"Correction does much, but encouragement does more." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe --

The Family Under the Bridge

 

Title: The Family Under the Bridge

Author: Natalie Savage Carlson

Rating: ★★★★★

Ages: 6 - 14

    Back Cover Synopsis: 

    Once there was an old man named Armand who lived under a bridge in Paris. Everything he owned could be pushed around in an old baby buggy without a hood - it was easy for him to move from place to place. Armand loved his solitary, carefree life. Children, he said, were like starlings, and one was better off without them. 

    But the children who lived under the bridge knew a true friend when they saw one, even if that friend was a little bit grumpy to begin with. And it did not take Armand long to see he had gotten himself a ready-made family - one he loved with all his heart, and one he would have to find a better home than the bridge.  

"Be somebody who makes everybody feel like somebody." -- Unknown --

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

"I came, I saw, I conquered." -- Julius Caesar --

"When you can tell your story and it doesn't make you cry, you know you have healed." -- Unknown --

"Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste." -- Benjamin Franklin --

"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment." -- Henry David Thoreau --

The Magician's Nephew

 

Title: The Magician's Nephew

Author: C. S. Lewis

Rating: ★★★★☆

Ages: 9 - 15

    Back Cover Synopsis: 

    NARNIA . . . where the woods are thick and cool, where Talking Beasts are called to life . . . a new world where adventure begins. 

    Digory and Polly meet and become friends one cold, wet summer in London. Their lives burst into adventure when Digory's Uncle Andrew, who thinks he is a magician, sends them hurtling to . . . somewhere else. They find their way to Narnia, newborn from the Lion's song, and encounter the evil sorceress Jadis before they finally return home. 

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." -- Lao Tzu --

Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 29

by William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

"Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes." -- Benjamin Disraeli --

"Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love." -- Lao Tzu --

"The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for." -- Allan K. Chalmers --

"Love is the beauty of the soul." -- Saint Augustine --

To Kill a Mockingbird

Title: To Kill a Mockingbird

Author: Harper Lee

Rating: ★★★★★

Ages: 15 - 18+

    Back Cover Synopsis: 

    The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy, Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill a Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pultizer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.

    Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill a Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into ten languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American Literature.

"We should take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it." -- Seneca the Younger --

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats

Sailing to Byzantium

by William Butler Yeats

I

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

"Cupcakes are muffins that believed in miracles." -- Unknown --

"There is no failure except in no longer trying." -- Elbert Hubbard --

"In trying to please all, he had pleased none." -- Aesop --

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

The Swiss Family Robinson

 

Title: The Swiss Family Robinson

Author: Johann Rudolf Wyss

Rating: ★★★★☆

Ages: 10 - 16

    Back Cover Synopsis: 

    The Swiss Family Robinson is a story of the happy discovery of the wonders of natural history by a family shipwrecked on a desert island, who remain united through all the adversities that they encounter. 

"Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe --

If by Rudyard Kipling

If

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!