Well, here it is at last, this year’s PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge. I know some of you have been on tenterhooks but there’s one advantage to announcing it a little late. All your other challenges should be well assimilated by now, and adding one more shouldn’t be too much of a trial… Anyway, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it

The Challenge for the last two years has revolved around geographical boundaries, as is perhaps to be expected of a World focused challenge – however, following deep consultation with Little Brother (9), we have come up with an extra geographical consideration this year. We have also decided to make the time factor as flexible as possible, in the hope that some teachers/librarians might be tempted to engage children in the Challenge during school term time. So without further ado, we present the PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge 2011:

1. Choose six books from/about/by or illustrated by someone from different countries anywhere in the world, 3 of which must be in different continents.

2. Choose one book from/about your city/district – as local and as relevant to your geographical setting as you can find.

3. You should choose at least one book of each of the following: fiction, poetry and non-fiction.

4. Have the books read aloud to you or read them yourself; share them as part of a book-group or in class. Combine your choices with other reading challenges.

5. There is no time limit for this year’s Challenge, apart from completing it by the end of the year.

Do join us, and keep us posted as to how you’re doing – we love reading all your posts. You can find lots of ideas in the PaperTigers Reviews and Reading Lists sections, as well as in many of our Personal Views – or do let us know your own suggestions.

Happy Reading!

And P.S. If anyone would like the code for adding the button to their blog, please email me – marjorie(at)papertigers(dot)org.

We are cracking on and are on target to have completed our PaperTigers Reading Challenge 2009 by the end of July, though it will be tight!

For our European readaloud, we have just finished the Swiss classic Heidi by Joanna Spyri. It has lost none of its charm over the years and we delighted in the well-rounded characters – the non-saccharine goodness of Heidi herself, Peter’s spikiness and jealousy, Grandfather’s transformation from a surly recluse, even the goats! This is not a book that either of the boys would have picked up on their own to read and is just another example of the breadth of literature that children are happy to absorb when it is read aloud to them. For an interesting take on Heidi, see this post from Hungry For (mostly Japanese) Words.

Little Brother (8) has also journeyed into Europe but a little further East, with Sheep Don’t Go to School, a collection of children’s poetry from Eastern Europe, edited by Andrew Fusek Peters and illustrated by Markéta Prachatická (Bloodaxe Books, 1999). He spent a month dipping in and out of this book – and one rather gruesome poem we read aloud together with great relish! Here’s what he has to say:

Some of the poems are funny, some are plain weird, and some are to carry on and on until you’re bored, like:

A doggy stole a sausage from the big bad butcher [...]
And on the doggy’s gravestone they wrote this little tale:
A doggy stole a sausage…etc etc! ad infinitum!

I’ve recited that one over and over and now my family is begging me to stop!

Too right!!! Yes, he’s definitely got a lot of enjoyment and glee out of that book!

Older Brother (10), in the meantime, headed to the other side of the world and plunged into the Amazonian rainforest with (more…)

Here we are with Book Number 3 in our PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge 2009 – and there are still a few weeks to go for you to join in, if you haven’t got going yet…

Together we read Scott O’ Dell‘s Island of the Blue Dolphins (first published in 1960 and a Newbery Medal winner). It was my well-thumbed copy from when I was a child and I was perhaps being a bit self-indulgent in sticking it under the boys’ noses – but my concerns that the protagonist is a girl were unfounded. They loved it. It is, after all, an incredible story of survival, steeped in tragedy, love and hope – and mind-boggling for them (and indeed, everyone) to take on board that the essentials of the story are true. It’s also beautifully written and is a joy to read aloud.

Older Brother (10 1/2) enjoyed Harry the Hairy-Nosed Wombat & Other Australian Animal Tales, by Jill Morris, illustrated by Tina Wilson (Greater Glider, 2003): you can read an on-line review here and here’s what Older Brother had to say:

The stories were very active and full of adventure. It was fun reading about Australian animals because they live in very different habitats from us and I like them. The story about Harry was my favourite and I really liked “Bobuck the Mountain Possum”. I thought it was really interesting that koalas are sometimes called kolas by Australian Aborigines, which means “no drink”.

