(++++) SYMPHONIES IN LIVING COLOR

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique; King Lear Overture. Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marek Janowski. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Mahler: Symphony No. 4. Christiane Oelze, soprano; Gürzenich-Orchester Köln conducted by Markus Stenz. Oehms. $19.99 (SACD).

Mahler: Symphony No. 7. Residentie Orchestra The Hague conducted by Neeme Järvi. Chandos. $14.99 (SACD).

     The SACD (Super Audio CD) format is likely to disappear sooner rather than later, relegated to the same pile of noble experiments that includes Quadraphonic sound in the era of LP records – that is, the set of noticeably superior methods of sonic reproduction that never quite caught on with the public. SACDs (like Quadraphonic records) generally cost more than recordings made in standard format, but the larger issue is that they require more and better equipment for their full effect. SACDs sound quite fine in standard CD players, but they sound noticeably better when played through the equipment for which they were designed. And certain pieces of music – ones written by masters of orchestral color and instrumental interplay – benefit significantly from being heard in SACD format. The Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique is a perfect example, and PentaTone clearly knows this: it released an SACD performance led by Sir Colin Davis a few years ago, and now offers an SACD of Marek Janowski’s reading with the Pittsburgh Symphony. It is an exceptionally fine performance – recorded live last year and imbued with the thrill of a top-notch concert. Janowski gives each of the five movements its own character, allowing Berlioz the flights of fancy that include a whirling ballroom dance here, some rolling thunder there, a march to the guillotine and opium-fueled dream of witches over there. The very first movement builds effectively from quiet into splendor, and the many piquant instrumental effects are brought forward lovingly and sensitively by Janowski and the Pittsburgh Symphony players. Indeed, sensitivity is a hallmark of this performance, in the episodic third movement just as strikingly as in the loud and raucous fourth and fifth. Throughout, Janowski handles the symphony as an extended tone poem – which it is – while accentuating the idée fixe each time it appears, allowing that theme to knit together the sprawling work as Berlioz intended it to. Whether heard on the equipment for which SACD is designed or on a standard CD system, this is a very high-quality performance filled with elegant touches. And it is well complemented by the highly dramatic King Lear Overture, which was also recorded live: this encapsulation of Shakespeare’s drama is very impressive in its own right, with the tragedy unfolding inexorably to some lovely tunes and very dynamic effects, all orchestrated with the usual Berlioz coloristic brilliance.

     One issue with SACD sound, though, is that it exposes the weaknesses of performances as well as their strengths. Markus Stenz is a fine conductor, and his new recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 certainly deserves a (+++) rating, but there are inelegances in the performance that come through with special clarity in SACD sound. The most notable of these is Christiane Oelze’s voice in the final movement. She has a strong and rounded soprano rather than a thinner, more childlike one – but it is precisely the child’s naïve view of Heaven toward which this whole symphony builds, and the rich tone of Oelze’s voice is simply not very well fitted to the text. She does sing with clarity and with minimal use of vibrato, and these are strengths; but the underlying sound of her voice is just not quite right in this context – and that is clearer in SACD sound than it would be otherwise. Stenz also has some performance quirks that would be clear in any type of recording, notably a number of unwritten tempo changes with which he tries to emphasize elements of Mahler’s writing but manages only to obscure them. The very slow opening of the first movement, for example, makes the sleigh bells almost dirgelike rather than jovial – but they are in proper tempo when they return later in the movement, so whatever point Stenz is trying to make at the start is lost. The performance is full of small miscalculations like this, and they are particularly irritating in a Mahler recording, since the composer was an outstanding conductor and knew exactly what sort of color palette he wanted for his very carefully designed symphonies. Because Mahler made it so clear – through manuscript annotations for his fellow conductors and in other ways – how he wanted his symphonies to sound, there is really no justification for altering his tempo indications, however much a conductor may want to emphasize or deemphasize a particular point. Stenz’s recording has many fine elements – the “entry into Heaven” in the third movement, for example, is excellent – but it also has enough disappointing ones, all of which come through very clearly in the excellent sound, to make it impossible to recommend unreservedly.

     Neeme Järvi’s recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 is unusual among SACDs for its low price – lower than the cost of many conventional CD recordings. But there is no compromise on audio quality here: the disc sounds every bit as good as higher-priced SACDs. The performance is very worthy, too, deserving a (++++) rating despite some interpretative quirks: Järvi’s approach to this difficult symphony is convincing even when atypical. The very opening of the first movement, for instance, seems somewhat too fast; but in the overall context of the movement, it works well by helping propel the music relentlessly forward – although it does lessen the movement’s darkness, which provides the baseline from which the symphony eventually climbs to the blaze of light in the finale. Järvi’s orchestra is not quite as smooth and opulent in sound as some top-quality European ensembles, but it plays quite well here and gives Järvi, its Chief Conductor, plenty of power when he calls for it. The second movement is also on the fast side, but consistently so; so, again, it is convincing on its own terms, and the strings sound particularly lovely. The well-paced central Schattenhaft Scherzo works especially well, its eeriness and dissonances nicely contrasted with the melancholy of its Trio. The fourth movement is the least successful here, because this time Järvi’s faster-than-usual tempo does not let the gentle serenade breathe: the whole thing sounds rushed, precisely when the symphony should finally become relaxed. The finale, though, bursts on the scene with tremendous enthusiasm and never flags, as Järvi pulls out all the stops to deliver a rip-roaring conclusion. It is rather vulgar, to be sure, but that is inherent in Mahler’s music here: this is one of the most forthright movements the composer wrote (despite some often-overlooked subtleties of construction). It is possible to quibble with some of Järvi’s tempos in this finale – as elsewhere in this recording, he tends to opt for speed over elegance. But his approach plays up the C Major ebullience here and therefore works well – abetted by excellent SACD sound that effectively highlights every detail that conductor and orchestra focus on bringing out. The days of SACD recordings are likely numbered, but some of the bright – and subtly shaded – colors of orchestral works will stand out less clearly if and when the format disappears.

(++++) CHILDHOOD MOST UNUSUAL

Hieroglyphs from A to Z: A Rhyming Book with Ancient Egyptian Stencils for Kids. By Peter Der Manuelian. Pomegranate Kids. $17.95.

The Jumblies. By Edward Lear. Drawings by Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.

The Dong with a Luminous Nose. By Edward Lear. Drawings by Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.

The Wuggly Ump. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $12.95.

Edward Gorey Coloring Book: The Wuggly Ump and Other Delights. Pomegranate Kids. $7.95.

     There is nothing the slightest bit typical about childhood as seen and experienced through books from Pomegranate – no, not even when those books are in the recently established Pomegranate Kids line. Any respectable child-oriented book catalogue must, for example, include an alphabet book. But an alphabet from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, featuring reproductions of ancient Egyptian carvings and the hieroglyphs used thousands of years ago to represent sounds? That is the Pomegranate way. In fact, Hieroglyphs from A to Z will be as fascinating for parents as for children – maybe even more so. There is no one-to-one correspondence between our alphabet and hieroglyphs, but there is sufficient sound correspondence to make this whole project workable and fascinating. For example, although the Egyptians had no letter C, a symbol resembling a basket with a handle stands for the hard C sound. The C page shows a statuesque cat, explains about cats being sacred in ancient Egypt, shows the symbol for the C sound, and demonstrates how to spell the word “cat” using hieroglyphs. So it goes throughout this wonderful, highly colorful book. The letter M is represented by an owl, and the page shows how to spell Man. The letter P is a footstool, and the page shows how to spell Pyramid. And so on. At the back of the book are a discussion of hieroglyphs; suggestions on using them to write secret messages; a table of English letters and sounds and their hieroglyph equivalents; and an absolutely wonderful stencil that kids can use to trace individual hieroglyphs accurately. Originally published in 1991 and long out of print, Hieroglyphs from A to Z is, in this wonderful new edition, an alphabet book like no other and a delight from start to finish.

