Books and Book Week

Last week was Book Week and E's first book week parade. Feeling lazy, my two costume suggestions were for characters of which I knew we could pull together a costume from stuff we already have - an elephant from Babar or Angelina Ballerina (also books she really likes so I didn't feel too bad about it!) She initially chose Queen Celeste then changed her mind and went as Angelina. One pink ballet dress, a headband with some cardboard ears, a stocking tail and eye-liner nose and whiskers and she was a happy and very cute dancing mouse. We got to school not knowing quite what a book week parade entailed - and it was great! The theme of this year's Book Week is "connect with reading" and the previous week we had been asked to write down the title and author of E's three favourite books on strips of paper. (She initially claimed bloody Peppa Pig is her favourite - objectively not even true! - but was then persuaded to write down Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Imagine (Alison Lester) and ... something else, I can't remember what we actually wrote, I know Milly Molly Mandy and My Naughty Little Sister were contenders.

It turned out every child in the school had done this, and some poor teacher (or hopefully maybe some older kids?!) had strung the strips together into enormous paper chains. The chains were suspended from a central maypole thing in the undercover area, and each class sat underneath one of the chains. Year 7 student councillors were in charge of setting up, and they introduced each class and "interviewed" each child, asking them who they were dressed as and things such as why they like that book, before each kid paraded around the circle. That's right, every child in the school got to announce, in front of the rest of the school who they had dressed up as. It brought home how pleased we are to have E in a comparatively small school (about 250 kids) as in many schools this simply wouldn't be possible. After the parading had finished there was a morning tea fundraiser and E was very pleased and excited to be able to have me stay for a cupcake and a juice. The whole event was really lovely with a really nice vibe about it. We sent an email to the principal saying how pleasantly surprised we were by all the effort that had clearly gone into organising it.

C and I recently went to baby rhyme time at one of the local libraries. I used to take baby E to this quite often but hadn't been for a long time for obvious reasons. We liked it! Lots of face to face bouncing and singing and smiling time. While we were there I had a quick flick through the shortlisted picture books that were on display. Banjo and Ruby Red, Kissed by the Moon and Silver Buttons may make an appearance in C's Christmas stash. For a full list of the shortlisted books click here.

The Boom-Boom Book

According to E - for reasons best known to herself* - and with apologies to Eric Carle. 

In the light of the moon, a little green egg lay on a leaf.
One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and - pop! - out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry boom-boom.
He started to look for some food.
On Monday the boom-boom ate through one apple. But the boom-boom was still hungry.
On Tuesday the boom-boom ate through two pears, but the boom-boom was still hungry.
On Wednesday the boom-boom ate through three plums, but the boom-boom was still hungry.
On Thursday the boom-boom ate through four strawberries, but the boom-boom was still hungry.
On Friday the boom-boom ate through five oranges, but the boom-boom was still hungry.
On Saturday the boom-boom ate one piece of choc-o-late cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of sam-a-li, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake and one slice of watermelon. That night the boom-boom had a stomachache!
The next day was Sunday again. The boom-boom ate one nice green leaf and after that he felt much better.
Now the boom-boom wasn't hungry anymore - and he wasn't a little boom-boom anymore. He was a BIG, FAT boom-boom.
He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and...
the boom-boom was a beautiful butterfly.

* but which are apparently very funny. She now walks around with the book saying 'I call this the boom-boom book!' Quite possibly the cutest thing ever.

Book of the Week: Ladbird Favourite Fairytales

I'm attempting to resurrect my much neglected Book of the Week series.

This week's seal of approval goes to the Ladybird versions of classic fairytales.* Little E received "Little Red Hen", "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," "The Three Little Pigs" and "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" for her second birthday and has been having a great time with them. They would be good for early readers to practice on, but they are also fun to read aloud. I am really enjoying her enjoyment of such familiar stories.

They are straightforward renditions of the classic tales, with a bit of rhyme and humour. The illustrations are bright and simple. Most pages involve the characters making a comment in speech bubbles which is lost on Little E but which I think would be appealing to a child learning to read. The books themselves are hardcover but with paper pages (ie, not board books) and they are cute easy-to-hold squares.

E is particularly enthusiastic about The Three Little Pigs. Her "rest" yesterday consisted of her going to bed with a pile of books and yelling "little pig little pig let me in" at the top of her voice for 20 minutes.

