Readers Books

Bravo! This book should be in every teacher's professional library! The world we live in today exposes children to the many ugly sides of humanity. Too often the people they look up to and aspire to become are not worthy of their devotion. Dennis Deneberg and Lorraine Roscoe have presented kids with an opportunity to meet real heroes. I use this book each year to define what it means to be a hero and to help 5th graders look beyond "famous" to see quality of character. This book inspires children to the best! Thank you Dennis and Lorraine! I am ready for the next edition!

Great Book --- I love the way it is written. It gives the reader not only information about a wonderful variety of American Heroes but asks questions about how the reader might be challenged to a higher standard. I'm looking forward to introducing my grandson to this book. I'm sure he will find many heroes in the book that he will want to find out more about.

As a 5th grade teacher in a mostly rural area, this book has allowed my students to get to know so many different American heroes. I was so impressed with the book myself, that I read the whole book cover to cover in one night! I have had parents of my students ask if their child could bring the book home so they (the parents) could read it and enjoy it as well. Our school wrote a grant in order to purchase about 50 copies of the book and it was probably some of the best money our district has ever spent! I highly recommend this book for readers of all ages - it's a gem!

My New Year's resolution..one of them, is to read more with and in front of my children. I brought this book home and read to them one or two of the figures. They LOVED it. We read from it almost every night now. They fight over who gets to pick the figure we read about and actually ask me to go and get it. It's really nice that they are learning about older historical figures but also recognize some of the faces they are reading about. I try to make my kids understand that great people are not born that way they are normal people who aspire to greatness. This is a great way to teach them that and then some!!

50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet is a wonderful book. The sections on each hero are concise, informative and up-to-date, especially for the heroes that are still alive. Includes heroes that are not new in history but usually are not included in publications. Excellent book for history classes in elementary grades.

This book is by far the best Bible story book we have found. I have been a children's minister for 20 years and have reviewed many books and this one tops them all. The stories are biblically accurate and incredibly easy to understand. We have bought this for every family/friend that has had a baby for the last 5 years and will continue to do so because it is so wonderful.

this is nice to have. it hasn't become a favorite yet, but some of the pictures are really beautiful. the idea of passing our family history is wonderful and this is a great aid to jump start teaching your children their ancestry.

This book has been great for family read aloud time. The story like format is very easy to read and understand.

One day my 15 year old son told me that he didn't know the stories in the Bible. I got to thinking...I knew bits and pieces of all the main stories, but I didn't really think I could repeat them to my son. I was embarassed, so I went right to Amazon to find a book that explained the Bible in a fun, understanding, interesting way. I also wanted something that hadn't been "modernized". I didn't want to read that God is our Mother, or words like "humankind". I wanted a good old-fashioned, biblically true book. This one exceded my expectations!! I am halfway done and have learned so much! I read it to my son, and he enjoys it. I have not been able to put it down, so my son is not as far as me. I can't believe how much I DID'NT know. I would highly recommend this for anyone. Even if you are very familiar with the Bible, it's a great refresher.

This book was recommended to me by a friend. I love this book!! My kids (7,4) and I read a passage every morning after breakfast. The stories are easily understood by my kids. They are short and capturing. Sometimes my kids will ask questions regarding our reading. I enjoy this special time with my children. Most of all it is coming from the Bible!!

If there were more craft books like this one, I wouldn't need so many craft books! This one has it ALL.

Yes, some have pointed out that the projects are somewhat dated. Published in 1979, the Complete Guide to Needlework is 6 years older than I am. However, if you're interested enough in crafting to even read it, you should be creative enough to improvise.

If there's a knit stitch or applique technique you just can't find, maybe it's in here. Trust me, it's all here. And with so many available used for under $1 on this site, it's a fantastic find.

What a deal!!! Has absolutely everything about the basics of almost every kind of stitchery. A real find.

An oldie but a goodie...I love it as it has everything. It is for any type of needlework what the "Joy of Cooking" is for cooking...if you want to know how to do something look here.

I had to buy this book for a fibers class and i'm glad i did. this book is great! easy to follow instructions. if you can get the older one, the cover is much cuter! it helped me learn lots of embroidery stitches, basics of quilting, and the macrame section is great!