     Wonderful in a different way are the two small hardcover books of Edward Lear’s nonsense poems about the Jumblies and their travels – as illustrated by Edward Gorey (1925-2000), whose fascination with the macabre here takes a back seat to meticulous and deliciously amusing renditions of the characters and their surroundings. Lear (1812-1888) was not primarily a nonsense versifier, although that is how most people know him today – in his own time, he was a painter of some note, his most famous pupil being Queen Victoria herself. But poems such as The Jumblies and its sequel, The Dong with a Luminous Nose, are the works with which he is now identified, and the poetry is even more delightful when accompanied by Gorey’s illustrations. There is a lovely cadence to Lear’s writing: “Far and few, far and few,/ Are the lands where the Jumblies live;/ Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,/ And they went to sea in a Sieve.” This oft-repeated portion of the Jumblies’ story is initially accompanied by a simply perfect Gorey picture of 10 Jumblies, most with their backs to the reader, rendered with extreme care and individuality on a beach above which clouds float. The drawing is as instantly recognizable as the verse. A later illustration for a repeat of the same words has 10 Jumblies facing the reader, stacked upon each other in a pyramid, their expressions neither smiling nor unsmiling, their poses dancelike and elegant. As the poem The Jumblies progresses – “They whistled and warbled a moony sing/ To the echoing sound of a coppery gong” – the voyage goes on, all the way to “the Hills of the Chankly Bore,” and eventually back again, where the Jumblies are honored with “a feast/ Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast.” But they leave some sorrow behind, as readers learn in The Dong with a Luminous Nose, a little love story about a stopover that the Jumblies made on their voyage. Here – on “the great Gromboolian plain” – a character known only as the Dong “fell in love with a Jumbly Girl/ Who came to those shores one day.” After a brief idyll, she left with the rest of the Jumblies, and the Dong made himself “A Nose as strange as a Nose could be!” Gorey’s pictures of the construction – which follow Lear’s description carefully – are wonderful, and the tale’s bittersweet ending, with the Dong using his luminous nose to search every night for the long-gone Jumbly girl, brings out Gorey’s underlying sentimentality while complementing Lear’s. The Gorey-illustrated Lear books are for children, to be sure, but it takes a special kind of child to appreciate them. A special kind of parent, too.

     Nor are these two Gorey books the only ones available for kids from Pomegranate. Oh no. But The Wuggly Ump, whether in original small-hardcover size or as a new coloring book that also includes several other Gorey drawings in black-and-white, is most assuredly not for everyone. This morbid minor masterpiece, originally published in 1963, is Gorey at his finest or most peculiar, depending on your point of view. The singsong poetry details the untroubled lives of three wholesome, milk-and-bread-fed children who receive an unexpected and unwanted visit from the mysterious, gigantic and huge-toothed Wuggly Ump, which “eats umbrellas, gunny sacks,/ Brass doorknobs, mud, and carpet tacks.” Gorey writes that “its other habits are obscure,” but the children who are having “lovely dreams” find out soon enough why the beast has come to visit them. There is nothing gory in Gorey’s story – he always leaves that sort of thing to the reader’s imagination – but there is no doubt about the children’s fate, with Gorey showing them all topsy-turvy at the end within a broadly smiling Wuggly Ump. Kids who find this story amusing (and a surprising number will) can see the colors of all 14 of Gorey’s original illustrations in small pictures on the inside front and back covers of the coloring book – along with original versions of the other eight drawings included inside. Then budding young artists can select their own colors for each and every picture. It is a fair bet that most of their choices will be more, shall we say, forceful than the subtle ones Gorey picked. But that is the fun of the Edward Gorey Coloring Book and, for that matter, a great deal of the fun of The Wuggly Ump itself.

(++++) TURNING NEXT YEAR’S PAGES

2011 Calendars: 365-Day—Dilbert; Baby Blues; The New Yorker; Insight from the Dalai Lama; Foodie Fight; Disney Animated. Andrews McMeel. $13.99 each (Dilbert, Baby Blues, New Yorker, Dalai Lama, Foodie); Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $14.99 (Disney).

     Yes, the new year is still months away; and yes, it may be a little odd to think about 2011 calendars when there are still plenty of days left in 2010. But if you like being on top of things – ahead of them, even – this is your chance to think and plan. And if you simply enjoy doing something a little unusual from time to time – say, making a comment during August 2010 along the lines of, “Well, I checked my calendar, and I’m afraid I’m busy on Friday, February 18, 2011” – an early look at next year’s day-to-day calendars gives you plenty of opportunities (365 of them, in fact).

     It is a time-honored tradition to use page-a-day calendars to lighten the mood of your home or office, and this is one reason Andrews McMeel’s calendars are so much fun in any year. The firm simply has more super-popular syndicated cartoons to draw from (so to speak) than any other. This means you can easily find daily laughs for both home and office. Of course, the office amusements produce more of a grimace than a smile if you work in a company that even slightly resembles Dilbert’s. But Scott Adams’ comic strip may be even more appealing if you don’t: you can lord it over all those poor Dilbert clones out there – you know, the ones who think of themselves as “a puppet hurtling toward failure,” who say “I want my unwarranted optimism back,” who stay “in my cubicle trying to imagine what futility doesn’t feel like.” For 2011, there is more of the same – lots more of the same – from the Pointy-Haired Boss (Adams is smart never to have named him), from ever-lazy but ever-clever-in-his-lazy-way Wally, from highly competent and easily angered Alice, and from the usual suspects (real-seeming and surreal) who inhabit Adams’ world.

     So you can have Dilbert at work and then breathe a sigh of relief when you head for home. Unless, of course, your home is like that of the MacPhersons, stars of Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott’s Baby Blues. Darryl and Wanda have attained the suburban dream: over-mortgaged house, minivan that always smells like melted crayons and ground-in popcorn, and three adorable children who have their parents thoroughly outnumbered. Just as Dilbert fans suspect that Adams has spies in their offices, Baby Blues enthusiasts think Kirkman and Scott must have found a way to sneak into their homes and take (or draw) pictures. Except that real life isn’t nearly as funny when it is being this chaotic (Scott, who writes the strip, is a real master at mixing parental angst with parental love). Kirkman and Scott are letting the MacPherson kids grow up a bit now, but not too quickly – one milestone in the 2011 calendar is baby Wren learning to walk, thereby making life even more impossible for Darryl and Wanda (yes, it’s possible to be more impossible). Just check out Darryl discovering some uneaten raisins (he hopes) and Hammie ordering so many ice-cream toppings that the ice cream flavor itself doesn’t matter, and you will see why Baby Blues continues to produce smiles day in and day out, year in and year out.

     For humor that varies daily – different topics, different artists, but always a certain sophisticated sensibility – there is the 2011 Cartoons from the New Yorker calendar, which is at its best when twisting reality (“Caribbean Airport Security” requires doing the limbo beneath smaller and smaller screening portals) or twisting cartoon conventions (angel stranded on a desert island: “I just remembered I can fly”). There are office parodies that are not quite what you will find in Dilbert (“everybody’s getting together after work to do some more work”), wry twists on classic literature (“Hamlet’s Duplex” has a door labeled “2B” and one labeled “Not 2B”), and commentaries on money, interpersonal relationships and most of the rest of life. The New Yorker is not to everyone’s taste – by design – but for those who like its offbeat brand of urban-oriented, sometimes esoteric humor, this 2011 calendar will be a hit all year.

