Books we've been reading

Take Care, Good Knight by Shelley Moore Thomas - Oh my goodness, these stories are the cutest.  Featuring a knight who is a little exasperated by the three little dragons he keeps encountering, but who is a good knight, so keeps patiently helping the dragons.  In this case the three dragons promise to take care of the old, old wizard's cats, but they can't read his instructions, so they end up putting the poor felines in some ridiculous situations before the knight comes to help them read.  This story (and the related ones) has a nice repetitive story structure that particularly appealed to Joseph, who memorized a lot of it.

The Runaway Tortilla by Eric Kimmel - The illustrations are a little quirky on this one, but the storyline - a southwestern version of the gingerbread man - proved really popular here.  The boys were particularly fascinated by how the hungry coyote lied and the foolish tortilla trusted him and got eaten.  Joseph requested this one daily for weeks.

The Not-So-Quiet Library by Zachariah O'Hara - Malcolm wasn't so sure what to make of this book when he first got it for his birthday, but he soon came to love it.  Features a character named Oskar and his brother (who is also a bear) named Theodore, their dad who likes donuts, the library, and a five-headed monster that likes to eat books.

Anything Star Wars related (but not Rebels, which Mike and I pretty much reject out of hand), including this graphic novel version of the original trilogy.  I have never gotten into graphic novels, but read a good review of this one and it turned out to be a great find.  (For all my beefs with Disney, they keep knocking it out of the park on children's books lately.)  It keeps a lot of the movie dialogue while cutting out extraneous bits, and makes an effort to keep with the iconic images from the movies while still being styled and modern-seeming.  Michael and Malcolm pored over the words, while Joseph was able to notice the distinction between Darth Vader's black text boxes and ghost-Obi-Wan's blue text boxes.  Really nicely done.  We also really liked the audio book versions of the original trilogy, featuring the original radio broadcast voices and music from the movies.