The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes

Rating: WORTHY!

It came to my attention this morning that I never reviewed this book which I read some time ago and found fascinating, so here we go! Note that this book offers no support for young-Earth creationism or for the Biblical mythology. Eve is used loosely and I wish it had not been, but authors don't always think up the best titles for their books - or worse, they're pushed into choosing misleading titles by their publisher for the sake of boosting sales.

The book is all about mitochondrial genetics. Mitochondrial DNA comes to us only through our mothers. It is separate from the main complement of DNA that we have, and was probably, at one point way, way back, a bacterium that got inside a cell and thrived there. Since it is part of the cell, it comes from the mother's ovum. It is not found in sperm, so this is a matriarchal lineage that can be traced back genetically and can tell enthralling tales of ancestry unavailable to us via other means.

The book focuses on modern European lineages, all of which can be traced back to seven founding groups. note that this doesn't mean that there there were only seven women alive back then. There was never a point where there was one Eve, either. There were many, many more women alive, but only these seven had their mitochondrial DNA lucky enough to survive the ages through to modern times. This means that a heck of a lot of DNA has been lost! We should mourn that.

The groups are referred to as haplogroups, scientifically, which in a very rough sense is somewhat akin to a sub-species or a tribe, but these only very rough approximations. Humans are all the same species, but even within a single species there can be many subgroups. The author attaches female names to each of these sub-, or haplogroups, the initial letter of which is taken from the alphabetical letter by which the haplogroup is known to science. The author gives his fictional the names as follows:

• Helena
• Jasmine:
• Katrine
• Tara
• Ursula (Haplogroup U5, excluding subgroup K)
• Velda
• Xenia

TO BE COMPLETED!

On the Road to Tara by Aljean Harmetz

Rating: WARTY!

This is a large format print book replete with photographs from all stages of the production and all aspects of it. But it's not just a picture book. It has a lot of text describing aspects of the production from the acquisition of the rights to the novel, to the filming itself. If you're a big aficionado of the book or the movie, or are deeply interested in film-making, then this is a worthy read, but overall I have to say it wasn't worth my time. I found it interesting in parts, but it was too big, too full of fluff, and far too repetitive to be of great value.

If there's one thing that runs through this book, it's the constant and monotonous drumbeat of producer David Selnick's obsessive-compulsive micromanagement and meddling. It's really more of a book about him than it is about the movie, come to think of it and frankly, it's tedious to read this much of that topic. Yes, his behavior was an important part of how the movie got made, and yes, once in a while it's interesting to hear about how interfering and uncontrollable he was, but to hear it in every other paragraph is truly irritating and belabors the point long past its sell-by date.

I felt the book seriously overdid that at the expense of other things it could have related, but apart from where it talks about Selznick's behavior, the book seems superficial, skimming over other important and interesting stuff until it gets to the next Selznick-o-thon. I can't commend it as a worthy read for this reason.

Super Cool Tech

Rating: WORTHY!

While there is a slew of production staff listed for this hardback print book, there is no one writer or group of writers listed unfortunately. Way to disenfranchise writers! The book itself is pretty cool, although it's somewhat out of date bow as any print version of a book such as this must be the moment it hits the bookshelves.

The one I read was published in 2018 and takes the form of a rather thick laptop computer, opening the same way (as a calendar rather than as a book). The cover and the ends of the pages are silver and the whole effect is pretty neat. It's published by the DK arm of Penguin. Or should that be the DK flipper?!

Inside is well over 170 fully-illustrated color pages divided into sections covering Play, Move, Construct, Power, Live, Future, and Reference, which is a look into a much more speculative future. The topics covered are games machines, holography, electric cars, space-travel, large machines, innovative buildings and homes, artificial intelligence, environment, and an assortment of other, high-tech or adventurous gadgets, items, and technology life choices.

The coverage is shallow, but varied and interesting, and it's definitely stimulating, especially to a younger reader, although it's not aimed specifically at any age range. I commend this as a worthy read. It was interesting to see what's come to pass and what's not made it based on what this book talks about as cutting-edge technology, and it has more hits that misses depending on hwo far it projects into the future.

Two Minute Mysteries Collection by Donald J Sobol

Rating: WARTY!

This is an amalgamation of three volumes that Sobol published starting in 1969, the final one coming out in 1975. Readers may know him better for his Encyclopedia Brown series which was extensive and which ran from 1963 to 2012. I've never read any of those, and I'm disinclined to do so after reading these stories, which are short, but rather violent, and often so simplistic, or so arcane, or so out of date that they're really not very entertaining. The book contains some 200 of them and my understanding is that many of these were actually in the Encyclopedia Brown series originally.