This volume lives up to the title. It is most definitely a very complete guide to needlework. The instructions are flawless, and the lovely presentation will encourage you to try new things and refresh old skills. The Complete Guide to Needlework would make a perfect gift for the crafter in your life, but be sure to buy another copy for yourself. It's just THAT GOOD!

Freddy the Detective is about a pig called Freddy who reads Sherlock Holmes and wants to become a detective. The first case starts when the boy who lives in the farmhouse loses his train of cars. Freddy is on the case right away. He goes up to the boy's room and finds clues to who has stolen the cars. He finds out it is the rats, who have come back to the barn. Soon more cases have come up for him to solve, including when Egbert, a bunny, goes missing from his mother, and when Prinny, a little dog, has her dinner go missing.
I enjoyed this book because I like funny stories, and this was very funny. I also enjoyed it because I don't usually read mysteries, and this made me more interested in detective stories. Freddy is very funny in the way he solves cases. I recommend reading this book, even if you don't usually read mysteries. It is a great detective book for anyone who enjoys reading.

Wonerful, Triumph, for all ages.
It tips my planet, shakes my world.

Caleb A. Craig

The second in the utterly charming "Freddy the Pig" series, "Freddy the Detective" chronicles the adventures of Freddy and his barnyard friends as they delve deep into the world of clues, suspects and the criminal world. In the great tradition of Sherlock Holmes, there is a disguise involved.

Cases are solved (like just what becomes of Prinny the dog's dinner), a jail is constructed to house all the freshly-caught criminals (who have more fun inside than out) , and in the ultimate test for a pig, some infamous bank-robbers are caught red-handed and carted away by the thankful police. It all culminates in the trail of Jinx the Cat, during which a hen faints dead away at the mention of roast chicken and the courthouse erupts in cheers at the end of the summation because they admire they way the attorney argued a hopelessly weak case.

The Freddy books are great fun for kids (boy or girl), and they won't put you to sleep reading them aloud, either. I would place them just below the Betsy/Tacy books and the work of Leon Garfield, and high above anything coming out nowadays. They do nicely as a comfort during stressful times, the gentle and goofy stories easing kids to sleep. Highly recommended for ages to 5 to 100.

GRADE: B

Freddy the Detective is one of a series of pig books written by Walter R Brooks. Freddy the cool detective is a master of disguise who helps Mr. Bean and the Bean Farm solve crime.

Freddy the Detective is one of my favorite books because I love pigs and the main character is a very smart pig. The book is exciting and fun to read. I recommend it for people who like pigs! You will love the book if you read it.

Lukas

I run a bookgroup for homeschoolers and have the very great pleasure of introducing this bunch of alternative education kiddies to some of the great classics in children's literature. It can be a very rewarding experience. Once in a while, however, the kids teach me about books that I've never heard of. One of the children I organize has been obsessed with the "Freddy" books for years. Occasionally he would ask me if I had read them or he'd promote them to the group. In my initial ignorance, I assumed that he was referring to the Freddy the Hamster books by Dietlof Reiche. Those books are very good but the kid was actually referring to the classic Freddy the Pig series dating back to the 1930s. Recently these books have been earning themselves an entirely new audience and children everywhere are engulfed in a kind of newfangled Freddy fever. I picked up "Freddy the Detective" (not realizing that "Freddy In Florida" is actually the first book in the series) to give the books a look-see. I did this with a kind of snide attitude that went something along the lines of, "well I'm sure these books have aged poorly over the years and that the only reason kids are reading them because their parents made them". Oh how wrong a children's librarian can be. The Freddy books are marvelous. Author Walter R. Brooks is marvelous. In fact, "Freddy the Detective" is so wry, well-written, and delightful that I am truly shocked that more people are not aware of this series. Consider me a convert of the pig. One who will be singing his praises to the masses every chance I get.