Little Brother (8) revelled in Antarctic Antics: A Book of Penguin Poems by Judy Sierra, illustrated by Jose Aruego and Ariane Dewey (Voyager Books, Harcourt, 2008) – I should perhaps say that for someone who loves both Natural History and playing with words, this was a wonderful book – here are his own words:

The poems are about a penguin family – and about the fun and the predators and what a penguin’s great thrill would be – two months at sea because the fish swim straight into their mouths:

“Several shrimp swimming south
Are approaching my mouth -
So I’ll just open wide
And invite them inside.
Yes, two months’ vacation
Is a penguinish wish.
I’ve got nothing to do
But slurp squadrons of fish.”

I liked the words in the poems and Mummy liked the Antarctic Anthem poem – me too but “Belly Sliding” is my favourite.

Yikes, I’m falling a bit behind on reporting back on this year’s PaperTigers’ Reading the World Book Challenge – but we have been cracking on so I hope I’ll be back in a week or so with Book #3. How are you all doing out there? For those of you who haven’t picked up on it, or need reminding, check out my initial post here - there’s still plenty of time to join in…

In the meantime, here’s what we’ve read for our books #2:

Together we read Tales Told in Tents: Stories from Central Asia by Sally Pomme Clayton and illustrated by Sophie Herxheimer (Frances Lincoln, 2006). We loved it! Sally Pomme Clayton is a performance storyteller as well as a writer. Her storyteller voice makes these tales a joy to read aloud and she unobtrusively inserts cultural details, which deepen understanding, as well as some of her own experiences while gathering the stories on her travels through Central Asia, most notably in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. We learned the legend of how felt was invented; added to our growing collection of beautiful creation stories; marvelled at magic; revelled in riddles; and sought out the mythical storyteller whose presence wove itself through the different stories. Herxheimer’s beautiful illustrations help to convey the magic and even after we had listened to the story we had to go over each one again with attention fixed on the pictures.

Older Brother, 10 1/2, read Ice Trap! Shackleton’s Incredible Expedition by Meredith Hooper, illustrated by M. P. Robertson (Frances Lincoln, 2000) (and I think it’s published in the US as The Endurance: Shackleton’s Perilous Expedition in Antartica by Abbeville Kids, 2001). Here’s what he says about it:

I enjoyed this book a lot because of the excitement. In 1914 Shackleton set sail to Antarctica as he wanted to be the first person to walk all the way across the Antarctic Peninsula but his ship was caught in pack ice. Then their ship was crushed by the ice. They sailed in lifeboats to Elephant Island, which was uninhabited, then Shackleton took five men in a lifeboat. They wanted to sail to South Georgia but in sight of the cliffs they got caught in a hurricane, which blew them to the wrong side of the island, so they had to climb over mountains to reach the town. Then eventually everyone was rescued by a steam boat.

It was very exciting because a lot of unexpected things happened and also it’s true, which makes it even more exciting because it’s about Man against Earth and people belong to Earth. And Earth/Nature is stronger than Man and actually, they couldn’t control the ice.

I think they were brave. It was nearly the first time anyone had tried to get there. And there was a stowaway on board, which made it harder for them to survive because there wasn’t enough food. Not a single person died in two years. I’ve read this book three times – once my Grandad read it to us. That was special because he spent a year in Antarctica a long time ago.

Little Brother, 8, read Follow the Drinking Gourd by Jeanette Winter (new edition, Knopf Books, 2008):

Peg Leg Joe is a sailor with a missing leg and he sings a song which will help lead slaves to freedom. It’s called “Follow the Drinking Gourd” – the Drinking Gourd is a constellation which we call the Plough and in America it’s called the Big Dipper and it’s part of the Great Bear. It points to the Pole Star so it always points North. There’s a slave who is about to be sold the next day away from his wife and children who are in slavery as well. That night they all follow the Drinking Gourd. It’s not an easy journey and in the pictures there are some Wanted! posters of them. Then they meet Peg Leg Joe at a river in a boat. He rows them across the river in his boat and then he goes back to collect some more slaves who have also followed the Drinking Gourd, leaving the family at a trail he calls the Underground Railway. It’s a trail of houses with safe places to hide. They hide and rest in the day and move at night so they can follow the constellation and also so they can’t be found so easily. They make it to safety and freedom.

This really happened. I knew that there were people who used to be slaves but I never knew they tore families apart. I’m glad that some people escaped to freedom but slavery is wrong and everyone should have the right to be free.