Each story covers only two pages in print, with the solution to the mystery printed (for reasons which escape me) upside down at the bottom of the second page. All of them are solved by Doctor Haledjian who hands-down beats Hermione Granger for being an insufferable know-it-all. He's obnoxious, and no one person could know all that he supposedly knows about every little thing. Worse than this though is that he's in every story, and nearly all of them are murders and robberies, which makes me highly-suspicious. How come so many serious crimes occur around Haledjian?! LOL!

The mysteries are of the nature of, for example, a guy supposedly entering a house from a freezing outdoors and claiming he saw a thief, and Haledjian calling him a liar on the basis that the guy's eyeglasses would have misted up as soon as he entered the warm house, and therefore he would have seen nothing. I'm serious, that's what they're like - all of them, except, for example, the ones which require you to know in detail how the old Pullman rail sleeping cars are organized, and so on.

Another example is where this guy wants to impress a girl so he hires a professional boxer to come on to the girl and then 'knocks him out' to impress her. The girl sees through this because the guy's eyeglasses, which he placed in his coat top pocket prior to fighting, survived the encounter unbroken despite the prize fighter delivering several body blows. The idea is that the eyeglasses must have broken, but that's not necessarily true. Even if they were hit, they might have survived and there was a relatively low chance that they'd be hit anyway, since a boxer would be punching to the abdomen and solar plexus rather than high on the chest. Despite that, this girl, who is all starry-eyed after the fight, suddenly rejects the guy (as she rightly should, it must be said) not because of the improbability of this wimpy guy surviving an assault from a prize fighter and then knocking him out cold with one punch, but solely on the basis of the eyeglasses being intact!

Another case of trapping a criminal hinges on the confusion between Anchorage - the port city in Alaska which contains almost half the state's population - and anchorage: that state of a ship being anchored somewhere, but Haledjian's persistent mistake is his flawed assumption that everyone knows the correct terminology for everything and routinely uses it in everyday interactions. He idiotically believes that everyone has his own knowledge pool, but had I heard this same thing, I would have assume Anchorage, Alaska was being referred to because most people don't say 'at anchorage', they say 'docked' even if that term is not strictly accurate! Again, for me it was really weak, and such a case would have been thrown out of court were there no other corroborative evidence.

In another case, Haledjian's idiotic incriminating evidence is that no railroad man would have said "twenty minutes after three," but instead would have said, "three-twenty," which is patent bullshit. His second line of devastating evidence is that no resident of San Francisco would ever call it 'Frisco. Again, had this case been tried on the basis of those two lines of 'evidence' it would have been summarily dismissed.

Another case hinges on a guy - who is dying of a stab wound - coming out of the house and telling Haledjian "Water" which shortly convinces him that this guy Scott is the guilty party. His 'reasoning' is that he learned from Scott that this guy was left-handed and consequently had all of his faucets switched so that the hot and cold water come out of the 'wrong' faucets as compared with the standard arrangement. Let's ignore the fact that this person being left-handed offers no rationale for switching faucets and put it down to the guy's eccentricity. What convinces Haledjian of Scott's guilt is that when he rushes into the house to get water (instead of immediately calling for an ambulance) he gets hot water rather than the cold he expected.

Haledjian realizes that Scott must have run the hot water to wash blood off his hands and this is why hot water came out immediately rather than taking time to warm up, and that therefore Scott is the murderer! If that's the case, why didn't the victim say "Scott stabbed me!" instead of offering the asinine cryptic clue 'water' and hoping Haledjian would make the labyrinthine connection? It's horseshit of the same stinking hue that Dan Brown created in the idiotic The Da Vinci Code when he had a dying man running around creating cryptic clues when he could simply have left a note explaining that a mad monk killed him, and asking in the note for Robert Langdon to contact his granddaughter!

So while I thought these would be entertaining, they were overall more annoying than anything. Once in a while there was an interesting or an entertaining one, but those were too few and far between for me to find this a commendable read. Maybe it would make a good bathroom book - you can always use the pages if you run out of toilet tissue! But as for me, I DNF'd it.

Vast by Linda Nagata

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the last Nagata that I read although I understand this one is superseded by another novel called Edge. I have no interest in reading that. I have no interest in re-reading this one either (or any of this series), but I do have a decent enough recollection of it to say this was the best of the three I did read, and to give it a worthy rating.

