the characters. Atticus serves as a kind of chorus. But the story could have been told without knowing specificlaly what Atticus thought.

Still, it was funny and I'm glad to have read another enjoyable Gary Paulsen book.

The Animal Review

The Genius, Mediocrity and Breathtaking Stupidity That is Nature

by Jacob Lentz and Steve Nash

Finished August 2010

What a funny book. I just ran across it while I was looking for pet books for a bibliography. Apparently, this is based on an unassuming looking blog of the same name. The cover photo is of an alpaca. Interesting... the cover pictured here, which I saved from the blog itself, rates the alpaca a D+. The Book I have in my hand has an F rating, as does the cover shown on Amazon.

This is a humor book. You can learn a little bit about animals, but you'd better take everything with several grains of salt. The authors will make up facts for a laugh. And I laughed a lot.

The premise is that scientists have made animal classification way too complicated. Instead of Kingdom, Phylum, Classes, Orders, Families, Genera, and Species, the authors propose that all animals be divided into four categories: Land, Sky, Water and Other. They can then be rated within each of those categories. To those who feel that giving an animal a grade is a little unfair, the authors say,

"By the way, please try not to feel too bad for the animals that don't get the grade you think they should. The reality is that, no matter how much you might love them, most of them secretly hold you in contempt, and they're usually lying when they tell you that they couldn't call you back because tehir cell phone died. Their cell phone works fine. Trust us."

I was just about to say that I'd rate some of the animals differently than the authors did, but in looking at their complete report card in the back of the book... no I'll have to say that I pretty much agree. The three animals receiving an F: Panda, Alpaca and Locust. Getting a D: Giraffe, Sea Cucumber, Hippopotamus, Peacock, Garden Snail and Sponge. The A list includes: King Cobra, Blue Whale, Sword Fish, Golden Dart Frog, Ladybug.
The Panda review had me laughing out loud:

"After toys with lead in them, food products with lead in them, and lead toys with food in them, pandas are China's fourth biggest export. They are best known for sitting dumbly in zoos around the world while visitors fawn over them and their adorable Chinese names. While about sixteen hundred pandas are alive in the wild, the vast majority (about thirty two) live in foreign zoos, where most of their time is dedicated to not mating...While everyone worries about the panda's future, any objective observer is led to the conclusion that perhaps its time has passed. Maybe Nature is trying to give them the hint that they need to go the way of the dodo, and maybe we should spend our time on a species that at least wants to survive. In the meantime, pandas occupy valuable zoo space and consume prodigious amounts of bamboo that could otherwise be used to produce offbeat furniture. Way to be, GaoGao."

I could keep quoting my favorite passages of the book, but anyone reading this should just go ahead and read the book instead. Or look at the blog. The blog, as I said, is very unassuming. With the book you get color pictures with captions and little fun facts in each chapter.

What Would Barbra Do?

What Would Barbra Do? How Musicals Changed My Life
by Emma Brokes
Read June 2008


When I looked back at my calendar and saw that the week of June 2 I finished reading the book What Would Barbra Do?, I could not even guess what the book was about.

Quick check of Amazon... Oh yeah! I liked this one. It's another girl memoir, but not "girl meets god", but snarky girl shares her memories of childhood and her love of Broadway musicals. This was a fun book. The memoir is a genre I, obviously, like. The subject matter had me wanting to rent a bunch of these musicals.

Can't really say much else about it. It's been a year since I read it and, while it was enjoyable, it was fluffy.