     But a daily dose of humor is not the only thing that Andrews McMeel calendars can provide. If you want something more uplifting – something to think about rather than something to laugh about each day – Insight from the Dalai Lama is one way to get it. Although reviled in China as a rabble-rouser with political motivations, the Dalai Lama is thought of elsewhere (and even in some areas within China itself) as an apolitical philosopher whose wisdom runs through everything he says. Certainly it permeates this 2011 calendar. Every page has a comment worth thinking about: “Ideology is man-made, but compassion and love are produced by nature.” “Too much involvement in the superficial aspects of life will not solve our larger problems of discontentment.” The Dalai Lama, unlike other religious and spiritual leaders, is unusual for not trying to force his views – including religious ones – on others: “Every person on the earth has the freedom to practice or not practice religion. It is all right to do both.” But he is also remarkably clear-headed about what it is right to do once you make a religious commitment – you must “focus your mind on it and sincerely practice the teachings in your daily life.” This is a far cry from the notion of making up on Sunday for all the things you did the rest of the week – and it is a singularly refreshing viewpoint, no matter what you choose to believe or disbelieve.

     Prefer something a little less intense, but also a far cry from a daily comic strip? How about some food-related trivia questions? Foodie Fight has them in six categories: “Foodiesphere,” Lab and Field, Food Productions, Dining Out, Company’s Coming, and What’s Cooking? Here, food lovers can feast themselves on queries such as, “Which state leads the United States in spam consumption?” (It’s Hawaii.) Ever wondered why a fresh egg sinks in water while an old egg floats? It’s because of moisture loss as the egg ages. Do you know the right way to eat soup – that is, the correct direction in which to spoon it? The answer is away from you, not toward you. How about picking the cake-mix brand named after a man originally known for restaurant and lodging guides? It’s Duncan Hines. Some of the questions in Foodie Fight are on the arcane side: “Who wrote American Cookery in 1796?” (Amelia Simmons.) Others are offbeat, amusing or simply neat to know: “What member of the Addams Family was an avid cook [once seen] borrowing a cup of cyanide?” (Morticia.) You can make a parlor game out of Foodie Fight, make it an after-dinner or before-dinner treat, or simply enjoy it yourself.

     And what if you want a day-to-day calendar that is really unusual – more than the typical tear-the-page-off design? New calendar types can be notoriously hard to design, but Accord Publishing has come up with a very intriguing one called Disney Animated. This is not exactly a day-to-day calendar – each page displays a full week – but the form of display is clever enough so Disney enthusiasts will not mind seeing each presentation for seven days instead of one. The reason is that each page really is a presentation. Accord publishes a number of books using a modern form of lenticular animation – a process in which still objects, seen through a grid after being photographer in a special way, seem to move. Disney Animated is a lenticular calendar, and if that sounds complicated, it really isn’t. In fact, the hardest thing about it is assembling the box in which the calendar pages sit – the folding directions are a trifle unclear. Once the box is set up, though, everything is simple. Each week displays a Disney scene: Mickey Mouse in Thru the Mirror (1936), Pluto in Mickey’s Grand Opera (also 1936), Donald Duck in Mickey’s Service Station (1935), Goofy in Boat Builders (1938), and many more. The pages themselves look like a jumble of lines with bits of color peeking through. That is the photography needed to make the characters animate – comparable, to an extent, to the visual separation needed to make 3D movies. To create the animation effect, you slide a plastic screen (which is a series of vertical black lines) from right to left across each drawing. The faster you slide it, the more quickly the characters move – and they move backwards, too, when you slide the screen from left to right. This is one of those effects that can really distract you from work – every speed at which you slide the screen creates a different sense of movement, from the smooth to the jerky, so it is very tempting to keep trying to animate the characters differently. And the calendar does have one significant and obvious disadvantage: if you lose or seriously damage the screen, the whole thing becomes useless (it would have been nice for Accord to include a spare screen, just in case). But if you are careful to keep the screen with the calendar and keep it intact, Disney Animation gives you a whole year of animating classic cartoons yourself, for your own enjoyment, whenever you wish. It is also a fascinating introduction to cel animation and lenticular photography, if you want it to be. This calendar runs only through 2011, but it may pique your interest in ways that could carry you well into 2012 and beyond.

(++++) JOURNEYS IN IMAGINATION AND REALITY

Ghostopolis. By Doug TenNapel. Graphix/Scholastic. $24.99.

The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H.A. Rey. By Louise Borden. Illustrated by Allan Drummond. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

Busing Brewster. By Richard Michelson. Pictures by R.G. Roth. Knopf. $16.99.

Swim! Swim! By James Proimos. Scholastic. $16.99.

The Fairy Godmother Academy #2: Kerka’s Book. By Jan Bozarth. Illustrated by Andrea Burden. Yearling. $6.99.

     So many places to go… Ghostopolis is not the sort of place you would want to visit in real life, or real death, but Doug TenNapel’s trip there is at the heart of an unusually effective graphic novel, which moves from silliness and absurdity to genuine emotion that really packs a wallop so seamlessly that it is hard to say when it changes character. Part of its excellence is its straightforward introduction – and then use – of bits and pieces of all sorts of supernatural stories, coupled with mundane details that prevent things (at first) from getting too serious. Love affair between a living man and a ghost woman? Got it. Covering a silver belt buckle from Wal-Mart to avoid upsetting a werewolf? Yup. A young boy accidentally transported to a ghost city while still alive – and maybe not the first one to whom that has happened? It’s here. Parodies of film noir characters? Sure: “It’s my brooding, hapless-drifter personality. Chicks can’t resist it.” Benedict Arnold as a hero? Yes, temporarily. An entire world created by a onetime Tuskegee Airman named Joe? Uh, yeah. An eventual “you always had the power to return” resolution along the lines of The Wizard of Oz? That’s here, too, along with a skeleton horse named Skinny and a host of other really odd characters. In fact, there is so much in Ghostopolis – not always logical, not always sensibly sequential, but there – that the book bears rereading, which is not often the case with graphic novels. TenNapel sometimes seems to lose control of one story thread or another, but he eventually pulls everything together, and his carefully crafted illustrations – from silhouettes to highly detailed drawings – are several cuts above the ordinary.

     For a harrowing true-life trip rather than a fictional one, parents whose children love Curious George may want to read The Journey That Saved Curious George – but whether or not to read it to or with children is an individual decision. This is a very well-done book, packed with photos and illustrations, about the escape of the Reys from the Nazis during World War Two and their earliest work about Curious George (originally French and named Fifi) and Whiteblack the Penguin (whose tale was rediscovered many years after the events of this book took place and finally published in 2000). The Reys were German-born Jews – a very dangerous thing to be when the Nazis were on the march – even though they had become Brazilian citizens. The Journey That Saved Curious George takes readers through a time of identity cards, hard-to-get visas, encroaching armies, consular delays and much more, with the Reys sleeping in their coats or with cows in a stable as they attempted, eventually successfully, to flee occupied Paris for Spain, Portugal, and eventually the United States. Louise Borden tells the story in matter-of-fact prose that nevertheless does not gloss over the horrors of the time. Allan Drummond’s illustrations are reminiscent of those in the Reys’ books but have their own color and character. The big question about The Journey That Saved Curious George is its intended audience. It looks like a book for children, but will be far too complex and scary for most kids who love the curious little monkey. Parents who remember their own enjoyment of the Reys’ books may want to keep this story for themselves until their children are old enough to appreciate it.

