Horse Diaries - Penny

 

Title: Penny

Author: Whitney Sanderson

Rating: ★★★★☆

Ages: 6 - 12

    Back Cover Synopsis:

    Penny is a blue-eyed palomino paint mare with a taste for adventure! She and a boy named Jesse search for gold in Northern California. After striking it rich and then losing everything, Jesse and Penny join the Pony Express. The job is a tough one, but Penny loves a challenge! Here is Penny's story . . . in her own words.

 "Once you've read a book you care about, some part is always with you." -- Louis L'Amour --

 "Reading is essential for those who seek to rise about the ordinary." -- Jim Rohn --

 "One disadvantage of being a hog is that at any moment some blundering fool may try to make a silk purse out of your wife's ear." -- J. B. Morton --

 "Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled." -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky --

 "Horses make a landscape look beautiful." -- Alice Walker --

 "If ever you feel like an animal among men, be a lion." -- Criss Jami --

The BFG

 

Title: The BFG

Author: Roald Dahl

Rating: ★★★★★

Ages: 8 - 18+

    Back Cover Synopsis:

    The Big Friendly Giant is no ordinary bone-crunching giant. He is far too nice and jumbly. It's lucky for Sophie that he is. Had she been carried off in the middle of the night by any of the other giants she would have soon become breakfast. When Sophie hears that the giants are flushbunking off to England to swollop a few nice little chiddlers, she and the BFG decide they must stop them once and for all!

 "Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought." -- Pope John Paul II --

 "A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself." -- Jim Morrison --

 "Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind." -- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own -- 

 "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." -- Martin Luther King Jr. --

 "We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it." -- William Faulkner --

 "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." -- Frank Zappa --

 "The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between." -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart --

 "Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like in the universe."

 "Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends." -- Alphonse de Lamartine --

 "Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST." -- Frank Zappa --

 "Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere." -- Jean Rhys -- 

 "I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves." -- David Foster Wallace --

 "Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while." -- Malorie Blackman --

 "Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing." -- Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird --

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . .  The man who never reads lives only one." -- George R. R. Martin --

Starship Troopers

 

Title: Starship Troopers

Author: Robert A. Heinlein

Rating: ★★★★★

Ages: 12 - 18+

    Back Cover Synopsis:

    Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up - and definitely not as part of the Mobile Infantry. But now he's in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training that is harder than anything he could have imagined. And he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids.

    Because everyone in the Infantry fights. And if the training doesn't kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job . . . 

Out of The Silent Planet

Title: Out of The Silent Planet

Author: C. S. Lewis

Rating: ★★★★★

Ages: 12 - 18+

    The first book in C. S. Lewis' acclaimed Space Trilogy, which continues with Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, Out of the Silent Planet begins the adventures of the remarkable Dr. Ransom. Here, that estimable man is abducted by a megalomaniacle physicist and his accomplice and taken via spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra. The two men are in need of a human sacrifice, and Dr. Ransom would seem to fit the bill. Once on the planet, however, Ransom eludes his captors, risking his life and his chances of returning to Earth, becoming a stranger in a land that is enchanting in its difference from Earth and instructive in its similarity. First published in 1943, Out of the Silent Planet remains a mysterious and suspenseful tour de force.

 

 "Everybody is born so that they can learn to live a good life - like loving everybody and being nice, right? Well animals already know how to do that, so they don't have to live so long." -- Robin Downing -- 

 "Animals don't know as much about jealousy as people, but they're not ignorant of it, either." -- Stephen King --

"Animals, like us, are living souls. They are not things. They are not objects. Neighter are they human. Yet they mourn. They love. They dance. They suffer. They know the peaks and chasms of being." -- Gary Kowalski --

 "Animals don't lie. Animals don't criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do." -- Betty White --

"If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans." -- James Herriot -- 

 "Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire. Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself. The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter." -- Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way --