Freddy is just your average highly intelligent pig. He lives on the farm of Mr. and Mrs. Bean and has a lovely little life. He has a fine library in his pen and it is from his books that he gets the idea to become a detective. After reading a couple Sherlock Holmes stories, Freddy is sure that he can pull off becoming the farm's number one crime-ridder. This decision is made not a moment too soon, for a nasty clan of rats has stolen a valuable toy train from the Bean home and is performing dastardly crimes with it. As we follow Freddy, he solves crime after crime and participates in adventure after adventure. When Jinx the cat is ultimately framed for a crime he did not commit, it's up to Freddy to sway a jury of his peers as to the feline's innocence and the true criminals in the case.

One of the first things that caught my attention in this book was the lack of human/animal interaction. For kids that grew up reading that other classic farm text, "Charlotte's Web", the fact that there are two kids on the Bean farm that never ever appear in the book is downright bizarre. In any other story we'd be getting everything from the children's point of view. Brooks, however, knows who the true star of his book is and he's not going to muddle the action with a couple of pesky young 'uns hogging (ho ho!) the spotlight. Another interesting choice comes with the fact that the humans and the animals on the farm cannot talk to one another. This makes quite a bit of sense, when you consider it. Animals have no vocal cords. Animals also don't usually use their hoofs like hands, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that humans and animals have their own fixed roles in Brooks' world, and for kids this is very easy to understand.

But it's the writing of Walter Brooks that has made this series as memorable as it is today. He continually peppers his books with songs and rhymes that not only pan out correctly but are rather clever in their own right. Consider the following:

"Habitually we offend
Against our country's laws.
It works out better in the end
Than being good, because -

No home has a superior
Or cheerier interior
Than this old jail
The which we hail
With constant loud applause".

Nicely done, eh? Better still are the 1930s turns of phrase and common references long since lost to the annals of time. In one section the children reading this book are urged to sing "Aunt Laurie" as fast as they possibly can. If a single child in this country knows both words and tune, I'll be amazed. In another instance a chapter title is simply, "Jinx is indicted", which I thought was great. And opposite the title page is a picture of Freddy falling down a flight of stairs backwards (as occurs later in the book) with the caption, "- but at that moment Freddy came to grief". Obviously the publisher of this book found that turn of phrase just as charming as I did. Well done there, Puffin Books. Paired with these words are German illustrator Kurt Wiese's original pen and inks. Known almost entirely for illustrating books with Asian themes (he won a Newbery for his illustrations in "Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze", for example), Wiese eschews his normal style in favor of this most American of tales. His animals are both deeply familiar and oh-so-slightly human. There is not a picture in this book that jars with the action or distracts from the words. The pairing of Wiese with Brooks can only be described as heavenly.

I was a little afraid when I picked up this book (and took a gander at its copyright date) that we'd have to deal with a fair amount of sexism and racism in this book. To my somewhat naïve shock, no such prejudice pops up. In fact, Brooks could even be credited with breaking down a few barriers here and there. Female characters do just as much good as male ones in Freddy's world. Freddy comes to realize early in the game that while there is no end to his cleverness, he's rather lacking in the common sense department. By partnering with the down-to-earth cow Mrs. Wiggins, however, the two are able to combine their equal strengths and solve any number of crimes.

I haven't even mentioned the clever things Brooks has to say about our legal system or the state of law enforcement itself. You'll just have to discover them on your own as you read through what can certainly be called a true children's classic for the ages. A marvelous and deserves-to-be-remembered tale.

Lois Lowry has really saved the day in this house more than once with her great Gooney Bird books. In this book, the first of the Gooney Bird series, Gooney Bird is introduced to her new class. She's confident and smart and has a good time in life and the class does an effective job of welcoming their new member. The "conflict" in these stories is some intellectual problem that one or more of the characters needs to solve, rather than having conflict with each other. This is perfect for us, because we have one daughter that doesn't care for conflict between characters in her fiction. The fact that Gooney is such a great character is stupendous (she likes big words and her dictionary!).

This is a clever book that will keep the parent entertained as well. Well worth every penny and then some!

Lois Lowry is a gifted writer of fiction who is passing on that gift to young readers with Gooney Bird Greene!

Children will learn the art of creating a story as they are enthralled by the tales told by Lowry's funny, pig-tailed heroine.