     Parents who remember a different, closer-to-home journey, or want their children to learn about it, are the target audience for Busing Brewster, which is intended to teach kids ages 6-10 about forced racial busing in the 1970s. The title character, a composite of first-graders, is skewed toward a positive view of a social experiment that tore neighborhoods apart and set blacks against whites in multiple cities. As befits a book for this age group, it emphasizes the good things that black children were supposed to get by going to white schools with “rooms for art and music and a roof that doesn’t leak.” Whites opposing busing are depicted as clearly evil: one protester carries a sign reading “Whites Only – Get Out,” rocks are thrown through the black children’s bus windows, and a single freckle-faced white boy and his father stand for the bad people who are against “them coloreds.” This is an extremely simplistic view of a highly controversial topic – even six-year-olds could handle more nuance than this – but the book is designed for black families and is not intended to be balanced. Yet the author’s note at the end has perspective: “Many blacks and whites honestly preferred that their children attend local schools. …Forced busing failed on many levels, but there is no denying that many black students were provided with opportunities they would not otherwise have had.” Too bad that Richard Michelson chose to be so one-sided in the story itself. The book gets a (+++) rating for at least attempting to handle a very difficult subject.

     After all these heavy forays into worlds real and make-believe, a little lightness is in order, and very young kids will get it from Swim! Swim! The book is listed on the cover as written “By Lerch,” the lonely, hat-wearing fish whose physical journey is not a long one – his tank isn’t very large, even though he says, “this is a big world” – but whose emotional journey is what counts. Lerch wants a friend, any friend. How about the pebbles on the tank’s bottom? He asks them to be his friend, but they do not answer. He asks the diver decoration standing in the tank to be his friend and gets no reply – “Good thing you can’t see tears underwater,” Lurch says after this attempt. Swimming and swimming, Lerch meets bubbles and tries talking to them in their own language, using a huge cartoon “talk balloon” in which the word “blub” is repeated 51 times. Poor Lerch (endearingly drawn by James Proimos at this point with a huge frown and big, sad eyes). Then Lerch encounters a cat, and may be about to turn into lunch – but suddenly there is another fish, Dinah (almost dinner), and everything manages to end happily and with silliness aplenty. Give Lerch and Proimos a (++++) rating – and check out the “recommendations” on the back cover.

     Kerka’s Book, which gets a (+++) rating, is for older readers, specifically girls ages 8-12, and is about a different sort of journey. This second book in The Fairy Godmother Academy series (the first was Birdie’s Book) is tied into an interactive Web site, www.FairyGodmotherAcademy.com, which is designed to encourage real-life as well as online challenges through games, music and fashion. The book itself, with a “collectible wisdom card” bound inside, is a straightforward magical adventure set in Aventurine, where selected human girls go to learn about their own internal magic and find out how to harness it in the role of fairy godmothers. Unlike the shy Birdie of the first book, Kerka is outgoing and self-confident, eager to start on the quest that she knows the fairies will require her to complete successfully. What throws Kerka is the nature of the challenge: instead of being asked to track down something physical, she must find her younger sister’s voice – and it is not only her own future that depends on her success. Readers will know from the start that Kerka will eventually succeed; even a scary encounter with a wolf turns out to be just a misunderstanding. “There’s a lot more to being a good fairy godmother than I realized,” one character says after the main adventure is over, and of course that is the point: it is not a simple matter of waving a wand and making magic happen, but requires self-knowledge and the willingness to endure fear and uncertainty – that is, to grow up, but not so much as to disbelieve in the underlying magic itself. Jan Bozarth’s pleasantly written book, enhanced by attractive illustrations by the late Andrea Burden, offers preteen girls an enjoyable and not-too-dangerous imaginary journey with a simple and clear underlying message of self-empowerment.

(+++) READING FUN BEFORE AGE ONE – AND UP

Fisher-Price Shapes All Around! By Jodi Huelin. Illustrations by Lyn Fletcher. Harper. $6.99.

Fisher-Price Counting Animals. By Jodi Huelin. Illustrations by Betsy Veness. Harper. $6.99.

The Berenstein Bears and the Haunted House. By Jan & Mike Berenstain. HarperFestival. $6.99.

Happy Halloween, Mittens! By Lola M. Schaefer. Pictures by Susan Kathleen Hartung. Harper. $3.99.

Biscuit’s First Beach Day. By Alyssa Satin Capucilli. HarperFestival. $3.99.

The Best Yard Sale. By Mercer Mayer. HarperFestival. $3.99.

Spider-Man: Funhouse Phantom. By Andy Ball. Pictures by MADA Design, Inc. HarperFestival. $6.99.

Spider-Man: Sandman Strikes! By Jeanine Le Ny. Illustrated by Andie Tong. HarperFestival. $3.99.

Transformers: Ratchet to the Rescue. Adapted by Jennifer Frantz. Illustrated by Guido Guidi. Harper. $3.99.

Transformers: Satellite Meltdown. Adapted by Lucy Rosen. Illustrated by Marcelo Matere. HarperFestival. $3.99.

Flat Stanley and the Haunted House. By Lori Haskins Houran. Pictures by Macky Pamintuan. Harper. $3.99.

Pinkalicious: School Rules! By Victoria Kann. Harper. $3.99.

Pinkalicious: Tickled Pink. By Victoria Kann. HarperFestival. $3.99.

Circus Fantastico. Concept by Lynn Gordon. Illustrated by Molly Idle. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

     Short, simple, easy-to-read and usually inexpensive books can help turn even the youngest children into lifelong readers, and follow their interests along as their reading prowess improves and they move up the age ladder. Two new board books sporting the Fisher-Price label – but not in any way offering a hard sell of the company’s products – are for babies as young as six months. Shapes All Around! is a lift-the-flap book that helps teach about circles, squares, diamonds and more with simple text in which cute animals play ball, have a picnic, take a bath, and so on. Parents should lift the flaps carefully the first time to avoid tearing them, but once used, the flaps are easy to manipulate and can be fun even for children too young to understand the very simple story. Similar flaps are the big attraction in Counting Animals, which features smiling animals in groups ranging from one to 10 – the correct number revealed when a flap is lifted. Happy penguins, smiling seahorses and grinning turtles, among others, are all here and all very enjoyable to see.

     Flaps can attract older children, too. The Berenstein Bears and the Haunted House, for ages 2-6, is a lift-the-flap book featuring Brother and Sister Bear searching for their lost kitten in a scary old mansion that turns out – unsurprisingly for books in this series – to be not so scary after all. Each page’s flap reveals a surprise – for instance, the bears open the dumbwaiter and find three squirrels inside, eating a meal. The most amusing scene, in the library, has flaps for “Frankenbear” and “Edgar Allen Bear.” But of course, flaps are not necessary in books for this age group, and most easy-to-read works do not include them. Happy Halloween, Mittens, part of the “I Can Read!” series, is designed for “emergent readers” and is a simple story about a mischievous kitten trying to help a boy decorate for Halloween. It is as seasonal as the Berenstains’ haunted-house book but is a more straightforward story – and Mittens is really cute. For summertime cuteness, Biscuit’s First Beach Day features another mischievous animal – this time a puppy – getting into trouble at the beach, meeting a puppy friend named Puddles, and having a good time both in the ocean and on the sand. The Best Yard Sale, another warm-weather book for roughly the same age group, features Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter searching the attic and his room for things to sell, having a who-makes-the-most-money competition with his sister (she wins), and enjoying Mom’s homemade cookies – the biggest yard-sale moneymaker of all. Kids will enjoy the clutter as well as the cuteness here, and perhaps be persuaded to clean out their own closets sometime. Well, perhaps.