January is moving on apace so there’s no time to lose! It’s time for this year’s PaperTigers Reading Challenge! Last year, we set about reading five books from/about/by someone from each of the five geographical areas on the PaperTigers map – but this year, as we have spread our wings all the way around the world, our Reading Challenge is going to do the same.

So, without further ado, here it is:

Choose one book from/about/by or illustrated by someone from each of the seven continents – that’s:

Africa
Antarctica
Asia
Australasia
Europe
North America
South America

Have the books read aloud to you or read them yourself; share them as part of a book-group or in class.

The books can be picture-books, poetry, fiction, non-fiction… the choice is yours.

Tell us what you have chosen/read, as and when, by leaving comments on our monthly updates – and complete the Challenge by the end of July 2009!

There are plenty of ideas for books in the PaperTigers Reviews and Reading Lists sections – and if you have any ideas you’d like to suggest to people joining in from different continents, please do!

It would also be great to join this to the Diversity Rocks! Challenge - this is a wonderfully adaptable challenge: it includes levels for The Overlapper, or even the Non-Joiner, which asks you to read one book by an author of color by the end of February 2009… Or if you’re a “Challenge Addict”:

Commit to reading 6 books, 12 books, or 24 books by authors of color in 2009. If you already read a lot of authors in one group, branch out.

Pick one or more of your challenges and commit to read four different authors of color: perhaps a black author, a Latino author, an Asian author, and a Native American author.

Well, I think at that point you could be an Overlapper AND an Addict, both while taking the PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge!

We’ll be following a similar programme to last year – each month, we’ll have one read-aloud and each of my boys will also choose their own. We’ll keep you posted – and I hope you will too!

Yesterday we went to the library and signed up for the Summer Reading Challenge – this year it’s called Team Read – and judging by the piles of books we all came out with, we’re really going to enjoy it. A new book in was Kanako Usui’s The Fantastic Mr Wani. Hooray! It’s been out since 2005 and I certainly knew of it before now but we’d never actually read it – and since it features in our current Big Picture Gallery, it couldn’t have appeared on the library shelves at a better time.

Mr Wani is a crocodile who is in a hurry to get to a party but the journey proves to be rather eventful. The story is helped on its way by expressive punctuation and font sizes and the illustrations are just superb. I love the way Usui draws the various animals’ eyes and there are lots of expressions for listening/ reading children to enjoy imitating – like the squashed mice with their tongues hanging out. There is a glorious moment where you just know the inevitable is about to happen as you turn the book end on to see Mr Wani hurtling down from the sky over a sledge carrying three penguins.

That is the other lovely thing about this story. It completely enters the spirit of young children’s imaginations – the journey is totally matter-of-fact in its acceptance of mice carrying umbrellas, balloons attached to the signpost pointing to Town and then the three penguins sledging down a snowy hillside, followed by Mr Wani’s “Bump! into Mr Elephant’s rump” (a very satisfying rhyme that I can see finding its way into the family lexicon) and bouncing from prickly hedgehog to prickly hedgehog through the Froggies’ door and so into the middle of the party. There’s an extra little surprise at the end as well…

This is a great readaloud, with lots of potential for “audience participation”! Kanako Usui also has a great Japanese/ English bilingual blog – well worth a visit.

Well, we did it, though time nearly ran away with us at the end. We’ve had so many extra things going on this month that apart from anything else, I wasn’t quite organised enough to go out and track down books we didn’t already have somewhere around the house… Older Brother had already set his sights a while ago on Arctic Adventures: Tales from the Lives of Inuit Artists by Raquel Rivera and illustrated by Jirina Martin (Groundwood, 2007); but we realised that our choice of books for the geographical area encompassing Southeast Asia on our PaperTigers map was somewhat limited. In the end, we revisited Asian Children’s Favorite Stories, retold by David Conger, Kay Lyons, Liana Romolo, Joan Suyenaga and Marian Davies Toth, and illustrated by Patrick Yee (Tuttle, 2006): Little Brother read the two stories from Thailand; and I read one from the Philippines and one from Indonesia as our official readaloud… of course, we did go on and read some of the others too – but it did serve as a reminder of the enjoyment you can get from just dipping into an anthology, rather than wading through the whole thing in one fell swoop, which is what I often tend to get carried away and do…

The two stories we read together, “The Mousedeer Becomes a Judge” and “The Golden Ring” both provoked quite a lot of discussion – the first because it had a strong moral which dealt efficiently with the nasty crocodile after he had tried to take a bite out of Buffalo, who had just saved his life; and the second because it is a folktale that explains why hawks and hens do not get on, and why hens scratch the ground, which we all enjoyed, even if we knew it wasn’t true. You can read a fuller review of the book here.

