Biblio Beau

Friday, November 27, 2009

132. George, Jean Craighead. My Side of the Mountain. 177 pages. 11.26.09.

My Side of the Mountain is a young adult classic which chronicles a year in the life of Sam Gribbley. Sam leaves his overcrowded home in New York City to seek out the farmland of his ancestors, and learns to survive on the land in the company of a cast of wild creatures. My Side of the Mountain serves as a guidebook at times, as Sam informs his readers what plants are edible, how to make a bed, and how he manages to make leather for his deerskin suit. It is a charming story for young children.

As an adult reading the novel to my toddler I have one problem - comma splices. Oh, the comma splices! I am not a grammarian by any stretch of the imagination, but the errors in George's novel make it very difficult to read out loud.

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Favorite Quotes

"To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not of teaching [...]. But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission..." - Oscar Wilde, "Letter to the Pall Mall Gazette on the Subject of 'The Best Hundred Books'" (qtd. Wright, Built of Books, 317).

"I wish you joy o'th' worm" - Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.270.

"The world must be peopled!" - Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

"That a man who has sons brings up chickens for his own table ... whereas daughters are chickens brought up for the tables of other men." - Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (77).

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

And then there is more Oscar Wilde:

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit." - The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal." - Personal Impressions of America

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint." - "The Children of the Poets", The Pall Mall Gazette

"There is no sin except stupidity." - The Critic as Artist

"One should always be a little improbable." - "Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young"

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - The Importance of Being Earnest

"Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance."
--- A.E. Newton