     There are superheroes as well as such pleasant characters as the Berenstain Bears and Little Critter featured in books for beginning and growing readers – and here, too, sometimes in books with flaps and sometimes in straightforward narratives. Spider-Man: Funhouse Phantom sets Spider-Man against “Morbius, the Living Vampire,” and features foldout flaps on right-hand pages that actually advance the story, or at least move it sideways: one shows Spidey opening a sarcophagus after seeing a vampire-like cape, only to discover a mummy within, and another has Spidey in a jungle village where he thinks he sees kidnapped Mary Jane’s red hair – which turns out to be monkey fur. Everything works out just fine, of course, as it does in the non-flap Sandman Strikes! This one features Spidey fighting the villain who can slip through anyone’s fingers by turning to sand – or become as solid as rock when he wants to. Spider-Man comes up with a clever, if overly explosive, way to stop the sandy shapeshifter here.

     Speaking of shapeshifters, the Transformers are also the heroes in some early-reading books. Ratchet to the Rescue is a “Reading with Help” (Level 2) book of the “I Can Read!” series, and is simply the “back story” of Ratchet, who “can fix almost anything or anyone.” Satellite Meltdown is at the same reading level but not within the series, and has a somewhat more complex plot in which bad guys Ratbat and Buzzsaw are busy destroying the city until humans enlist Optimus Prime and the other good guys to stop them. There is plenty of crash-bang-smash action here to interest kids who enjoy the Hunt for the Decepticons series, from which both this story and the one about Ratchet are adapted.

     But central characters need not be violent for young readers to have fun with them. Jeff Brown’s creation, Flat Stanley, appears in another “Reading with Help” (Level 2) book of the “I Can Read!” series, Flat Stanley and the Haunted House. This is not really about a haunted house – the house is a setup at school, and the kids do not find it scary at all. Instead, it is a story about Stanley helping a friend stand up to a bully. It just happens to take place at Halloween, but its lesson is worthwhile anytime. The lessons of two new Pinkalicious books are good in any season, too. School Rules! is at Level 1 (“Beginning Reading”) in the “I Can Read!” series, and is a pleasant story about Pinkalicious bringing her make-believe unicorn, Goldilicious, to school, even though she is told that is against the rules. Thanks to a cooperative teacher, Pinkalicious learns that rules can be bent from time to time but are in pace for a purpose. In Tickled Pink, Pinkalicious is challenged to a joke-telling contest by a girl named Tiffany, and tries hard to come up with something funny on her own – not a joke taken from a book. Everything works out just fine, and everyone is friendly at the end, both here and in School Rules! That is a nice lesson for preschoolers and kindergartners, if not always an accurate one: parents need to explain that not everyone will be friendly all the time, and not all teachers will be comfortable with rule-bending.

     And what sort of fun is in store for kids as they become even more skilled at reading? Generally, there are fewer and fewer “gimmick” books, such as ones with flaps, for more experienced readers – but every once in a while, a cleverly designed one comes along. Circus Fantastico is one of them. It is a circus story with a mystery wrapped up inside – and the inside front cover has a magnifying glass wrapped up and attached to the book with a ribbon, so readers can search for clues and try to figure out what is happening before circus sleuth Ella the Dancing Elephant discovers the solution. The story is simple enough: circus props are disappearing – small ones, such as hair pins and sequins, Who could be taking them, and why? Because the disappearing objects are little, Ella needs a magnifying glass to figure out what is going on, so young readers are in a race of sorts with the elephant to unravel the mystery. The solution, though, comes less than halfway through the book, which then turns into a “who is the real star of the show?” story – a transition that some children may find a bit jarring. Circus Fantastico is really two stories in one, but the book ends happily for everyone, and the magnifying-glass inclusion is a nice touch that adds a little extra enjoyment to the whole proceeding.

(+++) DO YOU MIND?

Fully Present: The Science, Art, and Practice of Mindfulness. By Susan L. Smalley, Ph.D., and Diana Winston. Da Capo. $16.95.

The Joy of Mindful Sex: Be in the Moment and Enrich Your Lovemaking. By Claudia Blake. Da Capo. $18.95.

     It is not difficult to define mindfulness, but it can be very difficult to practice it. Mindfulness is simply the state of being fully “in” the present moment, uninvolved in anything other than what is happening at a particular instant. It ties closely to certain Buddhist principles and less closely to New Age thinking in general, and is supposed to confer multiple benefits on those who practice it successfully: reduced levels of stress and pain, better focus and concentration, a non-drug approach to treating anxiety and depression, and much more. But the mere fact that books must be written purporting to say how one becomes mindful indicates that this is not a natural way of interacting with the world (or, for that matter, failing to interact with it) for most people, certainly within Western cultures. What Susan Smalley (founder and director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA) and Diana Winston (mindfulness teacher and former Buddhist nun) try to do in Fully Present is, first, to explain what mindfulness is and what benefits it can confer; and, second, to teach readers how to practice it. It is tempting to go into Zen mode about this: “It is only by not practicing mindfulness that one can attain mindfulness,” or something along those lines. But Smalley and Winston argue that, in fact, mindfulness can be taught through a series of exercises in which one gets more closely in touch with one’s body and (for want of a better word) spirit. The word “meditation” crops up frequently in Fully Present, and is crucial to “learning” mindfulness. So Smalley and Winston constantly tell readers how to meditate. For “mindfulness of breathing,” for instance, they counsel comfort and relaxation, but with boundaries that it may be difficult for many people to attain: “Feel your back remaining upright, but not too tense; try to stay relaxed. Keep your eyes closed and your tongue resting on the roof of your mouth or wherever it’s comfortable, and rest your hands on your knees or lap. You can then notice your body sitting: the weight, the posture, and the shape of your body.” Or, for “mindfulness of emotions,” you should “feel your body present. Notice any pressure, movement, or places where your body makes contact with the floor or the chair. Find a place in your body that feels relaxed, pleasant, or neutral.” It can certainly be argued that anyone with sufficient time for daily meditation, and sufficient inclination to follow these instructions carefully, is well along the road toward mindfulness already – but it is the people who are stressed, anxious, time-pressed and unable to focus on elements of relaxation who most need mindfulness and are least likely to be capable of it. To deal with this issue, Smalley and Winston tend to fall back on simplistic ideas or clichés: “Stop for a moment and reexamine how your thoughts my cause you pain. …You can learn, in the midst of your thinking, to be mindful of thinking without getting caught up in the thought.” Or “don’t believe everything you think,” a statement that sounds like something from a bumper sticker and that the authors in fact attribute to one. Smalley and Winston appear to believe strongly in the power of mindfulness: it is hard to doubt their sincerity when they write, “The ability to find peace and ease within yourself, no matter what the conditions, may be the greatest gift you can give yourself.” But the notion that mindfulness is universally appropriate and universally learnable (and teachable) remains at best an overstatement driven by enthusiasm. And the authors’ attempts to explain away potential doubts about the efficacy of mindfulness amount to circular reasoning: “Learning something new involves a period of doubt. So it is important not to get discouraged as you learn meditation, but to recognize doubt for what it is – just doubt.” Those who want to try to learn mindfulness in the hope that it will deliver benefits to them should by all means experiment with the approaches in Fully Present – but should not feel like failures if they are unable to attain great heights (or depths) through this book, and if they do not really accept the scientific underpinning of mindfulness that the authors are at pains to try introducing repeatedly.

