Book list - May 10

The Off-Islanders - fiction, by Nathaniel Benchley *
Baby Island - children's, by Carol Ryrie Brink
Whales on Stilts - children's SF, by M T Anderson
Anne of Green Gables - children's, by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Don Quixote, USA - fiction, by Richard Powell *
The Sixty-Eight Rooms - YA, by Marianne Malone
Granny was a Buffer Girl - YA, by Berlie Doherty (Carnegie Medal, 1986)
Knight Crusader - children's historical fiction, by Ronald Welch (Felton Ronald Oliver) (Carnegie Medal, 1954)
Official Secret - WW II memoirs, by Clayton Hutton *
Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life - palaeontology, by Scott D Sampson
Men, Martians and Machines - SF (short stories), by Eric Frank Russell *
Dear Nobody - YA, by Berlie Doherty (Carnegie Medal, 1991)
Mystery of the Old Barn - children's mystery, by Mary Urmston *
Of Mice and Men - fiction, by John Steinbeck
In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language - language, by Arika Okrent
The Death Collector - YA historical/SF, by Justin Richards
We Were Pirates: A Torpedoman's Pacific War - WW II, by Robert Schultz and James Shell


17 books last month, with five rereads (marked by asterisks). To reach my goal of 210 books this year, I have to average 17.5 per month, so I'm currently still a bit ahead of track.

Strictly speaking, Don Quixote, USA wasn't a reread; the book was one of the five selections in Reader's Digest Condensed Books volume 67 (Autumn 1966), and that was what I read before.

The Off-Islanders was the book on which the movie The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming was based. I'd forgotten how funny it was - the film was quite different, of course, but in this case they're equally enjoyable. (I still think Alan Arkin should have gotten the Oscar for his role as Lt Rozanov; he was beaten by Paul Scofield, who played Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.)

The three Carnegie Medal winners bring me up to 38 of 70 (with number 71 to be announced later this month). My thanks to the John P Webster Library, West Hartford CT; the Woodbridge Town Library, Woodbridge CT; and the Connecticut State Library Service Centre, Willimantic CT, for the ILLs.