Each week we assemble a collection – a bouquet, if you will – of books you can read for yourself, or use to build into a display in your library. And each week, we tend to go to a random word generator to find words that would be interesting to explore.
As always, the books we link to have info from Amazon.com. If you click a link, and then buy anything at all from Amazon, we get a small percent of their profits from your sale. Yay!!! Thanks!!! We really appreciate the assistance!
This week we look at books about fish, and books with fish on the cover. We are considering bringing in fish to be companions in the CMLE office; so if you have suggestions on good names, send them to us!
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, by Dr. Seuss
Well, this is a classic and an obvious choice. ” “From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere” . . . So begins this classic Beginner Book by Dr. Seuss. Beginning with just five fish and continuing into flights of fancy, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish celebrates how much fun imagination can be. From the can-opening Zans to the boxing Gox to the winking Yink who drinks pink ink, the silly rhymes and colorful cast of characters create an entertaining approach to reading that will have every child giggling from morning to night: “Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.””
A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberg
I’ve been interested in these fish ever since I read about them being rediscovered – so cool to know that there are still so many mysteries out there for us to discover! “The coelacanth (see-lo-canth) is no ordinary fish. Five feet long, with luminescent eyes and limb like fins, this bizarre creature, presumed to be extinct, was discovered in 1938 by an amateur icthyologist who recognized it from fossils dating back 400 million years. The discovery was immediately dubbed the “greatest scientific find of the century,” but the excitement that ensued was even more incredible. This is the entrancing story of that most rare and precious fish — our own great-uncle forty million times removed.”
Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish, by John Hargrove
Yes, they are not fish; but they eat fish, so… they count for this list. “In Beneath the Surface, Hargrove paints a compelling portrait of these highly intelligent and social creatures, including his favorite whales Takara and her mother Kasatka, two of the most dominant orcas in SeaWorld. And he includes vibrant descriptions of the lives of orcas in the wild, contrasting their freedom in the ocean with their lives in SeaWorld.”
Flush, by Carl Hiaasen
I love Hiaasen books! And if his latest ones are more mellow, and less high-edge-crazy, well that probably means he’s living a happier life. ” Noah’s dad is sure that the owner of the Coral Queen casino boat is flushing raw sewage into the harbor—which has made taking a dip at the local beach like swimming in a toilet. He can’t prove it though, and so he decides that sinking the boat will make an effective statement. Right. The boat is pumped out and back in business within days and Noah’s dad is in the local lock-up. Now Noah is determined to succeed where his dad failed. He will prove that the Coral Queen is dumping illegally . . . somehow. “
In the Heart of the Sea : The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick
Okay, yes – this one is cheating too; whales are not fish. But that cover is very dramatic! ” In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an angry sperm whale, leaving the desperate crew to drift for more than ninety days in three tiny boats. Nathaniel Philbrick uses little-known documents and vivid details about the Nantucket whaling tradition to reveal the chilling facts of this infamous maritime disaster.”
Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan
“Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled.
Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.”