"The book opens and closes with a picture of little Sal and her mother in the kitchen, the mother is canning blueberries... One sees in this opening picture Sal entertaining herself by placing the canning rings on her wrist and a spoon, a simple childlike act which helps to set the stage for Sal''s obvious child actions throughout the books. This is not to be the overly diligent or angelic girl of so many other books, Sal is a real child figure. She gets into mischief and causes her mom no end of trouble.” Little Sal''s Mother takes her to Blueberry Hill to pick berries. Sal drops three berries in her bucket, then eats them. This continues as she and her mother concentrate on the berries and gradually get separated on the hill. What they don''t realize is that a mother bear and her cub have also come to Blueberry Hill to eat berries for the winter. The book uses a number of visual and verbal techniques to compare and contrast the bear and the human families. Both families pictures are similar in compositions, but they head in opposite directions when they reach the blueberry patch. Little Sal’s Mother tells her that they can’t eat all the berries because they need to save them to can for the winter, but the bear mother tells her child to eat as much as it can to store up fat for winter. The bear''s way of preparing for winter is more natural for Sal who soon wanders off to eat. Sal and the bear cub get mixed up and follow after the wrong mother. It takes the mothers several minutes to realize they''re being followed by the wrong child; it isn''t until the bear cub tries to eat from Sal''s mother''s bucket and the mother bear hears the "ku-plink, ku-plank, ku-plunk" sound of Sal dropping blueberries into her tin pail that they realize what happened. Ultimately each child is reunited with its proper mother and they both leave the hill. Just before leaving Sal drops a blueberry into her empty pail. The end papers show Sal again playing in the kitchen while her mother cans berries.

Blueberries for Sal

One month before his thirteenth birthday, Jeremy Fink and his best friend Lizzy Muldoun are hanging out in his New York City apartment when the mailman delivers a package addressed to Jeremy''s mom. Lizzy convinces him to open the package. Inside the package they discover a wooden box with four keyholes and the words, "THE MEANING OF LIFE: FOR JEREMY FINK TO OPEN ON HIS 13TH BIRTHDAY." Jeremy immediately recognizes the box as the work of his father, who died five years earlier in a car crash. An accompanying note explains that the friend taking care of the box lost all of the keys. Determined to open the box, Jeremy and Lizzy contact a locksmith who explains that he is unable to pick the locks or break the box open without destroying the box and possibly its contents. The two friends set a goal to find the keys by the end of the summer so Jeremy can still open the box on his thirteenth birthday. Lizzy''s impulsiveness gets the duo into trouble for destroying property and they must spend the summer performing community service. Jeremy and Lizzy are assigned to work for Mr. Oswald, an antique dealer preparing to retire to Florida, who sends them to deliver some special antiques. Once the first house is reached, the children realize they are returning items to the original owners, people who pawned these items when only teenagers. Each item is being returned with the original letter stating why the owner chose to pawn the item. The people Jeremy meets help him learn important lessons about life by sharing their views. While doing community service they must find all of the keys they can, continuously worrying about the performance they must do at a fair due to losing a bet to Jeremy''s grandmother. It is only in the end that Jeremy truly understands the meaning of life.

Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

The story starts with the twins Pat and Isabel O''Sullivan looking forward to enjoying their first summer term at St. Clare''s. Their mother is happy to see them looking forward to school. One day, they go to play tennis with a friend, and meet a girl who has mumps. The twins, to their dismay, are put in quarantine, and are not allowed to go back to school at the beginning of the term. When they arrive back the following week, they are heartily welcomed by their friends. Five new girls have joined their form. There is an American girl called Sadie, who is obviously quite rich and elegant. The twins discover that their cousin Alison has already made friends with her. There is a wild-looking girl called Carlotta, who is half Spanish. There is a naughty but very likeable girl Bobby (Roberta), who quickly becomes friends with Janet. There is another girl called Prudence, who is quite pretty but has no sense of humour. The last new girl is Pam, who is very hard working but also very shy. The girls soon discover that Miss Roberts is on the war path. She is the first form head and is determined that her girls should do well and be promoted in next form. The twins also get to know the new girls. Prudence turns out to be nasty, spiteful, and dishonest. She takes a strong dislike to Carlotta, and discovers that Carlotta once belonged to a circus. She reveals Carlotta''s secret to the other girls, hoping it will make them despise her, but it only serves to make Carlotta even more popular. Prudence also manipulates the shy Pam under the false disguise of a friendship. As a result, Pam is initially disliked by all of the girls except Carlotta and Isabel, who take pity on her when they realise that she is afraid to tackle Prudence as she does not want to be on her own. Encouraged by the two older girls, Pam eventually stands up to Prudence and ends their forced friendship, becoming friends with Carlotta instead. Bobby initially doesn''t seem to care for anything or anyone until Miss Theobald tells her that she is cheating her parents badly. After learning this, Bobby starts working hard, too, though she occasionally plays tricks. The American girl, Sadie, is like Alison, always caring about her looks. She also hates sports and all outdoor activities (although, unlike Alison, she actually enjoys swimming). However, she is good tempered and laughs at being teased. The girls soon find out that Sadie is an heiress. Sadie''s father died and left a will giving away all his money to his sisters, but Sadie''s mother won it back through lawsuits. During the term, while Prudence is spying on Carlotta, Sadie is kidnapped, and Carlotta - who finds her tied up, gagged and blindfolded in the back seat of a motor car - goes after her, and stages a fake road accident, during which she manages to rescue her with the help of her circus'' friends. The term ends happily for most, with Prudence leaving because everyone hates her for her part in Sadie''s kidnap (she could have alerted Sadie to the fact that she was in danger when she and Pam met a strange man lurking around the school entrance but was too busy trying to get Carlotta into trouble to realise this, and ignored Pam''s warning to report the man to Miss Theobald), Sadie herself bouncing back strongly from her kidnapping ordeal and preparing to go back to America, and the other girls looking forward to going into second year except Prudence, who is leaving.

Summer Term at St. Clare''s

The story is narrated entirely in the first person by the sick and aging Father Urrutia. Taking place over the course of a single evening, and written mostly in a single paragraph, the book is the macabre, feverish monologue of a flawed man and a failed priest. Persistently hallucinatory and defensive, the story ranges from Opus Dei to falconry to private lessons on Marxism for Pinochet and his generals directed at the unspecified reproaches of "the wizened youth." The story begins with the lines "I am dying now, but I still have many things to say", and proceeds to describe, after a brief mention of joining the priesthood, how Father Urrutia entered the Chilean literary world under the wing of a famous, albeit fictitious, tacitly homosexual literary critic by the name of Farewell. At Farewell''s estate he encounters the critic''s close friend Pablo Neruda and later begins to publish literary criticism and poetry. Not surprisingly, Urrutia''s criticism is met with more applaud than his poetry (written under a pen-name) and there is little if any mention of Urrutia attending to matters of the church until two individuals from a shipping company (likely undercover government operatives) send him on a trip through Europe, where he meets priest after priest engaged in falconry, where we see his one act of rebellion, when he releases a caged falcon after the priest that owned him died. The story is also deeply political though not always overtly, and Father Urrutia seems to stand as a kind of pitiable villain for the author himself. Urrutia is chosen to teach Augusto Pinochet and his top generals about Marxism after the coup and death of President Allende. Bolaño was well known for his brazenly radical left-wing politics and was briefly jailed by Pinochet for dissent on returning to Chile in 1973, "To help build the revolution." Indeed, the wizened youth who Urrutia is forever lashing against and defending himself from, seems to be yet another trace of Roberto Bolaño inscribing himself into his stories, while also serving as a younger Urrutia who has not compromised himself as the current narrator himself has, suggesting that Urrutia has understood since his first words to the reader that he is compromised. By the end of the story, Urrutia seems to be making a last apology directed to himself, understanding that the reason by which he has led his life is flawed. Unlike other fantastical deathbed rants such as William Gaddis''s Agapē Agape the writing style is remarkably accessible despite itself and the story of his life intact as it is woven into Chile''s political history despite progressively more delirious and compromised powers of recollection. Francisco Goldman describes it as "Sublime lunacy, Goya darkness, poignant wizardly writing--the elegantly streaming consciousness of Bolaño''s dying literary priest merges one Chilean''s personal memories with Chilean literature and history, and ends up confronting us with devastating questions that anyone, anywhere, might, should, be asking of themselves ''right now.''" The novella, a satire, marks the beginning of its author''s criticism of artists who retreat into art, using aestheticism as a way of blocking out the harsh realities of existence. According to Ben Richards, writing in The Guardian, "Bolaño uses this to illustrate the supine nature of the Chilean literary establishment under the dictatorship."