     If mindfulness does have benefits, though, it would certainly make sense for it to have them in sex. Being mindful – fully in the moment – with a sex partner would seem, both logically and intuitively, to heighten each person’s awareness of the other and make the sexual experience more complete. And that is in fact the argument that Claudia Blake – a British writer about popular culture who has a special interest in meditation – makes in The Joy of Mindful Sex. This is not exactly a sex manual: it is filled with artistic sepia photos of the sort that look as if they are showing things that they are not in fact showing, with the result that the book has a curiously old-fashioned and even prudish feeling about it. And some of the text has an old-fashioned feel to it as well: “If sexual discovery is a journey, committed relationships are the best way of ensuring you and your partner are traveling in the right direction.” On the other hand, Blake is scarcely naïve, noting nonjudgmentally that “for some people monogamy simply does not feel like the right answer for them.” Yet readers may find some of her formulations about interpersonal intimacy a touch odd: “What we must remember is that we are not only in a relationship with a partner, but with humanity. Both need to be treated with respect.” Blake takes pains to indicate that mindfulness can incorporate all aspects of sexuality, even such potential distractions as fantasies: “Whether we are sitting on our cushions or meditating while walking through the streets, a sexual fantasy drifting into our heads would certainly be a thought we would strive to let go of, a distraction from the mindful moment. …[But] our fantasies are a rich and deep source of information about the core of our sexual selves. …This does not mean you need to act on all of them, of course.” Blake urges readers to forgo perfectionism, to appreciate one’s partner for who and what he or she is instead of comparing him or her to some imagined ideal, and to use mindfulness to deal with such issues as male performance anxiety and female arousal difficulty. She urges readers to try “helping each other to love ourselves,” which is surely a laudable goal, if not one that is easily taught. And she recommends a variety of techniques, from sensual massage to gazing into a partner’s eyes, to increase mindfulness and involve both people as fully in the moment as possible. Many of these suggestions are unexceptionable and partake only incidentally of mindfulness teachings. The key to whether readers will enjoy this book and find it useful is how they respond to Blake’s descriptive methods. Before lovemaking, for example, she writes, “Begin by making your sacred space ready and bathing together. When you enter your sacred space, do a short meditation together, settling into your bodies and clearing your minds. …[Later] perform some sensual massage, adding words of appreciation and devotion, praising the other’s femininity or virility, pouring your attention into honoring her sexual self in all its glory.” This is pretty much Blake’s style throughout, and while some readers will no doubt find it tender and loving, others may deem it overdone or just plain silly. Page through the book a bit before buying it – it will not take long to decide to which group you are more likely to belong.

(++++) A TALE OF LESS-THAN-BENIGN NEGLECT

Schmidt: Symphony No. 3; Chaconne. Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vassily Sinaisky. Naxos. $8.99.

Schmidt: Concertante Variations on a Theme of Beethoven for Piano Left Hand and Orchestra; Piano Concerto in E flat for the Left Hand. Markus Becker, piano; NDR Radiophilharmonie conducted by Eiji Oue. CPO. $16.99.

     Franz Schmidt (1874-1939) is one of those “in Mahler’s orbit” composers – Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942) is another – whose life story intersects Mahler’s and whose music suffers by comparison. Yet there are periodic expressions of wonder that Schmidt’s (and Zemlinksy’s) music is not better known and more often performed. Schmidt has long had a strong reputation in Austria, and his works garnered international awards as well as frequent performances for some time. Then they declined into almost total obscurity until recently beginning to reemerge on CD. Why?

     These two new releases help provide an answer. They show Schmidt to be a highly skilled craftsman and a knowledgeable orchestrator, but a poor provider of emotional connection and a not-very-adept tunesmith. His works are very well put together, but they generally do not grab a listener and make him or her want to hear more; and despite their grand Romantic scale, their emotive capabilities are limited.

     The most successful pieces on these CDs are the two with the most rigid formal structures: the Chaconne on the Naxos CD and the Concertante Variations on the CPO release. The Chaconne is a monumental and fascinating work that Schmidt wrote for organ in 1925, in C-sharp minor. In 1931, he transposed it to D minor and orchestrated it – for very large forces, including (among other instruments) bass tuba, three timpani and three tamtams in different registers. A chaconne is essentially a set of variations, and the variation form is one in which Schmidt excels. This work is quite extraordinary both in length (close to half an hour) and formal inventiveness, from the original display of the theme in the cellos through a set of four sections based on the Aeolian, Lydian, Dorian and Ionian modes. A compositional tour de force, Schmidt’s Chaconne is a formal, elegant work that calls on the audience’s intellect more than its emotions – and for that reason is exceptionally successful on its own terms. The Malmö Symphony Orchestra, although not quite in the first rank of international ensembles, plays the work deftly, with Vassily Sinaisky highlighting its many fine instrumental touches.

     Equally successful, although in a very different way, are the Concertante Variations on a Theme of Beethoven, written by Schmidt for famed pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961), who lost his right arm during World War I. Among all the composers who wrote works for Wittgenstein – Ravel, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Richard Strauss and others – Schmidt was the pianist’s favorite. It is easy to see why. The Concertante Variations are filled with virtuosity and opportunities for display, and they are extremely well constructed, but they are unsubtle and direct in expression and do not distract listeners with any weighty arguments that might lessen attention on the soloist. Yet these variations are not emptily flashy in the manner of salon pieces or works written purely for display purposes – there is genuine musical value to them and quite a lot of variety, from a “Tempo di Bolero” to a concluding fugato. Markus Becker plays them with real style and fervor, and the accompaniment by the NDR Radiophilharmonie under Eiji Oue is first-rate.

     The primary pieces on both these CDs, though, are less appealing, even though they are well worth hearing. Becker and Oue do an equally fine job with Schmidt’s Piano Concerto in E flat, also written for Wittgenstein, but the work is less satisfying despite its massive scale (it runs nearly 45 minutes, more than twice the length of Ravel’s concerto for Wittgenstein). Schmidt clearly thought out the piece very carefully – again, it is easy to see why Wittgenstein liked Schmidt’s work so much that at one point he showed it to Benjamin Britten to indicate how Britten should compose in a way that Wittgenstein would approve. The concerto features grand melodies contrasted with pastoral ones, clever use of harmony, and a final-movement climax consisting of a cadenza of more than 160 measures. But the work feels studied and rather dry, constructed with care rather than passion, and interesting rather than genuinely memorable. It must have been a highly satisfying piece for Wittgenstein to play, but from the audience’s point of view, its strength lies more in its structure than in its content. It is highly impressive in many ways, yet simply does not wear very well.