The story could be a standalone since it's essentially unconnected with anything that preceded it and needs no connection with anything else. It tells the story of a group of astronauts in a spacecraft named the 'Null Boundary', who are running from an alien race known as the Chenzeme. The Chenzeme for reasons either unexplained or which I do not recall, are purging space of humans. Maybe they're terrified of the nano-tech that humans have unleashed? LOL!

There's some weird stuff that happens in this novel and some situations which make it interesting, but that's all I'm going to say about it. I do commend it as a worthy read although I have to say that after three of her novels, I'm really not feeling any need to read anything else by this author.

The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata

Rating: WARTY!

I know I read this, but I recall nothing about it, which tells me it wasn't that great even though at the time I did read two other novels in "The Nanotech Succession" of which this is supposedly the first, although Tech Heaven is also part of the series and precedes this one.

The story in retrospect makes no sense. It features two nano-enhanced characters, Nikko, and Phousita, both of whom were enhanced by a device from which this novel takes its title. Nikko is coming to the end of his allotted span, just like Roy in Blade Runner, and just like Roy in Blade Runner, Nikko doesn't want to go quietly into that bad night, or any night, so he steals the Bohr Maker, which despite the terror in which it holds society, was never destroyed, but was retained in the archives of the Commonwealth police. Why? Who the fuck knows! Honestly? It makes zero sense.

Only now are the Commonwealth police determined to wipe out all trace of the Bohr Maker, so like Roy in Blade Runner, selfish Nikko is on the run with Rachael, um, Phousita, and we're supposed to root for him after what he did? That's it. So, Blade Runner, really. I don't recall and I'm not inclined to go back and re-read it this or any other of this series! If I were I'd probably rate this more highly than warty!

Deception Well by Linda Nagata

Rating: WARTY!

I read this some considerable time ago and barely remember it, which is what is now coloring my rating, because if it had been more entertaining than it evidently was, I'd have finished out the series, but I have no interest in ever reading it again or getting back into these stories at all.

There is a series of four: Tech-Heaven, The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, and Vast and they're only loosely connected, although I believe a couple of them are more sequential and connected than the rest. I never did read the first one and cannot summon up any interest in doing so now.

This story, named after the planet where it takes place, is set in a community which lives on the side of a space elevator. Why, I do not recall, but they are trapped there. How they survive is sketchy. The planet below is supposedly infested with nanotech that is commonly believed harmful, so no one is allowed down there, but even though there are rebels who wish to be set loose down there, the authorities won't allow it. There's no reason at all given as to why they're not simply allowed to go. Naturally they do go down there eventually, but I can't for the life of me recall what happened, which should speak volumes about how uninteresting this was.

Nor is there any info as to why this high-tech society doesn't have robots - a common omission is far too many sci-fi stories. Those robots could have been sent down there to probe the surface and see if the problem was A, as bad as it was supposed and B, getting better or worse. It seems to me that nanotech has a lifespan and maybe all the tech is dead on the surface now. No one seems remotely curious to find out what the status is! That's not authentic and it's a common problem with this sort of dystopic novel because the author stupidly seems to treat everyone as though they all believe the same things and behave the same way - there never are any rebels or conspiracy theorists, or adventurers, or whatever. It's not realistic.

The novel must have seemed interesting enough at the time, but reflecting on it now, it seems silly. There is a main character named Lot who is the son of a guy named Jupiter Apolinario, which I'm sorry but is just plain stupid as names go, to say nothing of pretentious. Earlier, he led a group of followers down the planet and they were never heard from again. Just like his father, Lot is considered a potentially inspiring leader, but as a character, he never inspired me! After all of his suffering, maybe he should be consider a Job Lot?!

We're told in the book blurb that on Deception Well, "a razor-thin line divides bliss from damnation" but if they have no idea what's going on down on the surface, and have never investigated it, how can they possible know this? Again, stupid. Like I said, I did read this once, but I recall nothing of it and have zero interest in starting it again (I know 'cause I tried!), so in hindsight I cannot rate this a worthy read.

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is where I quit reading this series. At the time I didn't know I would be quitting it, but I sure wasn't anywhere near invested enough to actively seek the next one. In the end I read a prequel in which I was seriously disappointed. As is usual in this series, McDevitt spends way too much time on things which really don't drive the story. In this case it's ironically the new drive (which will power McDevitt's other series in this universe, but which is set a couple of centuries later, I believe).

