The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco

I should really know better than to read a kid's book by now.  I'm not the target audience for them, and having never read them before, there's no sense of nostalgia when reading them now.  I know I'm not going to get the kinds of things I'm looking for in a story.

With all that being said, this book really isn't that bad.  It never tries to do anything that it can't accomplish.  There's no pretend drama, like in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Nor is it complete random like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  This is a just a nice, simple, cute story of a stuffed rabbit and the little boy who owns him.  Nursery magic is in full effect here, as are the feelings of children toward their favorite stuffed animals.

I would somewhat recommend this book.

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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

This is two books for the price of one!  Actually, it's two books for the price of none.  That's great value!

Both of these books are about some bad-ass kids.  Kids who seem to have an unhealthy obsession with dead animals.  Tom Sawyer is a shorter and lighter read.  Huckleberry Finn is harder to read, but much more illustrative of life in pre-Civil War America.  One of the things I found most amusing in these books was reading about the superstitions of all the characters.  It's funny what some people believed back then.  I'm sure the same thing could be said for modern superstitions, but I found nearly all of them to be way out there.

Tom Sawyer is written in the third person and is, as one would expect, all about the adventures of its title character.  I found Tom to be quite a likable child.  Sure, he's a bad-ass kid, but he still has a certain innocence about him.  He's also got a very quick wit and a very active imagination, which makes him more endearing.  His adventures range from trivial and strictly imaginative, to quite heavy with large implications for other people.  The book made me question several times how he would handle the mess he got himself into and stayed enjoyable to the end.

Huckleberry Finn is written in the first person, from Huck's perspective.  Huck's language isn't as easy to read as the narrator in Tom Sawyer (identified in this book as Mark Twain, himself).  I feel like Twain also paid more attention to the regional dialects of the characters.  As a result, some of the characters' speech is somewhat hard to follow.  That doesn't prevent the book from being enjoyable, however.

I should point out that I was forced to read Huck Finn during my sophomore year of high school.  As with all assigned reading back then, I resented it, and didn't care for anything that I read.  Huck Finn was far from the worst assigned reading, but I don't remember enjoying it either.  As a matter of fact, I didn't remember much of anything about it at all.  That probably helped me enjoy it this time around (as if I were reading it for the first time).

Huck Finn starts off where Tom Sawyer left off.  It's more than just Huck's adventures, though.  It is also about his thoughts.  He was born into a society where slaves were owned and blacks were thought of as inferior people.  These are views shared by Huck.  This causes an internal conflict when he begins his adventure down the Mississippi with a runaway slave.  He feels bad for helping the man escape, yet doesn't have the heart to turn him in.  I found it interesting how Huck handled all the situations he found himself in during his journey.

I do want to point out that I think some sections of Huckleberry Finn were missing.  There were a couple of places that had very strange transitions.  After each one, I became very confused and had to read and re-read the sections following the transition, as well as the transitions themselves to try and make sense of them (and I still couldn't).  This is most likely a result of when the books were transcribed for the (free) Kindle edition of the book.

These books are recommended.

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

This is the classic story of the headless horseman.  Or, I thought it was, anyway.  He only shows up on a few pages during the whole thing.  Instead, this book spends way too much time setting up the scenery and the setting that it forgets to get to any plot.  I zoned out countless times while reading the long-winded paragraphs.  I usually only do that for a book that's particularly hard to read.  This wasn't hard to read, just boring.

Save your time, don't bother reading this book.

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The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

I'm just going to go out and say it.  I like the movie better than the book.  Before you get all stabby on me, let me explain.

Don't get me wrong, the book is okay, for a kids' book, anyway.  But there's just something about Dorothy's adventures wearing the witch's silver slippers that just didn't inspire me.  Yes, in the book, the slippers are actually silver.  That's not why I didn't enjoy it, though.  Even though Dorothy and her friends encountered loads of problems along their quest, there was never one that wasn't solved by the first thing they tried within just a few paragraphs.  There was no tension or anything.  It kinda bored me.  Now, I haven't seen the movie in a very long time, but I seem to remember a bit more drama, and tension in it.

If you're interested in reading this, by all means give it a go, otherwise, I'd recommend giving it a pass.