By Night In Chile

As the story starts off, a young boy, who used to adore Christmas, hears a train whistle roar. To his astonishment, he finds the train is waiting for him. He sees a conductor who then proceeds to look up at his window. He runs downstairs. He opens the door. The conductor asks him “Well? Are you coming?”. He asks, "Where?" and the conductor replies "Why, to the North Pole, of course!" The boy then boards the train, which is filled with chocolate and candy, as well as many other children in their pajamas. As the train reaches the North Pole, the boy and the other children see thousands of Christmas elves gathered at the center of town waiting to send Santa Claus on his way. The boy is handpicked by Santa to receive the first gift of Christmas. Realizing that he could choose anything in the world, the boy asks for one bell from one of the reindeer''s harnesses. The boy places the bell in the pocket of his robe and all the children watch as Santa takes off into the night for his annual deliveries. Later, on the train ride home, the boy discovers that the bell has fallen through a hole in his pocket. The boy arrives home and goes to his bedroom as the train pulls away. On Christmas morning, his sister finds a small package for the boy under the tree, behind all of the other gifts. The boy opens the box and discovers that it is the bell, delivered by Santa who found it on the seat of his sleigh. When the boy rings the bell, both he and his sister marvel at the beautiful sound. His parents, however, are unable to hear the bell and remark that it must be broken. The book ends with a famous quote, also promoted to the film based on it:

The Polar Express

The story opens with a passage from Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. The story is a satirical look at a dystopian future in which time is strictly regulated and everyone must do everything according to an extremely precise time schedule. In this future, being late is not merely an inconvenience, but a crime. The crime carries a hefty penalty in that a proportionate amount of time is "revoked" from one''s life. The ultimate consequence is to run out of time and be "turned off". This is done by the Master Timekeeper, or "Ticktockman", who utilizes a device called a "cardioplate" to stop a person''s heart once his time has run out. The story focuses on a man named Everett C. Marm who, disguised as the anarchical Harlequin, engages in whimsical rebellion against the Ticktockman. Everett is in a relationship with a girl named pretty Alice, who is exasperated by the fact that he is never on time. The Harlequin disrupts the carefully kept schedule of his society with methods such as distracting factory workers from their tasks by showering them with thousands of multicolored jelly beans or simply using a bullhorn to publicly encourage people to ignore their schedules, forcing the Ticktockman to pull people off their normal jobs to hunt for him. Eventually, the Harlequin is captured. The Ticktockman tells him that pretty Alice has betrayed him, wanting to return to the punctual society everyone else lives in. The Harlequin sneers at the Ticktockman''s command for him to repent. The Ticktockman decides not to stop the Harlequin''s heart, and instead sends him to a place called Coventry, where he is converted in a manner similar to how Winston Smith is converted in George Orwell''s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The brainwashed Harlequin reappears in public and announces that he was wrong before, and that it is always good to be on time. At the end, one of the Ticktockman''s subordinates tells the Ticktockman that he is three minutes behind schedule. The Ticktockman walks away to his office "going mrmee, mrmee, mrmee, mrmee".

