Our summer holidays are nearly over and the Reading the World Challenge is nearly running away with me in terms of posting about the books we’ve read – so without further ado, here’s the latest installment, including the long overdue catch-up with our fellow readers…

Together we have read the delightful Lulie the Iceberg by Her Royal Highness Princess Takamado and illustrated by Warabe Aska (Kodansha America, 1998), which Sally wrote about a while ago – her post prompted us to get hold of it: and we did, indeed, love it. We read the actual story one evening and then spent several evenings after that reading the factual information at the end, while hunting again and again for the various creatures mentioned in the gorgeous illustrations. Read Sally’s post for a synopsis of the story…

Meanwhile, Older Brother has read Linda Sue Park’s A Single Shard (Clarion Books, 2001):

A Single Shard is about a young boy called Tree-ear in 12th Century Korea, who loves watching a potter called Min making vases grow from the wheel. Then Tree-ear starts working for Mon (but he’s not allowed to actually make things) and goes on a long journey to the emperor with some pottery to seek a commission – but he is tricked by robbers on the way…

It’s a very exciting story. It made me feel happy and sad at different times: and the ending was probably the saddest part of all, though it did eventually turn out to be for the best.

Little Brother has also read a book set in Antarctica – but I have to confess that I have mislaid the notebook in which he wrote his mini-review, which he will be quite unimpressed about. I will try and remedy the situation asap.

In the meantime, what of everyone else in all these weeks that have elapsed since my last update?

Corinne has read Shanghai Girls by Lisa See, of which she says, “It won Honorable Mention for Adult Fiction in the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. I loved Lisa’s previous book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and this book did not disappoint either. Highly recommend it especially for all those “historical novel” lovers like me.”

Olduvai at Olduvai Reads has completed the Challenge – Hooray! You can find links to her reviews for all the books she read here…

Tiina of A Book Blog of One’s own has read The Lovers of Algeria by Anouar Benmalek and The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge…

And I’m so glad Jama at Jama Rattigan’s Alphabet Soup has joined in too. She’s been reading a wonderful selection of picture books about Asia and Asian Americans, focusing on Korea, China and Japan - definitely not to be missed.

And welcome, too, to Nora at Reading My Way Through The Classics, who has read Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

There are only four and a bit months left of the year but if you’re happy to squash your reading up a bit, you could still join in our Reading the World Challenge of seven books from or about each of the seven continents… And I promise it won’t be quite so long till the next write-up!

In a few short days, Vancouver will host the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.  What better time than this to highlight a book on one of the city’s most well known landmarks — Stanley Park.  Warabe Aska’s Who Hides in the Park is a multilingual book about Vancouver’s municipal gem — a four hundred hectare urban park located on an almost island-like peninsula surrounded on three sides by the Pacific Ocean.   The book explores the mysteries of the park in four different languages: English, French, Japanese and Chinese.

Aska, whose books I’ve posted on before, loves to play with hidden images.  Each page presents a familiar picture of the park while at the same time, containing images of hidden animals, people and spirits.  It’s always fun reading an Aska book with a child because of the pleasure one gets in finding the hidden creatures!   For example, a leafy shrub scene portraying a peacock in the front reveals multiple ‘hidden’ peacocks in the the shrubs that have leaves for feathers.  A forest path scene with frolicking children has embedded within it rabbits and squirrels and even two police officers on horses.

While the image is presented on the right hand page, the left hand page contains the text in the four different scripts of each language.  The text is easy to read and follow, and makes for a good study of languages relevant to Canadians, especially those living on the West Coast.   At the back of the book is a delightful map of the park and a list of facts about it.  This is a good book to take along to the park or buy as a souvenir of a visit to one of Canada’s most delightful, natural urban treasures.

At this time of the year, people often travel for the holiday season.  Getting in cars, planes, or trains, people now traverse continents and oceans easily.  But what if you were an iceberg from the north pole who wants to visit kin in the south pole?  That is what the story of Lulie the Iceberg is all about.  Lulie, whose name comes from the Greenlandic word, iluliaq, is an iceberg who hears from his friend, Kiki the Arctic Tern, that there are icebergs on the other side of the world.  Lulie decides to visit them — an undertaking of massive proportion, to say the least!  After breaking off a glacial ice field, he sets off on a perilous journey southwards to the Antarctic.  He has many exciting encounters on the way and must make a decision that will affect his very existence in the dangerously warm waters near the equator.

Although it might seem a stretch of the imagination to believe an Arctic iceberg could make it to the Antarctic, icebergs can indeed travel great distances.  In the glossary of the book, reports of iceberg sightings in North Africa and the Azores are mentioned.   Perhaps now, in the age of global warming, these reports will only be all the more common.  Lulie the Iceberg is, in fact, intended to educate children about polar environments. Princess Hisako of Takamado who wrote the book, in conjunction with illustrator, Warabe Aska, was inspired by her visits to the polar regions of Greenland.  “I wondered where an iceberg calving off an ice sheet would want to travel once it was free to move.” The book, published a decade ago with proceeds going to UNICEF, has since been turned into a play and remains a delightful and informative work to this day.

There’s a lovely haiku by Basho about the first snow where he awaits the event with great anticipation, returning to his hut every time the clouds gather in the sky in early December.  He wants to be ready to write the words down as soon as he experiences the moment.  When the snow first came to our city in mid November, my daughter made me fetch a pair of cross country skis we’d acquired from a friend and set out into the slush with glee.  For the last few years we have had very warm, languorous autumns in my part of Canada, and this has oddly increased our anticipation of the first snow.

The seasons are often written about in poetry of every language.  This past summer, I stumbled on a children’s poetry book at a library cast-off sale.  It is called Seasons and is edited by the master anthologist, Alberto Manguel.  Manguel has selected poetry from all over the world and of different periods and languages that note, in some way, the seasons.  The book is illustrated by Japanese Canadian artist Warabe Aska who has a playful way of engaging the childish imagination with his pictures.  Often embedded in his colorful drawings are hidden pictures of animals or people.   My daughter delights in finding these images and this activity enhances her appreciation of the book’s contents.  For winter, there is this lovely poem by eleventh century Japanese court lady Sei Shonagon:

Snow

As though pretending to be blooms

The snowflakes scatter in the winter sky.

Accompanying the text, is Aska’s picture of a popcorn vendor in the park on a snowy day.  Popcorn, blooms — all are lovely metaphors, visual and literary, for snowflakes.  And so did my daughter and I feast our eyes this year on popcorn puffs and garden blooms in the otherwise dreary skies of November.

This week’s Poetry Friday is hosted at Lisa’s blog…