Of the two he read, Little Brother says:

I liked reading these folktales. The Fake Gem was about a person from Thailand called Phra who had a fake gem of glass and he was tempted to sell it to the Chinese Emperor Lao. Then Phra walked out and saw the bad thing he had almost done and in the end it turned out Lao wasn’t really a Chinese emperor anyway. “The Lucky Farmer Becomes King” was really cool because Lek was only a farmer but he managed to scare off invaders of Thailand but he didn’t have to fight them. Everyone thought he was brave but actually he was a scaredy-cat, except for when he fought a snake. The pictures are really funny, especially the snake one and the crocodile one where he’s cowering at the back of the boat.

Arctic Adventures: Tales from the Lives of Inuit Artists is a stunning book and, as Older Brother himself noticed, it is remarkable because the stories are all true and were not the experiences of adventurers but people who grew up to become artists. I’m not sure how much he took in this time round of the actual biographies of the four artists featured but I think it is the kind of book that will be read many times, and which will grow with its readers. Jirina Martin’s palette reflects the far northern setting with its glacial blues and greens and varied shades of grey and brown, and her style complements the examples provided of the actual artists’ work. I think this is a great book for boys who are themselves creative but also love adventure: it just proves you can be both. Here’s what Older Brother wrote:

My favourite story was about a boy and a girl who went out hunting and made a tent on some ice. Then in the morning there was a cracking noise and the tent and the children and all their dogs had broken away and they were stuck on an ice floe. In the end, they managed to get home but it was quite scary for me to think that this was a true story. In fact, all the stories are adventure stories and they’re all true. And I thought when I was reading it that it was amazing to think that all the stories were from artists because I want to be an artist when I grow up.

And so we come to the end of our Reading Challenge for this year. We’ve all really enjoyed it and if I had reservations at the beginning that I might have to cajole my two into keeping going, I needn’t have worried as, after each mini review, I was nagged into helping them find their next choice; and they have been quite thrilled at the possibility of their reviews spreading their wings and being read from anywhere around the world…

So if you took part, do let us know how you got on; and we look forward to you maybe joining us next year, when our challenge too will spread its wings and be even more global…

Our fourth geographical area for our readaloud PaperTigers Reading Challenge book this month is the Americas and we chose Deborah Ellis’ I Am a Taxi. I was slightly concerned that it might prove too much for Little Brother (aged 7): but by making sure that we read the last few chapters during week-end morning “book sessions” rather than at bedtime, we had plenty of discussion time (drugs…) and no nightmares! Diego, the book’s 11-year-old hero, became a real person to my two boys. They absorbed details about Bolivia; they compared details of Diego’s life with their own; and they goggled at the encounters with nature in the jungle. It was salutary for me to observe that they did not really pick up on the sinister side to Smith until it was completely obvious, but trusted him as someone who was kind to Diego, which in the immediacy of dealing with jungle beasties, he was. This did, however, make the climax particularly shocking for them. It is a book that I think they will both pick up and read for themselves in a few years’ time – for now, it has been a very exciting readaloud for us all.

For more, take a look at what Shelf Elf and Elisabeth thought about it too.

Little Brother’s book also came from the Americas – Napí by Antonio Ramírez and illustrated by Domi. Here’s what he has to say about it:

Napí is about a little girl called Napí who loves to dream. She is a Mazateca Indian from Mexico. She likes herons and I think it’s beautiful when it says the trees bloomed with herons and it’s also quite funny. Napí often dreams she’s become a heron. The river dresses itself in different colours. The river smiles up at her and the rocks on the riverbank form teeth. In her dream she was followed by the moon and carried by the river and the moon had a face and the river had hands. The pictures had all the colours I know and some I didn’t. They are so spectacular! I give it 10/10!