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

Martine is left an orphan after her parents die in a fire in England; she is shipped off from England to live at an animal reserve in South Africa with her grandmother Gwyn Thomas, whom she has never met before. There she meets Tendai, a local worker on the game reserve with Martine''s grandmother. Tendai takes Martine to his aunt named Grace, and she tells Martine that she has "the gift." When Martine has started to get used to her new home, she hears a local legend about a mythical white giraffe. Although no one sees it, the giraffe is rumored to leave footprints where it visits at night. Gwyn Thomas insists that the white giraffe is nothing more than a creature of legend, even though everyone else believes in it. Martine is startled, one stormy night, to see the white giraffe outside Gwyn''s home. After some time, Martine feels courageous enough to start looking for the white giraffe at midnight. When Martine is almost bitten by a deadly cape cobra in her search, the white giraffe, who she calls Jemmy, saves her. A few nights later Martine is with Jemmy in the wildlife reserve and hears two poachers discussing the giraffe. One of them spots her, and Martine, for the first time, rides on Jemmy to get away. Several nights later, she decides to go back to Jemmy’s secret cave. Inside, she meets Grace. Grace is a sangoma, a woman skilled at healing, and she tells Martine the full story about the ancient cave. Grace also gave Martine a bag of vials, which are used for healing. The next morning, Gwyn Thomas tells Martine that the white giraffe has been stolen by poachers. They suspect that Jemmy is on a ship, and race to the docks to try and find him. While searching for Jemmy, Martine meets Ben, a (mostly) silent boyfrom her class. She quickly explains to him what happened, and he agrees to help. Ben thinks that Jemmy is held captive in the cargo hold of the ship his father is captain of. They find Jemmy wounded in the cargo hold, and Martine heals him with Grace''s medicines. Then they ride off back to the game reserve, where the police capture the poachers.

The White Giraffe

Lord Dismiss Us is set in an English boys'' public school in the 1960s. The novel deals with the love affair between two boys, together with the internal politics of the school itself. Carleton, a sixth former loves Allen, a boy two years his junior. At the same time the headmaster is trying to enforce a policy against such liaisons. At the time of writing it was a contemporaneous work. As such it now depicts a school at a period in history. It was published in the same year that homosexuality between consenting adults was legalised in the UK. The author, Michael Mussen Campbell, b. 1924, was the grandson of the 1st Lord Glenavy and brother of the 3rd Baron, the humorist Patrick Campbell. He was a Dubliner who attended St Columba''s school and Trinity College. Lord Dismiss Us was apparently based on the suicide of a St. Columba’s schoolmaster. Briefly a barrister at the Irish bar, Campbell worked in London for the Irish Times. His other novels included Peter Perry (1956), a ‘story of Dublin Theatrical Life’, and Oh Mary, This London (1959), a fantasy set in London, and Across the Water (1959). Michael Campbell succeeded his brother Patrick in 1980 to become the 4th and last Lord Glenavy. He never married, dying in 1984.

