The Giving Tree

      First, let me just point out that Shel Silverstein was one of the scariest-looking people on Earth. Anyway, he could write, though; even if most of his stuff is rather strange. But The Giving Tree(New York: Harper and Row, 1964) is one of the best picture books ever written, I'd say, because of the sacrificial love the tree displays.

     The plot is simple: There is a boy who climbs a tree and eats her apples, swings from her branches, carves messages into the bark of the trunk, etc. Eventually, though, he gets older, and then he carves a girl's name into the trunk, not spending as much time with the tree. This makes the tree lonely, but she still loves the boy. He says that he would like some money, and while the tree doesn't have any(being a tree, obviously), she suggests that the boy gather her apples and sell them in the market. So he climbs into her branches again, "and the tree was happy."
     Then the boy goes away again for a very long time. Then he comes back as a middle-aged man, and asks if the tree can help him get a house. (This doesn't make much sense if you think about it too long.) The tree has a house already - the woods - but she suggests that the boy cut off her branches and make a house out of them. (What kind of house can be made out of chopped-up tree branches, I've always sorta wondered.)
     He stays away for another very long time, returning as an old man seeking to get away from everything. So the tree says that he can cut off most of her trunk to use as a boat, if he wishes. (The picture shows that the trunk gets chopped off at the girl's name he'd marked all those years earlier, leading me to think for a long time that he had gotten married to the girl "Y.L." and then they divorced. But seeing how elderly the man is on writing this review, I think it's more likely that that girl died of some sickness.)
     After another long time, the tree is just a wizened stump, and the boy is now ancient and feeble. The tree apologizes that she has nothing left to give him, but the boy says that he is too old and weak to do anything except sit and rest. So the tree admits that stumps are very good for resting upon. "'Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest.' So the Boy did. And the tree was happy."

     This book can be seen as a great depiction of the tree's selfless love, which is how I usually see it. Other people have complained that the relationship between the tree and the boy is abusive, which I can kind of see, too. The boy never thanks the tree or does anything for her; he just always takes. I guess it just depends on how you wanted to look at it. Either way, this is one of the most influential picture books of the twentieth century.

#Wesley

Late Edition: A Love Story

     My most recent read is Late Edition: A Love Story, by Bob Greene (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2009). In it he recalls the summers of 1964-68, when he worked at his first newspaper, the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen-Journal, during high school. It really is a love story; because of the excitement he had for working in the same building as all these people doing something as simple, and as local, as producing the local newspaper.

     It started on the day JFK was assassinated. No one quite knew what to do, so it seemed just as natural to write about how his high school class reacted to the news. And then he took it down to the C-J offices and dropped off the story at the city editor's desk. They didn't take that story, but he kept pestering folks, and that led the next summer to his first job with the paper, which was as a copyboy, running errands of all types. Nest summer he found a place in the sports department, with led to further adventures. By then he had started college near Chicago, but came back to Columbus the next summer to work for the city department.

     It was at a special week of extra work for the paper's parent company that he realized there was a wider world out there. That week Greene was asked to serve as a copyboy during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which made lots of news for being very acrimonious. He didn't notice; he was running errands for senators and famous TV broadcasters, so he figured they were all like that. But it was there that he realized that there were bigger places to write than the Citizen-Journal, much as he loved it. So he went to the Chicago Sun-Times, then across town to the Chicago Tribune. And then books came, a column in Esquire magazine, and a freelance spot reporting for ABC News. Computers entered the scene, and then changed the landscape completely. Gone are the Linotype operators, or scissors necessary for physically cutting the copy to rearrange the paragraph structure. There are no more typewriters making that wonderfully noisy clacking noise. And it's rare that people will read an actual newspaper any longer. Which is really sad. But here Greene does a wonderful job of recapturing that world of that newsroom, and the public's attitude and assurance that they would be here forever. There was a romance to that time, like the way he describes assuming that everyone always read at least one paper a day, usually more. It would have been nice to live in that world, I think.

#Wesley

Island of the Blue Dolphins

    Sometimes when you're sick, your brain turns to mush. So, you pick up the nearest piece of paper and curl  in a ball to wait it out. Anyway that was me last week, and Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O'Dell, was the nearest piece of paper. It's the perfect sick book, all about a native american girl who's tribe decided to leave their land -- island, I guess-- accidentally leaving her behind to fend for herself, and have a bunch of adventures. She befriends a wild dog, fights an octopus, and makes a skirt out of crow feathers. I think I read it in like six hours. Overall a fun, quick read. I really loved this book, sorry for the lame review.  

*Courtney