La Bloga and Gina MarySol Ruiz have both published reviews in the past too…

Meanwhile, Older Brother (9) travelled to the other side of the world and read Kakadu Calling by Jane Garlil Christophersen, an elder of the Bunitj clan in Kakadu National Park, Australia:

These adventure stories are all set in the Australian Bush. I liked the book because all the stories had animals in them – a snake, a dingo and a hermit crab – as I love animals and it’s wonderful to me to be reading about wild animals in Australia. My favourite story was about a young boy who had to wait four full moons until his parents came to pick him up from his grandparents but he decides he wants to get home sooner and runs away. On his way he meets some buffalos and he wakes up to find a snake slithering across his chest. He wanted to run but he heard his father’s voice telling him to stay really still.

So, we have but one more book to go in our Reading Challenge 2008… We’ve been taking it gently but I would say there’s still time to leap in there; and at the end of the month, be ready to tell us your final booklists. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Our selection last month once again had us travelling all over the world and this time included poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

First of all, in honor of Poetry Month in the US, we chose Linda Sue Park’s Tap Dancing on the Roof as our reading-together book. We’ve all had great fun dipping into it and taking it in turns to choose and read the poems to each other. There were some gem moments like Older Brother discovering the sijo about how annoying it is to be summoned out of bed to go and clean your teeth – minutes after being subjected to the same treatment himself! The more we explored the poems, the more I marvelled at Linda Sue’s knack for getting the words just right – whether she’s describing a very ordinary, every day event or taking off on a flight of whimsy and metaphor. I’ve already blogged about Tap Dancing on the Roof so I won’t say any more here, but pass on to…

… Older Brother’s choice, which was Grandpa Chatterji by Jamila Gavin, illustrated by Peter Bailey. Here’s what he (aged 9 1/2) has to say:

I really enjoyed Grandpa Chatterji and I thought it was very funny sometimes, especially the part at the fair when Grandpa and Sanjay went on the rockets and they flew up into the air – when they came off they were green! Then in the evening Sanjay said, “Shall we have another go next time?” and Grandpa replied, “Maybe.”

I learned that in India some people pray standing on one foot and then when they pray they say, “Om” and the O is like the shape of the sun. People think of God as the sun because he is bright and the light of the world.

I would recommend reading it because I think people would enjoy it. Now I want to read the other two Grandpa Chatterji books.

In the meantime, Little Brother has enjoyed dipping into and absorbing the Australian Creatures of the Rainforest:Two artists explore Djabugay country by Warren Brim and Anna Eglitis:

I love books, especially encyclopaedia books about animals. This book has some animals in that I love, like echidnas and kookaburras and bandicoots. I learned that some ants are edible (the green ants) and I learned some words in Djabugay like gurrina, which means echidna, and badil, which is a zamia palm tree. Luckily at the end there is a guide to how you say their letters.

The book is by two artists – first there are lino cuts then there are original aboriginal pictures. It is very good.

So, as you can see, we are very much enjoying the PaperTigers Reading Challenge and I know my boys are finding the books they’ve chosen to be fun and enriching. Do let us know how you are getting on – only a couple more months to go!

It’s hard to believe that a month has gone by since my first update on our rising to the PaperTigers Reading Challenge but it has and we are just about managing to keep up! Our three books this month are all very different and once again Big Brother and Little Brother have prepared their own reviews. It is quite coincidental that both their ‘solo’ books are illustrated by Ed Young – and that they both feature piercing eyes on their front covers!

Meanwhile our joint choice has been The Select Nonsense of Sukumar Ray. We still have quite a long way to go and I suspect we’ll be dipping into it right to the end of the Challenge: you can’t rush Nonsense Poetry! Each poem has to be savored and the sounds enjoyed. Sukanta Chaudhuri’s translations from the original Bengali are truly amazing – lots of delightful rhymes and rhythms; and nonsense that is both nonsensical and convincingly English. Sukumar Ray’s own sketches and silhouettes sometimes give a visual lead into the poems and it hasn’t worried my two that some of the language is archaic: they expect to be baffled because it is, after all, nonsense! I think the word porcochard from “Hotch Potch” is set to become a new family word. But of course this is a translation – and here is another version, equally virtuoso, of the same poem, this time translated by Sukumar Ray’s son, Satyajit Ray. Here the extraordinary combination of a pochard/duck and a porcupine has become a “Porcuduck”…. Which of course leads into all sort of questions about translations… but that’s for a later date!

Big Brother’s book was Sadako in the picture book version by Eleanor Coerr, illustrated, as I said, by Ed Young. I said how much I was looking forward to seeing this book in a post for World Peace Day; here’s what Big Brother (aged 9 ½ exactly!) has to say: (more…)