Cover Coincidence: Frog Edition

As soon as I saw the cover for the new Barbara O'Connor book I had a sense of deja vu, but couldn't quite place it until I ran across this yesterday:

And now I've got that scene from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial stuck in my head...

How to Train Your Dragon

   

So I read How to Train Your Dragon out loud to my bright-eyed little daughter a month or two back and never got around to blogging about it.  Then we rented the movie and now we've just finished the second book in the series.

Hooo-ee, it's a bunch of fun.  If nobody else, middle-reading boys (4th-7th) will love this stuff.  Plenty of references to belches, farts, swords, dragons, and horrible ways of expiring.  The illustrations are all ink-spilled hilarious scribbles similar to the ones in their own loose-leaf notebooks.  And it's about Vikings and dragons and pirates for crying out loud.  How can you go wrong?

The books are about Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, son and heir to the chief of the Hairy Hooligan tribe, Stoick the Vast.  Problem is, Hiccup is a scrawny, brainy boy and not the muscle-bound Viking hero his father or tribe trainer, Gobber the Belch, would like to see.  Needless to say he proves that sometimes brains can win out over brawn and maybe even save the village from impending doom in the form of giant attacking fire-breathing dragons.

That's the basic plot anyway and the movie sticks with about just that much.  Everything else, however is completely different.  What's weird is that they are both (first book and film) perfectly delightful in their own way.   Usually when they take the title of a children's book and maybe the basic idea, but change everything else, it ends up to be a pile of mushy nothingness (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs; The Polar Express), but this movie is really pretty great even though the father is much more of a character, the dragons are completely different, the main adversary is absent, and a romantic subplot with a girl Viking is tossed in.  Don't ask me how, but they nailed it.

I have no idea if they're planning to adapt the second one, but they'll have to change everything again.  In the second book, it turns out Hiccup has a legendary sea-faring ancestor named Grimbeard the Ghastly who has buried and booby-trapped some sort of pirate treasure.  Stoick the Vast becomes obsessed with finding it with the help of an untrustworthy new arrival to the island claiming to be named Alvin the Poor-but-Honest Farmer.

Again, it's a delight and again it would make a great film but it would be very different because in both the books and film Hiccup has a dragon companion named Toothless, but they are very different creatures.  In the books Toothless is a self-involved reluctant helper who is pathetically small and actually has nubby little teeth.  In the climax of the second book when a bad guy is approaching Hiccup with blade drawn, he commands Toothless to bring him a sword from a pile.  Toothless is similarly scrawny and can only managed the smallest, rustiest weapon.

In the movie, "Toothless" is a joke name because the full-sized black dragon has retractable teeth so it looks like he has none until he springs them when coming in for a bite.  He would have no trouble flying a cannon over to Hiccup if he wished.  But I'm sure the filmmakers could pull it off with no problem after their triumphant first adaptation.

How to Train Your Dragon Book 1
How to Train Your Dragon (Single Disc Edition)

How to Train Your Dragon Book 2: How to Be a Pirate

The Nine

This is not a high-minded history of the Supreme Court of the United States, but neither is it a trashy tell-all that the generic legal-thriller cover would lead you to believe.  It's somewhere in the middle.  You know those books that start out as popular magazine articles and then get expanded into book form?  This is like that.  Someone at my book club says it felt to him like "just one long piece on NPR by Nina Totenberg."  But I like those NPR Supreme Court pieces!

But yes, sometime is doesn't seem like too much more than a collection of colorful anecdotes about the personalities of the judges.  The meaty stuff comes in  the description of Sandra Day O'Connor's real power.  Despite a Republican-appointment dominance since the Reagan years, the Court has handed down mostly moderate decisions and mostly because of O'Connor.

The book is just as good, but gets upsetting, when it gets to the case popularly known as Bush v. Gore (it was actually Gore v. Harris, but never mind).  Reading about that fiasco again just opened up my ulcer from that time again.  It damaged the reputation of the Court as well as the country and makes it clear that it's not law or theories about the constitution or the place of precedence, but ideology that truly runs the court.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

How to Learn? From Mistakes - TED Talk

Nailed it!

