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"A baby needs not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to the world."
- G. K. Chesterton
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How Many Miles to Babylon?
We left Egypt some time ago and I am now looking through books on Babylon, Assyria, and other Near Eastern Empires. So far I haven't found as friendly of a guide as I did for Egypt, so I still find the history a dreadful muddle. Perhaps it just was a dreadful muddle, with multiple interconnected empires all conquering and being conquered.
The library happened to be displaying The Epic of Gilgamesh (apparently it's connected to the Lost TV show in some way), and seeing it was much shorter than I would have feared, I took it home and found it hard to put down. Now I'm waiting to check out a children's version, but the library doesn't have it available yet.
One picture book on Babylon that I did find was Ishtar and Tammuz, by Christopher Moore, which tells a suitable-for-children version of an ancient legend about the seasons. I haven't quite defined what I look for in a book that tells stories of the ancient gods, but this book has it: a feeling of distance, I suppose, that this is a story people told long ago but we need not take it too terribly seriously. It would be a good fall book. I don't want to read it to D1 until she has a better understanding of the difference between fact and myth, but I would have no trouble reading to a five or six year old.
I've discovered that many of the best picture books are not kept, at least by my library, over in the general picture book section. The non-fiction section has most of the children's folk tales, myths and legends, and poetry. We've found two other lovely books there lately. One is A Midsummer's Night's Dream, by Bruce Coville, with utterly magical pictures and a lovely retelling. Everyone, from D1 to passing visitors, has been unable to resist it. (And now, looking at the Amazon links, I see the author has done several other Shakespearean books. We shall have to look for them.)
The other is The Shepherd's Song, the 23rd Psalm done with pictures by Julia Miner, of a family of shepherds caring for their sheep. D1 wants to hear this one over and over.
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Posted: 2:21 PM, Oct. 22, 2006 |
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