This book is tremendously entertaining and valuable as a teaching tool!

Another great children's book by Lowry! This book is absolutely hilarious and educational, too. Great to integrate into an English lesson(s) about writing stories. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves Lowry or anyone who loves the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary.... the books contain great energy & lots of humor.... all with some lessons learned along the way. :)

I teach second grade and love to use this book as a read aloud to inspire my students to write interesting stories. After we finish the book, we then write our own stories from our life, and use all of Gooney Bird's tips for writing. I also like to use it as a visualization lesson, where we draw the picture in our head before Gooney Bird tells a story, and then the picture in our head after she finishes her story. (very different)Gooney Bird also has some great characters to analyze, as we learn about the different classmates through their interaction with Gooney Bird as she tells each of her stories. It is a treasure!

I read this book to my fourth graders, and they loved it! Gooney Bird is an original thinker who always tells the truth! We had fun speculating exactly how her "wild" tales could be true, before we read on.

Gooney Bird also discusses the ways to make writing better, and kids can learn from that as well. The book would be good to use in writing classes. Plus, it's just plain fun!

Inspired by a potato on her kitchen table, Esmé Raji Codell wrote this book to let parents know that just as a potato is "plentiful and versatile" (p 3) so too is children's literature. She states that this is a "recipe book" to give parents ideas for how to incorporate children's literature into their child's life, whether it be as a "main course or a sustaining side dish" (p 3).

The book is divided into nine main parts. The first part is an overview for parents of why reading is important. Codell uses research, theorists, and practical first-hand experience to give parents an understanding of the importance of reading and a basic knowledge of some of the lingo that educators use when discussing reading. She then moves on in parts two through eight to share ideas for how to incorporate reading into your child's life in a variety of different formats and using different types of literature. The ninth part, "Storytime Central", shares lists of recommended books for a variety of different topics not previously mentioned.

Looking through parts 2-8, you will find ideas for encouraging children to read both with a parent and on their own. Using humor and personal anecdotes, Codell shares a plethora of ideas ranging from simple (sit down and read a book) to complex (organize a "parade of books' for your community). For each idea she gives examples or tips for how to actually do the activity. These ideas are coupled with lists of recommended book titles. Pictures of actual book covers are found throughout each section, enticing the reader to go find a copy and flip through the pages for themselves. Also found throughout are sidebars and boxes containing book reviews and "Dear Madame Esme" questions and answers.

The main strength of this book is its lists of book titles. The lists of books in each part are a resource that can be utilized by parents and educators alike when searching for quality children's literature. Codell covers a wide range of topics such as math, history, science, folk tales, breakfast, mysteries, and baseball. In addition to these topical lists, there is a list of all of the Newbery and Caldecott award winners among the appendices at the back of the book. Also at the end are detailed indices that are broken up by author, title, and subject which allow for ease in finding information among all of these lists.

This book is not an exhaustive list of all of the quality literature available today, but it is definitely a huge springboard for launching into the wonderful world of children's literature. Codell encourages reading as often as possible beginning from the day children are born. By reading with children she says that you are doing something for them "that is not only fun, but essential, important, and lasting" (343).

I thought it was a book on how to get my child to read, to enjoy reading. The title is deceptive. Instead, its a book advertising other books and it doesn't even tell you what the books are about or for what age group. A total waste of money!!!

This book is loaded with great ideas! I school my children at home and love to find any type of book activities to encourage reading. There is so much in this book. I was checking this out at the library and renewing it until I reached my limit on renewals so I would take it back and then request it online again. I finally bought it.

This book is packed with great ideas, methods, and resources to inspire children and parents for reading activities. My family enjoyed it very much. It clearly brought up my son's reading interest. Day after day, he has read a lot and has become one the best readers in his class from below average. He often ranks high in the Beestar weekly reading program (a nice web site http://www.beestar.org). I'm very happy with this book. I highly recommend it.

I am very pleased with this purchase and found it to be a great value. I didn't realize what a huge book I would receive and I am thrilled with the information crammed inside. There are so many wonderful ideas with book lists galore. I have actually carried this book around my public library looking up different recommended titles! This is a wonderful book for both parents and teachers and makes a perfect gift!