     Nor does Schmidt’s Symphony No. 3 – despite, again, a very fine performance. This is one of the works that garnered Schmidt international praise in his own time: written in 1927-28, it won first prize from New York’s Columbia Graphophone Company as the best new symphony in the spirit of Schubert’s “Unfinished” (as part of the centenary commemoration of Schubert’s death). Yet there is nothing very Schubertian about the music – there is far less of Schubert here than in, say, Bruckner’s earlier symphonies. The first movement does offer some appealing if rather slow-moving lyricism, and the second movement is particularly well constructed (it is essentially a set of variations – that form that Schmidt handled so well). The work has all the right elements for a symphony, including a well-made scherzo and trio and a finale whose Lento opening provides the theme of its Allegro vivace section. But it is an easier work to admire than to enjoy – it feels careful rather than involving. And despite the Schubert-related award it received, this symphony is utterly lacking in the tunefulness that was Schubert’s hallmark. Schmidt was certainly a fine, solid composer who knew his craft well and did an expert job of assembling well-wrought, complex works. But there is little that is gripping, much less charming, in the music heard on these CDs. The impression they leave is that although the neglect of Schmidt’s high-quality music may be unfair, it is also understandable.

(++++) HALF A YEAR AHEAD OF THEIR TIME

2011 Calendars: 365-Day—M.C. Escher; Shakespeare’s Insults; Wall— Exquisite Creatures; Man Ray; Edward Gorey’s “The Deranged Cousins”; B. Kliban Coloring Cat Calendar. Pomegranate. $12.99 each (Escher; Shakespeare); $13.99 each (Creatures, Man Ray, Gorey); $9.99 (Kliban).

     No, the middle of summer is not too early to look ahead to the wintry days in the northern hemisphere that we humans designate as the end of one year and the start of another – certainly not when there are such delights as the 2011 Pomegranate calendars around. In fact, a flurry of anticipation of the new year can make summer more fun, even in the knowledge that buying a 2011 calendar early won’t actually let you start using it early. Unless, of course, you cannot resist looking at the calendar’s contents…which means you will probably be thoroughly familiar with them by the time winter rolls around…which means you will probably want another of these calendars for the new year. And what is wrong with that?

     You may very well want several Pomegranate calendars in any case. The company offers an unusually wide variety of them, in an unusually wide number of styles – with particular emphasis on calendars with visual impact (lots and lots of fine-arts offerings) but with equally high quality in calendars focused on words. Consider, to take two examples among many, the 365-day calendars based on works by M.C. Escher (strong visual orientation) and Shakespeare (strong verbal focus). Pomegranate’s Escher calendar is a feast for people who do not want the world to seem exactly the same day in and day out. The Dutch artist, who told the world that he was “deliberately inconsistent,” was a master at applying strict geometrical principles in ways that led to the creation of highly realistic-looking objects and scenes that cannot, in fact, exist. The notorious box in which it is impossible to decide what is inside and what is outside – shown on the cover of the 2011 calendar – is but one example. This calendar offers 261 Escher images in all, ranging from Möbius strips to fish-eye-lens views of cities to brilliantly realized blendings in which objects change subtly but quite definitely into other things, often while switching from black to white or from two to (apparently) three dimensions. Escher was not a sensationalist – his work was very carefully thought through, and he had a fine analytical mind as well as the ability to use perspective effectively in traditional ways (as seen mainly in his earlier works). The 2011 calendar’s weekend pages offer 52 excerpts from Escher’s writings, in which he explains the way he saw the world and the reasons behind some of his deliberate distortions of reality. This calendar is a recipe for year-long fascination, one day at a time.

     So is Shakespeare’s Insults, where words are the entire focus – and what words! Known for the beauty of his expressions and his skill at fulsome praise, Shakespeare was equally adept at mining the language of his day for purposes of innuendo, insult and all-around nastiness. There are 313 examples of his brilliant but less-than-kind verbiage here – one for each weekday and one per weekend. And non-scholars need not be put off by any presumptive erudition – anyone can understand what is going on quite well, because each day’s insult comes complete with explanations of no-longer-familiar words and of who is attacking whom. There is something highly satisfying in knowing that the greatest writer in the English language was quite as clever with curses and sexual puns as with highflown sentiment. “All villains that do stand, by [compared with] thee, are pure,” he writes in Timon of Athens, and “Foul-spoken coward, that thund’rest with thy tongue/ And with thy weapon nothing dar’st perform,” in Titus Andronicus. It is especially enjoyable, after reading less-known quotations like these, to stumble upon better-known and equally insulting ones, such as, from Julius Caesar, “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” Erudition in the service of malediction – what a combination!

     If Pomegranate’s 365-day calendars offer both visual and verbal focuses, its many wall calendars are primarily oriented toward the visual – but in very different ways. Consider, for example, the color ones compared with those in black-and-white. You will not find a more colorful 2011 calendar than Exquisite Creatures, which displays a dozen of artist/entomologist Christopher Marley’s minimalist works based on insects. There is no “yuck” factor here; in fact, in some displays it is hard to tell that insects are involved at all: “Blistered Ground Beetles,” for example, looks like a brightly colored school of fish until a close examination reveals that the fish “heads” are actually the beetles’ rears, and “Various Beetles” appears, even in close view, to be a starburst-shaped multicolored jewel. From a gorgeous blowup of a single swallowtail butterfly to cascades of brilliant-hued beetles and weevils, Marley’s art enchants and delights with colors that seem too bright to be found in nature – but are.

     At the opposite extreme is the surrealistic black-and-white work of Man Ray, a Dadaist who went beyond the “everything is art” pronouncement of other such artists to use old photographic processes in the creation of striking and often disturbing images. Perhaps the two oddest and most intriguing among the dozen in this 2011 calendar are Les larmes (Glass Tears), an extreme closeup of a woman’s eyes and nose with five tiny glass beads carefully placed on her face, and Le violon d’Ingres, a view of a woman’s naked back with two F holes (the shapes that let sound come out of a stringed instrument) above her hips. But other images here are almost equally strange and involving, from self-portraits to beautifully framed but distinctly odd visions of people.

     Speaking of distinctly odd black-and-white art: Edward Gorey is another artist whose work appears in a number of Pomegranate offerings, and The Deranged Cousins calendar is not only a fine example of Gorey’s work but also a good choice for anyone who would like a bit more verbiage in a wall calendar than is customary. There is, of course, little that is “customary” about Gorey, among whose oddly skewed Victorian/Edwardian tales of murder and mayhem The Deranged Cousins is a standout. The 12 calendar illustrations take this typically dark tale through the entire year, starting with the three cousins “seventy-nine years ago” and ending when all three have succumbed to mayhem or mayhap “an unusually high tide.” Gorey’s dark humor and meticulous craftsmanship pervade the illustrations from January through December and will be a treat for those with a suitably sinister turn of mind.

     For 2011, buyers do not even have to make a final decision between color and black-and-white Pomegranate wall calendars if they do not want to. In an expansion of its offerings into a line called Pomegranate Kids, the company makes it possible to start with something in black-and-white and end (or continue) with it in color. Fans of B. Kliban know his fascination with cats very well indeed, and the dozen pictures in the suitable-for-coloring 2011 Cat Calendar are feline-filled, from the two cats indulging in ballet to the one wearing a Hawaiian shirt to the small one surrounded by 10 very large fish. Kliban’s cartoons are fun even in black-and-white, so there is certainly no need to color them in order to enjoy this calendar; and there is certainly no requirement to try to duplicate the colors for the pictures that are shown on the back of the calendar. But as a yearlong project to bring some brightness into a child’s (or adult fan’s) life, this calendar combines amusement with artistry – fine fun for feline fanciers, and something suitable to contemplate when thinking ahead to the still-distant new year.

(++++) BOARD BOOKS AND BOB BOOKS

Katy and the Big Snow. By Virginia Lee Burton. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.

Star Wars ABC. Lucas Books/Scholastic. $12.99.

