Dear Beast: The Pet Parade

 For summer reading, my son read this to me and we both rather liked it. 

In the neighborhood, children and their pets are going to have a pet parade. Andy normally goes with Simon his cat and Simon hates it. This year, Baxter (or Beast) is going to go with Andy, but Simon is kind of nosy and wants to know what Baxter and Andy are going to be dressing up as for the parade. Only Baxter won't tell and it's driving Simon nuts. 

It is a cute little chapter book, good for 2nd or 3rd graders. It was engaging enough for my son not be scream and throw a tantrum about reading with pictures to not be too intimidating for young readers--I know this was a thing for me when I was little and why I didn't read many books in the younger grades unless I was forced to. It's also written in letters from and to Simon which is different and fun altogether. 

I enjoyed the characters enough that (and the fact that the letters were delivered by a snail mailman, very punny--or how a crow's name was Edgar Allan Crow) that I would be interested to read (or have my son read) the rest of these books. 

One thing that kind of bothers me is that some of the characters (mainly Baxter) doesn't spell things accurately, which can throw young readers off a little in a similar way Junie B. Jones does--though they are different. I found that I need to tell him what some of the words meant, like "cuz," because he didn't know what it was. Most of the characters write accurately in their letters. 

Over all though, the story was cute and gave me a reason to explain things that had gone over my sons head. Like SnailMail, Edgar Allen Poe, and who Sherlock Holmes is, which got him a little more interested in what what/who those things/people were. 

The Bad-A** Librarians of Timbuktu And Their Race To Save the World's Precious Manuscripts

I thought this was going to be an epic non-fiction piece like Before and After, but after the first five or six chapters, I struggled so hard. I just couldn't finish it. 

 This story is about how a librarian named Abdel Kader Haidara who worked all throughout the 80's and 90's to gather as many ancient documents and manuscripts from around Mali and its surrounding countries and gathered many of them in Timbuktu and his own collections. He preserved and restored many of them. They were gorgeous pieces of literature, Qurans embossed in gold, mercantile documents, and so much more. Though as the political scene in Africa during the late 90's and early 00's got more and more violent with Al-Qaida becoming more prevalent, foreigners getting kidnapped and murdered, and religious/historical everything getting destroyed, Haidara and others like him worked to get the many thousands of manuscripts out of Timbuktu to safe places where these historical documents from the 15th Century . 

I was really excited to learn about these librarians who worked so hard to save these documents of such historical significant that showed how Africa isn't just a bunch of desert and bush, but that they had thriving communities of intellectual and tolerance. The beginning and Haidara's story was engaging. But after a while that story telling became very dry. Names were thrown all over the place and I didn't know who they were even through the are of modern historical significance. I, personally, wasn't around for the 80's and was only a little kid in the 90's so many of the names were vaguely familiar, but I didn't know what they had done. I became very bogged down. If I had more basic information about what Al-Qaida was doing I might have been able to understand it more. 

I, sadly, didn't finish it. It was an audiobook, so it made it really hard to skim through the parts to get to the other parts I was more engaged in, and then had to return it. I tried. Four or five extra chapters. But I felt like I was just more lost. The reader could have been better too. 

I still want to know more about it and thankfully there is actually a TedTalk by the author Joshua Hammer talking about it and what Haidara did which I will be diving into. Here is a link to the TedTalk as well as (1 a five minute clip, (2 A BBC documentary, (3 an Extra History presentation on the Empire of Mali links for documentaries about it. It is very fascinating and learning more in a different format is probably what will be best for me.  

Read on. Find out more.