Lord Dismiss Us

Originally, Drake is a professional musician, with minor celebrity. When his wife Ana is diagnosed with an unspecified incurable brain disorder, Drake exhausts every option attempting to cure her. Only then does he decide to have her body cryogenically stored, in the hopes future generations will discover effective treatment. However, Drake is extremely cautious, and in case the future culture doesn''t care about her plight, he has himself frozen as well. Furthermore he devotes all his energies for a decade prior to his freezing, in becoming an expert primary source on the musically notable people of his era. Assuming that if you become the world''s foremost expert in any subject, and given infinite time, someone will want to write a book on that exact subject. At that time the hypothetical future writer will want to awaken Drake, and he can in turn awaken his wife, if treatment is available. Drake''s thinking is correct and he is awakened in the year 2500. Although society is vastly different, there still exists no cure for Ana. He spends six years apprenticed to a musical historian to pay for his reviving costs and to gain a foothold in this new world. Drake is continuously laid dormant and revived, exponentially further into the future. Human civilization alters radically over the eons, but Ana''s mangled brain proves an extremely difficult problem. Despite the incomprehensible changes surrounding in each successive awakening, Drake never loses sight of his mission. Eventually, in the extremely remote post-human future few billions years later, Drake''s original biological body has disintegrated, despite the cryogenic treatment, and he has become an uploaded consciousness, though still in stasis. At this point the descendants of humanity have colonized the entire milky way galaxy, yet an inexplicable threat is wiping out their colonies in a widening arc. The leaders of this civilization have exhausted every answer they can conceive of, and have zero information as to the even the cause of the threat. Their last hope is Drake, an ancient holdover, who may have ideas new to them - namely war. The main problem is that the beings have no idea what is happening as the planets that are wiped out seem exactly the same, but do not respond to signals and outside communication is impossible. All probes sent do not return, nor reply once they reach the surface of the planet. Drake becomes the commander of the residents of the galaxy, in designing weapons and defenses, ideas that have long vanished from the minds of these beings. At this time, their technology allows for extremely powerful and deep manipulation of matter at a fundamental scale. An experimental technology called caesura is used as the plot-device to carry the novel. It is a means of instantaneous teleportation using exotic physics, which has by now developed to a stage where it will have no meaning to the causal being. This caesura is not guaranteed teleportation but has a low chance of succeeding. Billions upon billions of copies of Drake are thus sent out to the planets on the border of the invasion, and by means of caesura are teleported back to the base to collect information about the threat. Eventually it is discovered that the threat is an exotic inter-planetary plant-type life with spores that migrate between systems. These plants do not intentionally destroy the living beings on the planet, but as a result of their growth they do so. After the cause of the problem is found, the post-humans decide that the militant Drake is no longer needed or deemed a positive influence - he is seen as too warlike. They tell him to merge with all the returning Drake copies, of which there are billions. This he agrees to, and over billions of years, he collates these copies together - forming a collective-mind of copies of himself. There is a subplot of a version of him that was randomly teleported by the caesura to a distant galaxy, and how he manages to return over a few billion years. Finally, the collective version of Drake resolves to use the Omega Point to gain complete knowledge of everything and to restore Ana. The story ends on an ambiguous note as Ana is potentially revived, and they seek to create a new universe by means of caesura to live in.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Estri, the Well-Keepress of Astria and High Couch of Silistra, the highest office in the land, has continued her quest to locate her god-like "Shaper" father to his home planet, Mi''ysten, where she is tested and shown to have inherited his powers. Following further training in the ability to manipulate time and probabilities with her mind, Estri is abruptly returned to Silistra after an absence of two local years. Many changes have taken place in the power vacuum her absence left and Estri must conquer her immediate captor, Chayin, Cahndor of the violent Parset desert tribes, in order to continue her quest to save the Silistran people who are dying out from infertility. The Parset tribes cultivate and grow the plants from which the costly longevity drugs sold throughout the Bipedal Federation are made. Renegade members of the Bipedal Federation offer proscribed hi-tech weapons to leaders of the warring tribes in exchange for exclusive access to the longevity drugs, assuring that tribe’s domination of the rest. Chayin rejects their offer, knowing it will end in the destruction of his people from greed and power. The BF keeps counting on at least one tribal leader''s greed to eventually agree to accept their offer, allowing one tribe to conquer all others with off-world weapons. Estri and Chayin must find Sereth, former Slayer of Estri''s home who aided her in beginning her quest and was made outcast afterward (because Estri disappeared under his protection). Estri, Chayin and Sereth must join in a triad, forging a bond created by their innate powers and intense love to assure the future of the planet. After they defeat Chayin''s various tribal opponents, they conquer Estri''s enemy of hundreds of years, her father''s grandson, Raet, and hope they can have a respite from tribulation. However, Khys, the semi-mythical, usurper overlord of the planet, abducts the triad to his sacred city and binds Estri with a device that suppresses her powers and causes her to lose her memory. With Estri in his control, he elevates Chayin to be his puppet overlord of all the Parset, but leaves active Chayin’s own in-born powers that may drive him insane. Khys forces Sereth into the role of a “trusted” vassal who remembers everything about Estri, Chayin and their pasts. Helpless before his power, Chayin and Sereth cannot stop Khys from impregnating an unsuspecting Estri to take advantage of her "Shaper" genetics. Khys gloats, triumphant in assuring himself a powerful and gifted heir, while believing no being in the universe is powerful enough to deny him what he truly desires: return of the technology that nearly destroyed the planet and forced the population underground into "hides" until their world recovered enough from the devastation to support life again. For a time, he’s correct.