We found this little wandering good feeling in a library in 1967. The whole family loved it, from the adults all the way down to 4 year old me. The Brute Family's daily feeding of Stick and Stone Stew and Sand and Gravel Porridge became part of our family's vernacular. It still makes me giggle to say the phrases. I was absolutely delighted to find the book again - time had erased the book title and author, but I decided to google "sand and gravel" and voila! I caught that lost happy feeling and ordered my books on line! Enjoy!!!

This book is so simple and sweet. It's pure poetry. I love Russell Hoban, and this is definitely a must if you enjoy the Frances books. Baby Brute finds a "litte wandering lost good feeling" in a field of daisies and she puts it in her tiny pocket. How wonderful.

The Little Brute family lives a miserable existence...even has to eat sand and gravel porridge...but something wonderful happens and the family
undergoes a magical transformation...this book is so well written it will be a family favorite for years to come..Every mother can relate to Mama Brute who stays home to "bang the pots, thump the furniture, and scold the baby."

This book was one of my absolute favorites as a child so I just purchased it for my children who also love it. I'm hoping that it will be one of their favorites when they are adults remembering fond memories of reading books with Mom and Dad. A great message about manners and attitude! You have to love Russell Hoban's books.

Every child wonders why certain peers are mean. This book paints the story of those unhappy families, with unhappy children, and offers the grand hope they may change! Among the Brute family, parents and children suffer a self-perpetuating attitude malignancy until a solitary "good feeling" enters the picture. When everyone gives "being nice" a try things change quickly and permanently for the better.

I WISH this book was required reading in EVERY school in America. The book shows that each and every child can be a catalyst for kindness. Fathers and Mothers aren't happy when they aren't providing for their children. Children aren't happy when their parents are miserable. Its a vicious circle. And, happy kids in every school will recognize the Brute families they encounter. However, the Hobans' message to TRY BEING NICE as a platform for uplifting and contagious change works for the Brutes, who stage a quick turn-around! One's living conditions are as much about one's attitude as about conditions.

I bet the Brutes (I mean the Nices) even planted a flower or two next to their doorstep ... together!

After the Magnifecent Seven's wonderful performance at the '96 Olympic Games, I decided to read this book to find out more about these talented young women. I thought it was terrific! There are biographies of each of the seven members along with really cool pictures. This book was awesome. These seven are really magnificint and it shows!

The book was pretty good for writing a book. Gave good information but it was a hard book to just sit down and read but I would for sure buy the book!

A must read with lots of good pictures. Gives good info. on all the athletes, with quotes.

This book is what really got me interested in gymnastics.

I had gotten introduced to gymnastics through a book about Mary Lou Retton I had picked up at a thrift store, but I didn't become too interested until I saw a picture of Kim Zmeskal in an Encyclopedia Annual. I looked her up on the Internet, and the rest they say is history.

Through the Internet I discovered the Magnificent Seven, and I found this book at our library. I couldn't have been more satisfied!

The Magnificent Seven was a team of US girls that consisted of Amanda Borden, Amy Chow, Jaycie Phelps, Shannon Miller, Dominique Dawes, Dominique Moceanu and Kerri Strug. These talented gymnasts won the very first Olympic Gold team medal in US. Gymnastic history.

This book has very informative biographies about each girl, complete with full color photos. It is very well written, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the Magnificent Seven, or just want to see some great pictures about them.

If you like gymnastics you'll love this book! It tells about the lives of the seven gymnasts on the 1996 gold medal winning U.S. Olympic gymnastics team, Shannon Miller, Dominique Moceanu, Kerri Strug, Dominque Dawes, Jaycie Phelps, Amanda Borden, and Amy Chow. There are pictures of each girl from their very young life to the 1996 Olympics.

Good quality used book, required for my high school AP Psychology course. Took about 12 days to arrive, which is too long.

A very good book for general psych. It will will help to lay the ground work for all your future psych courses.

Exeptionally good study guide. Has helped raise my son's grade in his AP physcology class.