I was initially a little apprehensive that E would be frightened or upset by some of the more gruesome aspects of fairytales but it hasn't bothered her so far, quite possibly because she doesn't understand it. The demise of the first two pigs is phrased as something like "and that was the end of the first little pig." When D paused his recital of the story to ask E what she thought happened to the pig, she said "he ran home to his mummy."

Needless to say, all four of these books get big thumbs-up from us.

 *This is not a sponsored post.

2012 reading challenge: The Puzzle Ring by Kate Forsyth

Not sure what category this fits into, it could be Young Adult, could be Fantasy, it wasn't one I'd planned to read for either, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

The first little bit of the story is set in modern day Australia, then the next quarter or so in modern day Scotland. The protagonist is a 12 year old girl who discovers, upon travelling to Scotland to meet her father's family for the first time, that her family is cursed. She then manages to travel back to the Scotland of Mary Queen of Scots in order to remove the curse by solving various mysteries. It all sounds a bit ridiculous when set out like that, but it is typical Kate Forsyth: meticulously researched, but written in such a way that the research is not intrusive. The only little criticism I'd make of it is that the plot did seem a bit rushed towards the end; it perhaps would have benefited by being released as two books rather than one.

My favourite Kate Forsyth books are still by far her Witches of Eileanan series but I suspect I would very much have liked this, and her other books aimed at children/young adults, when I was in primary school. Speaking of which, I'm about to go and scour the library for the second and third volumes of her Chronicles of Estelliana series which I didn't realise had been published.

This post is part of my 2012 reading challenge.

2012 reading challenge: 'The Golden Day' by Ursula Dubosarsky

I listed this book in the "crime/mystery fiction" genre of my 2012 reading challenge and I think I may have unintentionally cheated. It certainly isn't a cheap page turning paperback mystery, although the plot is centred around a mystery.

Set in 1960s Sydney in an all girls private school, it tells the story of a class of 11 year olds who go on an excursion with their teacher, only to have their teacher vanish and not return.

Although the content is dark and the mood sombre it's very readable; I spent about an hour on it whilst Little E was having her lunch time nap and finished it that night. In a guest post at Kids Book Review, Ursula Dubosarsky wrote that the novel was partly inspired by a painting she saw the National Gallery in Canberra, Floating Schoolgirl: "It’s a painting of a surreal schoolgirl in hat and tunic floating above the city in the darkness - the flying child may be frightened, but she’s also brimming with the joy of a secret life."

Prior to reading this book the only thing of Dubosarsky's I had come across was her picture book The Terrible Plop which is funny and clever and gets a regular workout at our place. Impressed by her versatility, I then picked up another of her "young adult" novels The Red Shoe. I preferred The Golden Day but recommend both.

2012 reading challenge: Manhattan Dreaming by Anita Heiss

This is the first of my reviews for my 2012 reading challenge. I actually read two books from my list in January but didn't get around to reviewing them.

I really liked the idea of this book. The first quarter/third is set in Canberra/Golbourn and it's always interesting to read a contemporary description of familiar places. The protagonist is a female Aboriginal art curator who works at a gallery in Canberra and there's certainly not too many of them in fiction (and probably not in real life either!) The next setting is New York City, and one of the aspects I enjoyed most was getting to voyeuristically experience living there.


However. For me at least, this turned out to be a poor execution of a bunch of good ideas. I didn't think the writing was particularly skilful; not enough of the "show don't tell" - I found the style stilted and everything over-explained. There was a supposed twist at the end of the book which I thought was pretty obvious.


The protagonist just about irritated me to tears. Other than the fact she was an educated, succesful Aboriginal woman doing an interesting, professional job there wasn't much about her that I liked. I couldn't stand that her friends called her "Loz" as a nickname for "Lauren." I thought the way she behaved towards her boyfriend was entirely pathetic (I do realise that was sort of the point of the book, that she only went to NYC as a means of getting over/escaping from the boyfriend, but I still found it intensely annoying).


Other good things I can say about it is that it's a light, easy read. It definitely fits into the romantic fiction category, which was always going to be a challenge for me to enjoy. Others might not have the same issue I did with the protagnoist. That being said, it annoyed me sufficiently that if it hadn't been a book on my list I don't think I'd have finished it.


So not a very positive review for my first book! Fingers crossed the next ones will be better.

Little E and her Beloved Bop

Little E has a not-so-secret love. She begs for him morning, noon and night. She would gladly spend all day with him but her (electronic) access is doled out in strictly measured doses (usually when Mummy is preparing her lunch and dinner). She has memorised the names of all his friends and can recite his numerous biographies. She mispronounces his name with all the earnest enthusiasm that only a toddler can muster. Her devotion is, frankly, driving her parents nuts.