The Golden Sword

The story is of three sisters, of whom the youngest is chosen by Tsar Saltan (Saltán) to be his wife, while he makes the other two his royal cook and royal weaver. They are jealous, of course, and when the tsar goes off to war, and in his absence the tsaritsa gives birth to a son, Prince Gvidon (Gvidón), they arrange to have her and her child sealed up in a barrel and thrown into the sea. The sea itself takes pity on them, and they are cast up on the shore of a remote island, Buyan. The son, having quickly grown while in the barrel, goes hunting. He ends up saving an enchanted swan from a kite. The swan creates a city for Prince Gvidon to rule, but he is homesick, and the swan turns him into a mosquito. In this guise, he visits Tsar Saltan''s court, where he stings his aunt in the eye and escapes. Back in his distant realm, the swan gives Gvidon a magical squirrel. But he continues to pine for home, so the swan transforms him into a fly. In this guise, Prince Gvidon visit''s Saltan''s court again and he stings his older aunt in the eye. The third time, the Prince is transformed into a bumblebee and stings the nose of his grandmother. In the end, he expresses a desire for a bride instead of his old home, at which point the swan is revealed to be a beautiful princess, whom he marries. He is visited by the Tsar, who is overjoyed to find his wife and newly-married son.

The Tale of Tsar Saltan

The action starts in Sacramento in 1867. The Cascabels are a French family of circus artists who spent several years touring the United States and plan to return home. Their savings get stolen so the family cannot afford the ship ticket. Instead, César Cascabel decides to travel overland, via Alaska and Bering Straits, through Siberia and Central Russia with their horse drawn Carriage, the Belle-Roulotte (the Fair Rambler). They don''t expect dangers to happen. On their way, they rescue at the Alaskan border, with the help of native girl Kayette, a Russian political fugitive, count Narkine, whom they bring along so that he can see again his father in Russia. Count Narkine adopts Kayette as his daughter. In Sitka, the group witnesses the transfer of Alaska to the United States. On their way from Port Clarence the travellers unfortunately end up on a floating iceberg that drifts to the Lyakhovsky Islands in Arctic Ocean. There they are captured by the natives. Other troubles, including political ones, occur but Cascabels manage to get through Ural to Perm and then, easily, to France. An animated TV series inspired by the book was produced in 2001 in France. <gallery> Image:''César Cascabel'' by George Roux 03.jpg|Map of route through Alaska Image:''César Cascabel'' by George Roux 39.jpg|Map of route through Russia </gallery>

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Blueberries for Sal

By Robert McCloskey

Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

By Wendy Mass

Summer Term at St. Clare's

By Enid Blyton

By Night In Chile

By Roberto Bolaño

The Polar Express

By Chris Van Allsburg

"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman

By Harlan Ellison

The White Giraffe

No Author Listed

Lord Dismiss Us

By Michael Campbell

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

By Charles Sheffield

The Golden Sword

By Janet Morris

The Tale of Tsar Saltan

By Aleksandr Pushkin

César Cascabel

By Jules Verne