I love this book, I'm 16 and I have no trouble understanding it (though I am smarter than your average teen). It's quite interesting and explains a lot. It's the perfect introduction to psychology for someone like myself looking to pursue it as a career.

This is the best textbook I've ever used. It is interesting and engaging. The content is excellent, but the charts, photos, quotes, cartoons, etc. make studying even more enjoyable. If you want to learn the basics of pyschology, but this book!

Una novela que marca a todo el que la lee... el lenguaje en su máxima y más hermosa expresión.

La historia con Bèrthe Trépat, la carta de La Maga a Rocamadour, Talita pasando por el tablón y, claro, el capítulo 7 (toco tu boca...). Este libro me deja sin aliento. Nunca, pero NUNCA he leído nada de semejante belleza.

I really enjoyed this original book.

It has taken me years to sit down and finally make a serious commitment to read Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch/La Rayuela." I cannot think of a better companion to devote a few weeks to, maybe even longer - hey, whatever it takes! It depends on your reading speed and the time you take to truly savor the poetry of the author's language. So, be willing to make a small personal investment in this very special novel, and the reward you reap will be a worthy one. Julio Cortazar will take you to places you have never been before in literature, and may never experience again. I read "Hopscotch" over this past summer, after a thirty year delay. I can be very stubborn about putting off what is good for me!! The author's imagination is boundless, his prose rich and luminous, his wit and sophistication rare, the dialogue brilliant, the plot...I won't attempt to describe that with a few adjectives. Wander through the extraordinary labyrinthine plot on you own - the way is yours to discover. I promise, you won't get lost!

I was introduced to "La Rayuela" about thirty years ago, when a close friend, with similar reading tastes, gave me the book. Enthused after just reading the novel, he told me that I reminded him of one of the characters, La Maga. (What a compliment...I think!). I was living in Latin America at the time. With personal interests at stake and much curiosity, I bought a copy in Spanish, which I read with some fluency back then. After experimenting with which way to approach the novel, and trying both ways, I gave up...and just read the parts about La Maga. I had little patience at that point in my life, and needed to acquire some, and to read slower, with more of a sense of play and participation. Cortazar wants his readers to participate - to make reading his book an interactive experience, not a passive one. I was and still feel touched when I remember my friend's comments regarding La Maga. She is a magnificent character and Cortazer's prose, his language, (Spanish), is exquisite. So, about a year later, I thought I'd give it another try, in English, perhaps with better results. None! I just wasn't ready, I guess. That happens to me with fiction occasionally. I have to be open to the experience. Yet, after all these years, I still thought of Horacio Oliveira and La Maga from time to time. And why not? They are truly unforgettable. As I wrote above, I did make time, at last. For an adventure of a lifetime, I recommend you do the same.

When Julio Cortazar published "La Rayuela" in 1966, he turned the conventional novel upside-down and the literary world on its ear with this experiment in writing fiction. He soon became an important influence on writers everywhere. "Hopscotch" is considered to be one of the best novels written in Spanish. The work is interactive, where readers are invited to rearrange its text and read sections in different sequences. Read in a linear fashion, "Hopscotch" contains 700 pages, 155 chapters in three sections: "From the Other Side," and "From This Side" - the first two sections are sustained by relatively chronological narratives and so contrast greatly with the third section, "From Diverse Sides," (subtitled "Expendable Chapters"), which includes philosophical extrapolation, character study, allusions and quotations, and an entirely different version of the "ending."

The book has no table of contents, but rather a "Table of Instructions." There, we learn that two approved readings are possible: from Chapter 1 through 56 "in a normal fashion", or from Chapter 73 to Chapter 1 to... well, wherever the chapters lead you. The instructions are all in your book and are extremely clear. At the end of each chapter there is a numeric indicator to lead the reader to the next chapter. One never knows where one will be lead. Due to its meandering nature, "Hopscotch" has been called a "Proto-hypertext" novel. Cortázar probably had this work in mind when he stated, "If I had the technical means to print my own books, I think I would keep on producing collage-books."

