alisarae's Reviews (1.65k)

This is just charming. The illustrations are loose and bright, and the story is heartwarming. It tells the tale of a Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, back when the trees were transplanted in NYC.

I love bird illustrations, and these are so lovely.

Not lovely is being typeset in Papyrus. Also, though the story has a good concept, it is clunky and abrupt. Wish it had been handled with more grace, like the illustrations.

I like this book. Its message is very spelled-out and clear, carefully explaining everything with churchy lingo, but it makes subtle connections too. For example, John Sonneman has a beard, does carpentry, invites people into his shop to celebrate with him, etc. Anyways, this is a nice story to explain the symbolism of the candy cane, and in the back it explains how the candy cane came into being.

Allen Say writes and illustrates BEAUTIFUL autobiographical books. This book is gentle and gorgeous, about his first Christmas in Japan. There is much left unsaid (What was his mother wishing for so badly that she needed to make 2,000 cranes?), but I think it shows the honest interactions between a mother and a child. My mom didn't overexplain things to me when I was young either.

There isn't a Christmas message here, and Allen doesn't get any info about Santa or Jesus. He learns that people exchange gifts and decorate trees.

Things I am curious about: Why did his mother move from California to Japan? And why is this the first year that his family is celebrating Christmas?

UPDATE: I got the answers to my questions by reading Grandfather's Journey.

This is a nice story, esp for fans of Little House.

This collection of Christmas memories spans former president Jimmy Carter's entire life, from a farm boy in rural Georgia through his presidency and into his current life. His childhood stories are the most interesting ones, to me anyways.

Something that stood out to me was during his presidency, he couldn't afford to send out 100,000+ Christmas cards to his list of contacts and he didn't want to burden tax payers, so he asked the DNC to pay for it (and they did). Imagine the president caring about his personal tax burden! So foreign these days. Jimmy Carter is such a humble and admirable man.

PS the audiobook is read by Carter himself-- always a bonus.

We know so little about octopuses. They are one of the most intelligent beings on our planet and they are completely other. We have some inkling of a theory that they don’t need eyes to see and that they have a decentralized brain. We know they use tools. We know they have three hearts. We don’t know much beyond that.

This book takes you into an exploration of the wonderous other. What is it like to be an octopus? What is it like to be another human? Can we, unless we display deeply sincere empathy, even begin to guess?

Set in Regency England with Jane Austin as a (very) minor character, this is a romantic comedy meets classic Austin "girl struggles to maintain position in society by marrying rich dude" meets the intrigue of the Scarlet Pimpernel at Christmas. Just the right amount of fun and dumb jokes :)

Confession: I came for The Nutcracker.

It did not disappoint. I'm surprised that I had never read the original story before!

Just read this for a third time, and I'll probably read it several more times in the future. I don't remember it being so funny, so tongue-in-cheek, or so delightful when I was younger. It's a classic for a reason, and it certainly reminded me of the important things about the holiday spirit.

Fourth reading was listening to the edition read by Simon Prebble. Very good narration! But I couldn't help imagining all of the characters as muppets ;)