Spot the dog came into Little E's life via the loan of several books. After several hundred readings in the space of a month or so, I attempted to give them back. Upon seeing the enthusiasm that resulted from me producing the books from my bag and putting them on her bench, Lovely Friend E declared that she was not going to be the one to deny Little E such pleasure. And so the books remain on extended loan, and E's enthusiasm now extends to the DVD which I bought her thinking it might buy me a minute or two of peace every now and then. Although she does enjoy a wide variety of books, E will always return to Bop. She will sit and look at them by herself with concentration that is very impressive for someone not yet two years old.

So, regardless of the ever diminishing levels of Mummy and Daddy's sanity, innocent little Bop brings Little E such pleasure it's hard to begrudge him. Other fans may enjoy this site I discovered today: http://www.funwithspot.com/au/

A challenge for grown-up readers

I am good at finding a variety of books for Little E to read, and for making time to go to the library to get books for her. Invariably though, our library trips don't involve us going home with anything other than picture books and DVDs from the "juvenile" shelf as E has to demonstrate how much she loves the library by running all over it and attempting to pull books from any shelves in her path

I am good at finding things for myself to read; the trouble is they almost all come from my bookshelf and I have read the vast majority of them an embarassing number of times before. So when I came across Judi J's post about two new reading challenges for 2012 I decided that I must try one. Like Judi, I'm going to attempt a combination of the Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge and the Eclectic Reader Challenge 2012. So my challenge is:

• Read one book per month;
• From each of the 12 genres below;
• Each book must be written by an Australian female author; and
• After finishing each book, write a blog post about it.

The 12 genres ,along with my tentative booklist are:

1. Literary Fiction (something by Sonya Hartnett)
2. Crime/Mystery Fiction (The Golden Day by Ursula Dubosarky)
3. Romantic Fiction (either Paris Dreaming or Manhattan Dreaming by Anita Heiss)
4. Historical Fiction (Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth. Cheating slightly, at least in the "eclectic" stakes, as I love Kate Forsyth's Witches of Eileanan series);
5. Young Adult
6. Fantasy (BattleAxe by Sara Douglass. I’ve seen her books in libraries many times without ever picking one up. I didn’t realise she was Australian).
7. Science Fiction (Dark Space, Marianne De Pierres, as the fourth book in the same series won the Aurealis Award)
8. Non Fiction (something by Germaine Greer)
9. Horror (no ideas here, so unless someone else inspires me I'll copy Judi and read Madigan Mine by Kirsten McDermott)
10. Thriller /Suspense (maybe something by Bronwyn Parry whose website describes her work as "Australian romantic suspense")
11. Classic (I'm not sure if it counts as "classic" but I've never read Sally Morgan's My Place so I'm going to try that)
12. Your favourite genre. (I'm adding poetry so as not to double up but haven't chosen an author yet).

Before working as a lawyer I used to quite like crime/mystery fiction but haven't read anything that would fit into that category since. For me it's the same as watching police shows on tv: it prompts thinking about work and invariably it prompts lots of complaints from both D and I as the shows are never accurate enough. Horror and thriller/suspense are also going to be a challenge.

This Wikipedia page is a useful source of authors if, as I was, you're struggling to think of enough. It's not arranged by any kind of genre so you just have to get clicking.

Book of the Week: Monkey and Me

We love love love Monkey and Me! It's a rollicking, rhythmic, repetitive read that describes a little girl and her monkey visiting a variety of wild animals.

We've used it to introduce a number of new animal noises/actions; Little E can now flap like a bat and bounce like a kangaroo. We like that it includes a few animals less common to children's books; the afore mentioned bats and kangaroos, as well as penguins (and the more common elephants and monkeys).

The illustrations are lovely, simple pen and ink drawings. If you look closely, each page gives you a clue as to the identity of the next animal they visit.

I can see Monkey and Me being a favourite at our house for years to come.

Book of the Week: Usborne "Look and Say" Garden Book

This is an enduring (well, a few months anyway) favourite at our house. It was a library find that we liked so much we bought.

It is a sturdy little board book with tabs down the right hand side of each page to make them easy to turn.

International Postcard Swap Update

 We received our list of families to whom we need to send a postcard. If our list is representative, Zoe did a great job of allocating everyone different countries and trying to match the ages of the children in the sending/receiving families. Our postcard recipients live in:

Book of the Week: DK Children's Encylopedia of Animals

This is one of E's big favourites at the moment. D takes her to the zoo pretty regularly, and like him she is besotted with all things animal.