Horacio Oliveira, our protagonist and sometimes narrator, is an Argentinean expatriate, an intellectual and professed writer in 1950's bohemian Paris. He and his close friends, members of "the Club," do lots of partying, drinking, and intellectualizing, discussing art, literature, music and solving the world's problems. Oliveira lives with and loves La Maga, an exotic young woman, somewhat whimsical, at times almost ephemeral, who leaves behind her, like the scent of a light perfume, a feeling of poignancy and inevitable loss. La Maga refuses to plan her encounters with Oliveira in advance, preferring instead to run into each other by chance. Then she and Oliveira celebrate the series of circumstances that reunite them. Eventually, he loses La Maga, who loses her child. With her absence, Oliveira realizes how empty and meaningless his life is and he returns to his native Buenos Aires. There he finds work first as a salesman, then a keeper of a circus cat, and an attendant in an insane asylum.

As Oliveira wends his way through France, Uruguay and Argentina looking for his lost love, "Hopscotch's" narrative takes on an emotionally intense stream of consciousness style, rich in metaphor. Back In Argentina, Oliveira shares his life with his bizarre double, Traveler, and Traveler's wife, Talita, whom Oliveira attempts to remake into a facsimile of La Maga.

The game of hopscotch is only developed as a conceit late in the narrative. It is first used to describe Oliveira's confused love for La Maga as "that crazy hopscotch." The theme develops as a metaphor for reaching Heaven from Earth. "When practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you're into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too." The variations on the children's game are described as "spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often." The allusions continue and include some beautiful passages.

"Hopscotch" is much more than a novel. Ultimately, it is best left for each reader to define what it is for himself/herself. Pablo Neruda in a famous quote said, "People who do not read Cortazar are doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease." I don't know whether I would go so far. Remember, I put off the experience for many years. But this is one novel that should be read during one's lifetime. It is brilliant and it is fun!
JANA

Rayuela es, junto a otras obras como "El Túnel" de Sábato, una de las pocas muestras de literatura Existencialista latinoamericana. Y el resultado difícilmente pudo ser mejor, este libro de Cortázar fue aclamado por la crítica internacional y actualmente está junto con "Cien años de Soledad" ,y algunos otros pocos, dentro de las novelas latinoamericanas más renombradas.

En la primera página de "Rayuela", el autor indica que la obra es en realidad muchos libros y no sólo uno, pero que principalmente son dos libros (dos formas de leerlo). El primero se lee en forma continua, desde el capítulo 1 hasta el 56. El segundo se lee de acuerdo a un orden específico que da Cortázar, y abarca muchos otros capítulos, la totalidad de la obra. La palabra Rayuela se refiere a un juego, y algunos críticos consideran que esta 2da opción es también un juego, una broma del autor. Incluso al llegar a cierto capitulo (leyendo de la 2da forma), te ves dirigido luego al capítulo que leíste antes, formándose así un circulo de tal manera que la obra no tiene fin. ¿Cómo leer Rayuela? En lo personal la leí en forma continua, y no me arrepiento, aunque confieso haberle dado una hojeada a los capítulos no leídos.

No quiero contarles la trama de la novela, que si bien es muy valiosa, no es lo principal y no vale la pena conocerla antes de la lectura (como en casi todos los libros, en mi opinión). Basta con decir que narra la historia de Horacio Oliveira, un argentino de espíritu libre, sus años en París y en Argentina, y sus problemas existenciales. Como en toda novela existencialista, el principal atractivo es la profundidad de los personajes y la habilidad narrativa del escritor para envolvernos en la personalidad y mente de estos; en todo esto triunfa Julio Cortázar. En Rayuela, además de Oliveira, hay otros caracteres interesantisimos, como la famosa "Maga". La construcción de este personaje es una genialidad del autor, "La Maga" termina siendo una suerte de "Madame Bovary", una mujer a la cual ni Oliveira ni el lector podrán nunca olvidar.

Que más decir, "Rayuela" es un libro infalible, genial, de lectura imprescindible para cualquiera que disfrute leyendo a Sábato, Camus, Hesse, Sartre o Dostoievski. Pero es para cualquiera en realidad, pues es un libro verdaderamente extraordinario.