Finally McDevitt gets serious about the biggest threat to the galaxy, which was discovered in the first book in this series, but then inexplicably neglected until this story, five novels later! It turns out that the omega 'clouds' are coming from near the center of the galaxy, and inexplicably after being rather retired from spaceflight, Hutch pilots this next trip to seek out the source, which turns out to be rather boring. Nothing much happens - it's all journey and little payoff, and I think this boredom is why I lost interest in the series - that, and the fact that with this discovery, it was largely over by then anyway.

Odyssey by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

Priscilla Hutchins isn't even a pilot in this one - she's an administrator and the book focuses on a different pilot whose main qualification, it seems, is that she's 'beautiful'. Interest in space travel is waning (despite a deadly omega cloud with Earth's name on it?!) and so Hutch is fighting that, and a mission is launched to try and figure out what these 'UFOs' are that are being spotted out in space. They're named moonriders for no good reason, but why is the novel called Odyssey? In Omega, the clouds are called Omega clouds, so the novel is called Omega. Not here I guess. Anyway, this new pilot drops monitors to discover what these moonriders are, yet they apparently can't drop monitors to watch the omega clouds, one of which is barreling down on Earth?!!)

The story made little sense and is perhaps the most boring of the series that I read.

Omega by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

This is the fourth novel in the Priscilla Hutchins series and like the previous one, it has nothing to do with the omega cloud threat per se, even though it is a threat from one of those 'clouds' which starts the story off.

Given that this threat was discovered in the first book in the series, you would think by now that humanity would have monitors on every known omega cloud out there, tracking it, but once again they're taken by surprise as an omega threatens a planet with a civilization on it. In true Star Trek mode (barf! I am not a fan of Star Trek), they've somehow convinced themselves that they must save the planet without revealing themselves to the aliens. This makes zero sense.

The idea in Star Trek is that civilizations must inevitably suffer after contact with a superior civilization, but this is bullshit based on a primitive and ignorant past. It makes no sense in an enlightened future (and Star Trek breaches the rule constantly!). It especially makes no sense here when an entire plant is threatened. Rather than try to tackle the Omega cloud, the focus inexplicably is on the planet and of course they end up making contact.

One again we have minor and uninteresting characters and a planetary threat - pretty much the same as in previous volumes, which is why I detest series for the most part - it's inevitably the same story over and over again with the same characters and that's precisely what happens here; same threat, same urgency. These novels could each have been written independently with new characters instead of being part of the same series and nothing would have been lost while there stood much to gain. Of course, then the cloning of the earlier volumes for re-use in later ones would have been far more stark. I guess maybe that's why it's a series? The more I reconsider these though, the more I wonder why I stayed with this series as long as I did. I must have viewed them differently when I was younger than I do now! Clearly my tastes and tolerance have changed!

Chindi by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WARTY!

The "Chindi" in the story is an asteroid that's been converted into a space ship to capture samples from across the galaxy. The story of Chindi is another example of McDevitt tossing a bunch of spoiled, uninteresting, flat and minor characters into a spaceship piloted by Priscilla Hutchins, the least commanding commander ever, and having them do stupid things repeatedly despite life-threatening scenarios on repeat. These "rich, amateur SETI enthusiasts" hire her to pilot them on a jaunt to try and track down where a mysterious signal is coming from, and their journey takes them on a sort of hare and hounds trip from one planet to another, each of which is orbited by an alien satellite. Why Hutch would go off on yet another trip populated by idiots is a mystery, and I forget what happened here. Maybe she lost her job or got fired or something, and was desperate for the gig?

Given that one of these secret satellites is around Earth, it's very strange that this group and Hutch are the only ones who are pursuing the signal, but here it is. Improbable is what McDevitt does, but he's well-off and old now so I guess she doesn't much care how he got there. The idiots abroad encounter evidence of a snake society which destroyed itself in nuclear war. How snakes would ever get that far is a mystery, but this is how McDevitt creates his aliens: they're just like Earth creatures with no consideration given to how or why. After snake world, they encounter beautiful aliens who fool the visitors into falling in love with them only to prove to be murderous and who take two victims from the passengers.

Finally they encounter the asteroid and discover it's a space-going zoo, so really, Star Trek 'The Menagerie'. It's been so long that I read this and I barely remember it, so I guess it really didn't leave much of an impression, but it certainly didn't turn me off the series otherwise I would never have moved on to the next one, which I did. Reflecting on it now though, several years later, I feel less benign toward it!