Bob Books: Sight Words, Kindergarten; Sight Words, First Grade. By Lynn Maslen Kertell. Pictures by Sue Hendra. Scholastic. $16.99 each.

     Put interesting content and fine packaging together – in two very different formats – and you have some very successful books for the youngest readers. Actually, Katy and the Big Snow, even though it is now in board-book form, is not quite for the readers usually targeted by board books. This is a fairly complex story by modern standards (it was originally published in 1943), and there are lots of things to see and point out and figure out as the tale of an unexpectedly big snowfall in the city of Geoppolis proceeds. Summertime may be an especially enjoyable time to read this winter-oriented book with a child, and the book’s size – somewhere between small board book and lap-size board book – invites closeness and cuddling. Virginia Lee Burton is best known for Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, and parents will find a similar theme here: a heroic, anthropomorphized piece of machinery (without a named driver this time; in fact, apparently without an operator at all) that bravely saves the day for lots of other machines and, not incidentally, people. Katy, “a beautiful red crawler tractor” who (not “that”) can function as either bulldozer or snowplow, rarely gets called into service in Geoppolis, whose winters are normally mild; but when she is needed after a huge snowstorm, she does everything that everyone asks of her after every single snow plow in town breaks down. The story is simple, but there is a lot to see and learn from in the book: a map of Geoppolis locating 30 separate landmarks, a compass that includes eight directions (NW, NE, SW and SE as well as the usual four), lots of road signs and building labels to read, and more. Watching the city re-emerge from a two-page spread of solid white is a real joy, and seeing Katy’s circuitous paths as she plows out different parts of town is another.

     The joys – and illustrations – are quite different in Star Wars ABC, which extends the popular franchise into the alphabet realm with a handsome oversized board book featuring characters from all six Star Wars films. This is one alphabet book in which it is obvious (to fans) what the letter X will stand for: the X-Wing fighter, of course. The letter Q is more of a puzzlement – it turns out to be Queen Amidala – but many other letters go with exactly the characters that Star Wars fans will expect: D for Darth Vader, Y for Yoda, J for Jedi, O for Obi-Wan Kenobi, and so on. There is almost no text in the book – just excellent full-page pictures for each letter, with the briefest bit of description: “R2-D2 is a clever robot” is just one comment that is rather underwhelming. But the uncredited writing is not the point here: the book is a very effective use of the Star Wars universe as a teaching tool for the alphabet, and parents of young Star Wars fans will find it both attractive and useful.

     The Bob Books are useful and attractive in a very different way. These highly focused little volumes, packaged in boxes with flash cards and instructions for parents or other teachers, take reading and understanding one tiny step a time, while giving young children the experience of reading whole books entirely on their own. Super-simple stories with super-simple illustrations are the key here: “Sam saw Mat. Sam ran to Mat,” appears in Kindergarten Book 1, while the same set’s Book 7 – with slightly more advanced vocabulary – includes, “Dot saw Mat. Can she tag Mat?” There is a tremendous amount of incentive for progress built into the Bob Books. Each box of 10 little stories has books in three different colors, so kids move ahead visually as well as with vocabulary. The word building itself is so gradual that many children will manage it on their own: new words tend to be very similar to ones already learned – “ran” in one book and “can” in the next, or “he” in one story and “she” in the next one. There are three “sight words” per story, and flash-card reinforcement is designed less for the expected nouns (“home”) than for recurring words whose critical importance is often overlooked in other books for very young children (“went,” “they,” “not,” “in,” and so on). The two new Sight Words volumes are valuable additions to the Bob Books line, which already includes instructional little volumes from alphabet basics through long vowels. Any parent who wants to help a child get a bit ahead before school starts again – or wants to reinforce the lessons of kindergarten and first grade – will find the new Bob Books boxes to be fine learning tools that are also a lot of fun for kids to use.

(++++) COLLEGE SELF-GUIDANCE, FROM THE EXPERTS

The Portable Guidance Counselor: Answers to the 284 Most Important Questions about Getting into College. By the Staff of The Princeton Review. Princeton Review/Random House. $14.99.

     Let’s face it: high-school guidance counselors are overwhelmed. Even before the current era of extremely tight budgets and educational cutbacks, there were never enough counselors to give high-school students plenty of personal attention during their struggle to make one of the biggest decisions of their young lives: what colleges to choose. This reality of life makes The Portable Guidance Counselor especially valuable: it cannot take the place of face-to-face meetings with a counselor who knows a student as an individual, even imperfectly; but it contains the collected knowledge from a survey of more than 2,000 counselors, and is therefore a highly useful supplement to whatever personalized meetings a student can arrange at his or her school.

     The notion of “284 most important questions” is a little silly – why not 283 or 285? – but the book certainly delves deeply into issues that will be of significant interest and concern to all college-bound students. “Should I apply to a school that I can’t afford?” “What do I do if I want to study abroad?” “How many times should I take and retake standardized tests?” “Do colleges really care about extracurricular activities?” These and many other of the questions here can all be answered with the same two-word reply: “It depends.” But to the credit of the Princeton Review staff that assembled this book, The Portable Guidance Counselor does not unduly hedge about these or other subjects. Each question is listed as posed by a specific (if generic-sounding) student, seen as a silhouette; each answer is given in narrative form, including multiple quotations from counselors, and with additional counselor quotes at the bottoms of pages. Thus, “Is a B in an AP class better than an A in a regular class?” gets the narrative response, “The overwhelming consensus is that students are better off taking Advanced Placement classes because colleges appreciate the effort of taking on a challenge when a student could easily have taken a less-strenuous course in the same subject.” But the narrative also says that “not everyone agrees with this line of thought,” and cites some differing opinions. And beneath the narrative, there are a couple of specific comments from named counselors, such as, “I like the B in the AP class. You have a good grade, and the AP class is far more rigorous. …No C in AP classes, however.”

     The answer to this AP question makes it clear that the counselors do not have uniform responses or recommendations, and that may be a source of frustration to students. But it is a dose of reality. Just as a counselor in person needs to (or should) take each individual student’s needs, desires and abilities into account, tailoring answers to that student’s particular situation, so the counselors in The Portable Guidance Counselor try to evaluate a variety of possible scenarios to help students reading the book figure out which circumstances best fit their own.

     Thus, “Are there certain extracurricular activities that admissions committees love?” provokes such quoted responses as, “I find that colleges truly appreciate substantive school and/or community service,” “I am inclined to believe that leadership is highly valued,” and – in the narrative section – “service-oriented activities are always popular [and] will certainly help you come admissions time if you show a real commitment to them." And “what should I not say on my college application essay?” brings these comments: “Essays should be marketing tools for the applicant,” “High-emotion issues such as abortion, death penalty, etc., should be avoided,” and “Any topic can be good or bad depending on the way it is handled in the essay.” It is left to students who read The Portable Guidance Counselor to evaluate these different and sometimes potentially contradictory pieces of advice – for example, if being yourself and being passionate about something are important, and what you are passionate about is a high-emotion issue, what do you do? But that is why this book is no substitute for in-person meetings with a (hopefully) knowledgeable and concerned school guidance counselor. Nor is it the place to go for definitive answers about what colleges to choose and how to get into them. There are no definitive answers to those questions, in print or in person. The best any student can do is assemble as many tools as possible to help himself or herself make the best decision within particular circumstances of time, knowledge, finances and other factors. The circumstances, and thus the decision, will differ – must differ – from person to person. But for many different people in many different situations, The Portable Guidance Counselor deserves a place in the tool kit.