President Al Gore

Today is the day, back in the year double aught that then Vice-President Al Gore conceded the presidency to a failed Texas businessman.

But during all the kerfluffle of the election controversy, one of us (my wife and I are both educators) had a Scholastic  Book Clubs order come in and there was an order for Mr. President: A Book of U.S. Presidents which they update and add the newest president on the cover and a short bio at the end.  Since they didn't know who it would be yet, Scholastic went ahead and made one for both possible candidates!

This is not a screen grab from a bookseller, this is a photo I just took here in my office.

Included is a letter from a customer service person which reads:

Dear Student,

Because the winner of the Presidential election was not finalized when our January orders started shipping, we have included books about both Presidential candidates.  You will now have information about whoever becomes our 43rd President.

We hope you enjoy both these books and thank you for your understanding.

Crazy, huh?  I wonder how many of these were put into circulation.  I'll hang on to it just for laughs but who knows, maybe it'll be worth something someday...

The Disappearing Spoon

A book about the Periodic Table of Elements sounds boring, I know, but this one is so not.  Gallium is the element that you can make into the shape of a spoon and it will look exactly like any other shiny metal, but it's low boiling point will cause the spoon to dissolve in a cup of hot tea, hence the title. (You can view this phenomena on Youtube if you wish).

So Kean takes us on a survey of the Periodic Table by the different groupings and relating the fascinating ways the elements are related.  We also get wonderful stories about their discoverers and the relationships involved with these people as well.  Much like Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, it's these stories that make the book.

That's the beautiful thing about science.  Some of the people are weasels, some are almost saints, but they're all just human.  But over the years the process wins out and the truths emerge and the connections are made.  People individually are a mixed bunch.  But put them together and give them the tools of science, and there's no telling what they'll achieve.

You really need to read this with a copy of Thodore Gray's book of the elements to provide the visuals (though Wikipedia is a help as well).  And don't forget about the wonderful Periodic Table of Videos which adds another dimension to the story.  Those three things together would make a kuch more interesting high school chemistry class.

It's the stories that you remember (or at least I do, being no chemist) and not always the ones you'd think.  Of course I already knew about Linus Pauling and his two Nobels.  I knew he was one of the smartest people ever (although am more than skeptical of his vitamin promotion).  I did not, however, know about his deep gracious humility when it came to his not only admitting his mistakes when it came to the race for the structure of DNA, but his promotion of the winning team of Crick and Watson, ensuring their own Nobels.

The elements and the discoveries are, of course, amazing.  But it's the people and the process that make the endeavor, and this book, the fun ride it is.


The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe

The Periodic Table of Videos

Stephanie Paulk, 1972-2010

Last time I saw her is when she delivered a copy of her wacky and wonderful book, Tiny Bedtime Stories, for my daughter and I to enjoy.

I worked with her, a hundred years ago, at a Barnes&Noble bookstore.  I jumped that ship and made my home at a much more fun Borders Bookstore up the road and eventually got her to come up there for a while before she went off to law school.

We bonded over books, movies and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  She could read whole mystery novels between her scheduled lunch and two smoke breaks.  She often talked about writing historical romance bodice-rippers.  She still has (or had) my copy of Snow Crash but I may still have her copy of Gormenghast.

There are few people in my life who I would read anything they recommended to me and I would always enjoy it immensely. She was on that short list.  I was proud of being able to recommend Bleak House to her when she told me she'd just gotten into law school.  I told her I thought every lawyer would benefit from reading it and she agreed.  Of course, she finished the book in two days and it had taken me weeks to get through in college.

I will never forget the day we were at the World Congress Center here in Atlanta setting up the tables and registers to sell books at a huge convention.  It was the summer Smashmouth's "Walking On the Sun" was in heavy rotation and she had mentioned that she'd heard the perfect summer song the other day.  It came on the radio as we were unpacking books in this vast room with many boxes and tables.  We had a lot of work to do but as soon as that song came on, she cranked it up and made me and another guy helping us stop and dance around with her like goofballs.  For that four minutes or whatever it was, she was totally into that music, that moment, and dancing around as happy as she could possibly be.

That's how I'll always remember her.

Tiny Bedtime Stories

Stephanie Ann Paulk, 38: Lawyer, poet and performer