It is definitely aimed at a slightly older (primary school?) audience, with snippets of information about the different animals in little boxes on each page. There are separate pages on topics such as animal classification, skeletons, senses, mammals and reptiles, as well as an alphabetical section about different animals. The back cover says it contains information about more than 2000 different species and I'd believe it, it really is a very detailed yet easy-on-the-eye book. It would be a great resource for school projects.

At this point E adores it mainly for the beautiful colour photographs. She has her firm favourites and can make the noises/actions of these animals very loudly and enthusiastically:

* Tigers/lions/cheetahs (all of these get a fantastic, r-rolling growl);

* Elephants (a funny trumpeting noise complete with arm movement);

* Dogs (either "fff-fff" [woof-woof] or a panting noise as Mum & Dad's dog pants more than woofs);

* Cats (meee-ow! meee-ow!);

* Gorillas/chimpanzees/monkeys (pats chest because of repeated readings of Rumble in the Jungle in which the gorilla "wallops his giant great chest");

* Kangaroos (bounces on spot);

* Rabbits (touches nose rather tha twitching nose); and

* Bats (flaps arms).

As of this morning I think she is also saying "baa" for sheep.

So, partly a post about a book we enjoy, partly a post about our clever litlte angel!

International Postcard Swap for Families 2011

 

I just read about this and it sounds super! It is a way of sending and receiving postcards to/from overseas and of learning about good children's books at the same time.

It is being coordinated by Zoe of Playing By the Book. To participate you send her your postal address and your children's ages and sexes. She will send you the details of five overseas families, to whom you send a postcard on which you write a recommendation for a children's book. You will receive five postcards from families overseas in return (not the same families to whom you sent cards).

Zoe's email address is zoe (dot) toft (at) kuvik (dot) net. Full details of the project here.

I used to love writing to my interstate cousins when I was little and I also had a couple of overseas pen friends, so I couldn't sign us up quickly enough!

(Another lazy) Book of the Week: CBCA Book of the Year Awards

I will do a proper Book of the Week post at some point, because E scored big time in the book department on her birthday last weekend. We also made it to the library today, but the best fun was had in crawling in and out of the play house and in toddling along the shelves pulling books out, interspersed with gleefully grabbing them from the boxes on the floor, briefly examining them and then dropping them.

However, I thought I would instead mention that the Children's Book Council of Australia today announced the shortlist for its Book of the Year awards. For some reason its website doesn't yet have a list of them, but there is a full list at Slightly Addicted to Fiction. 

Of the Early Childhood list, the only one we have read is Noni the Pony. I quite like it and persist in reading to E in a rap style "Noni the pony is friendly and funny! Her shimmering tail is the colour of honey!" E doesn't think much of it yet (very shortly after it arriving in the house she ripped a great big tear in it) although I am hopeful that that will change. She isn't too excited about horses, but it does after all feature Dave Dog and Coco the Cat so should score well on the popular animals front. 

How do we know dogs are popular? E's current best party trick is, when asked "what noise does the doggy make?" to give an enormous, gorgeous grin, showing all six of her little white teeth, and to make enthusiastic panting noises. Given the response she gets upon doing this, she has now started doing it as soon as she sees a dog, real or in pictures. This has deviated somewhat from being a book post, but as her unbiased mama I can confidently say it is close to being the cutest and cleverest thing I have ever seen, so well worth a mention!

Lazy Book of the Week: a plug for Slightly Addicted to Fiction

We haven't been to the library this week and so have been trawling our way through old favourites, most often Toddle Waddle and Shirley Hughes' Chatting, Giving, and Bouncing. So I don't have a book to recommend today, but thought instead that I'd mention the book blog to end all others: Slightly Addicted to Fiction.

Its authored by one of the lovely ladies my Mum used to work with at CMIS; she is now a judge for the Children's Book Council Book of the Year awards. Her prolific website is full of information about books, publishing, reviews and literary awards, with a particular emphasis on children's fiction. Each week she has a list of links to articles about books/authors/awards that have  recently appeared in  newspapers, magazines and journals. Today she has a post about Australian authors because April is Aussie Author Month.

If you're trying to decide on a book for a present and need some inspiration, or are wondering what to read next yourself, her site is well worth a visit.

Book of the Week: Toddle Waddle

Oh, Toddle Waddle. Little E wants nothing but Toddle Waddle. Toddle Waddle ad infinitum. Toddle Waddle, you are going to make my brain explode.

It's a recommendation, in a warped kind of way.



(I wasn't planning on doing a Toddle Waddle review, as Cousin V at This Growing Life did one a little while ago. But given the above, I felt somewhat obliged).

(Another belated) Book of the Week: Zin! Zin! Zin! a Violin

I like this book so much I bought it for Little E when she was far too young to appreciate it (she still is really). Accordingly we hadn't read it for a while and I was very pleased to rescue it for where it was languishing on her shelf when we went looking for something to read before bed. tonight. She crawled around her bedroom floor loudly repeating "boo boo boo" (book) in a very pleased manner whilst I read it even though I doubt how much attention she was paying. 

This book is such a cracker that it's hard to pick between the language and illustrations. The book is a description of ten instruments from an orchestra with each page containing a verse devoted to a different instrument. The language is lyrical,  sophisticated and often alliterative:

"Flute that sends our soul a-shiver;

Flute that slender, silver sliver.

A place among the set it picks

To make a young SEXTET - that's SIX."

The illustrations are bright and whimsical. The musicians are a suitably eclectric and eccentric looking bunch. The orchestra's two cats, dog and mouse also feature on each page.

We don't have any other Lloyd Moss books but he has a couple of others about music - one called Music Is, another called Our Marching Band. The illustrator, Marjorie Priceman, has written another book that we enjoyed: How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World.

Book of the Week: This is the Farmer

A library find, and a variation of the rhyme "this is the house that Jack built."

It has endearing pictures of farm life, with clear, simple outlines and bold colours. There's only a few words on each page and the text is much larger than I have seen in any other book - it's great for babies and I suspect it would also be good for beginner-readers.

It ticked all of Little E's boxes as it has multiple pictures of cats and dogs, as well as other animals she recognises.

There's a good sneak peak of a number of the pages on the Harper Collins website.

Book of the Week: Old Favourites

 Eli's book of the moment is anything that has flaps to turn, and there are so many of them that it's not worth writing about any one in particular. She is so enamoured with lifting the flap that she now looks for flaps on every book she comes across and seems surprised that not all books have them!

My mention of re-reading in a post last week made me think I should write about the books I re-read the most. I do go through phases where I like some more than others, but here are the main culprits:


1. Anything by Tamora Pierce. I discovered the "Alanna" (officially "The Song of the Lioness") quartet when I was about 10 or 11, at which point she had only written that series and part of the next. She has now published nearly 30 books. She is one of the few authors whose books I will buy without having read them first. They were the first "fantasy" books I read and I still enjoy the genre today. Her slight quirk on the genre is that almost all her protagonists are female. If interested, see www.tamora-pierce.com/about.html - there is a description of each series as well as scene samples.


2. Kate Forsyth's The Witches of Eileanan series. More female driven fantasy, but extremely well written. It draws on myths of medieval witch burning as well as other aspects of the medieval world. When you put it like that it sounds like every other fantasy series around but I promise this one is different!


3. The Harry Potters. Enough said.


4. Enid Blyton. More irregularly these days, but I do still drag them out occasionally. Only really the Famous Fives, as they were what I read as a child. As an adult I've discovered others, including the Adventure series, but haven't enjoyed them as much. Has anyone else discovered that? As a child I knew that the likelihood of a four children winding up on the wrong aeroplane, then in a valley in some random European country, that had some convenient caves for them to sleep in, that just happened to contain long-lost Nazi-stolen treasure, which of course they would help recover was .... remote. But as a child it didn't diminish my enjoyment of the book. Now, sadly, it does.


5. Nick Earls, particularly Zigzag Street, Bachelor Kisses and Perfect Skin. Australian realist, comedic drama.


6. The Babysitters Club. My not-so-secret, guilty pleasure. They are so trashy and even as a child I knew they were not well written. But I still like them enough that, despite having sold the 30 or so I originally owned during a moment of poverty ridden student angst, I recently re-started the collection courtesy of eBay and now own nearly, ahem, 100.

7. David Eddings. The original people-on-horses-trotting-around-medievalish-world-looking-for-magic-stone.

8. The Ramona series by Beverly Cleary. I was stoked to discover a year or so ago that there was a new one I didn't know about as a child. And the "Anastasia" series by Lois Lowry who I think of as the poor cousins to the Ramonas.


10. Laura Ingalls Wilder. When I was in Year 4 our teacher asked for a suggestion for a read-aloud book and I recommended The Long Winter. The rest of the class hated it so much that it was abandoned after a few chapters. I still love them.


11. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series. Akin to Kate Forsyth in that they bridge the gap between fantasy/realism, are beautifully written and unlike any other fantasy out there.


I was going to restrict the list to 10, but didn't quite get there. Here are the almost-made-its in no particular order:


* Anne of Green Gables etc
* Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy et al. Haven't read these in quite some time, but for a while in high school I thought they were the smartest, funniest thing ever written.
* Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series. I have been reading these as a child and there is still one to come!
* John Marsden's Tomorrow series. This possibly should have made the main list. I realised how well I knew them when the movie came out and I could tell which dialogue had been altered and a lot of the time say the original line.
* Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman family books
* Madeleine L'Engle's Austin family and Murry family books. Now I'm thinking about it both these, as well as the Cynthia Voigts should probably be on the main list too, if practically being able to recite parts of them is one of the criteria.


And just to show that I do re-read things other than trash, here are my slightly more literary re-reads:


* Goldengrove Unleaving, Jill Paton Walsh
* Grand Days and Dark Palace, Frank Moorhouse
* Hunting and Gathering, Anna Gavalda
* Captain Correlli's Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
* The Harp in the South and Poor Man's Orange, Ruth Park


The main photo is of "my" bookshelf. When D and I moved in together we did somewhat integrate our books, but so many of them are mine that I still feel that the bookshelf pictured is mine rather than "ours." We joke that now that we live in the suburbs, we have a "library" ...

... complete with little helper, whose latest favourite game is pulling everything off the bottom shelf and ripping into it! One day we will get floor to ceiling bookshelves.


Do you have read read and read again favourites? I would love to hear about them!

Belated Book of the Week: Decision Points

Oooh, an actual grown-up book! We haven't come across any children's books we've enjoyed as much as the first four, so here is one for those over two! 

And a real surprise it was. I will start by saying that it was D's purchase, not mine. Prior to reading this, everything I knew about George W., I disliked. Chronically disliked. I thought that he was an ignorant, inarticulate, lying, redneck buffoon. I knew D felt similarly about him and so was surprised he wanted to read this, although I've always known he's more open minded than me, so perhaps I shouldn't have been! Admittedly this book is an autobiography, so you'd hope that Bush would manage to portray himself favourably, but I was still really surprised, for a number of reasons:

1. The man is not (at least not academically) stupid. He has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a MBA from Harvard. This alone was a revelation to me, given how dumb he often sounded in the media.

2. Many of his domestic policies were ones: a) I had never heard a word about and b) I actually found appealing. He made really significant changes to America's Medicare system by enlarging it to cover prescription drugs. He tried to reform immigration laws so that the millions of people who enter America illegally could apply for temporary visas to work on specific jobs for set lengths of time (the Bill did not pass the Senate).

3. Prior to reading the book, I was very opposed to Bush's approach to stem cell research.  The main thing I knew was that my aunty, an emminent molecular biologist, was appointed to Bush's bioethics council. In 2004, after publicly criticising his policies on stem cell research, he failed to reappoint her, in what the media reported as a political move. It is clear the issue of stem cell research was a very difficult one for Bush. Even if he did later turf my aunty from his committee, (seemingly a few years after deciding on his policy) I was impressed by his discussion of opposing views and the number of opinions he sought before deciding on the policy.


4. I wound up believing him about Iraq. Prior to reading the book I thought that he had used the claim that Iraq had nuclear weapons as an excuse to topple a regime of which America disapproved. However, he was convincing:

"I had been receiving intelligence briefings on Iraq for nearly two years. The conclusion that Saddam had WMD was nearly a universal consensus. My predecessor believed it. Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill believed it. Intelligence agencies in Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, China and Egypt believed it. ... If Saddam doesn't actually have WMD, I asked myself, why on earth would he subject himself to a war he will almost certainly lose?"

He also sought a wide variety of opinions: aside from those which came from official sources he spoke to "scholars, Iraqi dissidents in exile, and others outside the administration." Ultimately it was his description of his reaction upon realising that Iraq did not in fact have WMD:

"Members of the previous administration, John Kerry, John Edwards , and the vast majority of Congress had all read the same intelligence that I had and concluded that Iraq had WMD. So had intelligence agencies around the world. Nobody was lying. We were all wrong. ... No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do."

So, an adult book. Non-fiction at that, and something I hadn't already read dozens of times. I'm still not sure I would have voted for Bush had I known this stuff beforehand. But a pleasant and interesting and clearly and persuasively written surprise. I urge it on Bush supporters and haters alike.