Deepsix by Jack McDevitt

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the immediate sequel to McDevitt's The Engines of God. Unlike that novel, which I read some time ago and then recently revisited via an audiobook, this one I read some time ago and haven't thought much about it since, so my recollection of it has dwindled somewhat and I had to refresh it a bit for this review. I do recall the basic story - just not a lot of the details.

It's set in 2204, and on the negative side, the second book in this series suffers from everything I despise about a series: that the subsequent volumes are really a warmed-over redux of the first volume, which is only a prologue to begin with. In this particular case, there's too much of the first book being repeated here, evidently in the hope that readers won't notice it's the same dinner with a different dressing: doomed planet (it was a moon in the last book) with people trapped on it (same), who do dumb things (same) such as wasting time on a formal burial on a planet that's going to be destroyed anyway, and finally, archaeology with a dramatic deadline looming.

That complaint aired, there was enough in here for me, having read the first volume, to continue with this series. I never did go back to re-read any of this series (apart from the aforementioned audiobook), so maybe that should tell you something! But here a rogue gas giant is threatening a planet with destruction and Priscilla Hutchins is once again the one who's on the spot. She takes a bewildering array of unimportant (to the story) characters there to study the wildlife and flora and also the remnants of a previous civilization. These minor characters get far too much airtime, and she really becomes a minor character in her own story. On top of that, the book is too long, but evidently I found it entertaining enough on my first read through to pursue this series into the next volume.

The First Muslim by Lesley Hazelton

Rating: WARTY!

I am not a religious person. Not when I live in a world the worst of which we've seen in the USA over just the last year, let alone what came before it. It's been a year - and not the first over the last four - where the US's allies must have despaired over the USA, and the US's enemies must have salivated. In times like this in particular, it makes sense to me that too many people are blindly desperate for religion. Indeed, we've seen what amounts to a religious cult created since 2016 in the US, but religion itself makes zero sense to me, and it doesn't matter which religion it is. They're all as bad.

The real problem is that the prospective adherents to a religion fail to actually listen to the teacher of the religion - the founder. Why is that? The founder is pretty much always a white guy isn't it? People of color sometimes do start a religion, but women barely get a look in, and when any of these do, they rarely get far with their endeavor. That ought to make everyone suspicious! But even when the message is delivered directly from the mouth of the founder, the adherents fail to take it to heart and instead of internalizing the message, they become obsessed with blind ritual and mimickry instead of following what's been taught to them.

According to the New Testament, for example, a specific message was taught and it was delivered to the children of the House of Israel. It was never intended to spread beyond those people. Yet when Paul derailed the original message, he perverted it to apply to everyone, and spread it way beyond its intended recipients. Christianity as it's practiced in the world today bears no relation to what was originally taught. Worse, it has been spread not through love and compassion, and through turning the other cheek, but through pograms and burning of heretics. In short, the original message was lost and instead, it became a perversion of what had originally been intended.

Here's another issue with the word being given to humanity: Mohammed was, when his life began, a nobody who no-one expected anything from. He was an orphan who was passed around and adopted by various kinsmen and tribes; he was never expected to become any lind of a leader, so why was he chosen? For that matter, why Abraham? Why Moses? Instead of one of these initially obscure people, why not pick someone who is charismatic and powerful, and who can get the word out everywhere and quickly?

Why was it Abraham instead of Alexander the Great, who was a man controlled a huge amount of territory? Why was it Mohammed instead of, say, Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan who had access to a far wider territory to spread the word than ever did Mohammed. It makes no sense to me, and it's clearly the reason why so many of these religions fail to take off. For every one of them that comes to world prominence, there are scores upon scores which fail completely or which at best become a niche religion. Once in a while, one will grow and succeed (if you can call it that), such as Christianity did, and later Islam did, but those are the rare exceptions, not the rule, so something is obviously and clearly wrong with this system of dissemination somewhere along the line.

And why are the religions so contradictory? All three major monotheistic religions came out of Middle East roots, yet none of the three can agree on much! If Christianity was better than Judaism - more accurate, more true or whatever its advantage was supposed to be - then why didn't the Judaists adopt it? Why do they still remain Judaists? And if Jesus was the last word, as Christians maintain, then why was Mohammed called to step up? Conversely, if Islam is the last word, why wasn't it adopted by both the Judaists and the Christians? Again, to me, it makes no sense.

There's another way in which this makes no sense, and while there are many fantastical stories in this particular book, I think it's best exemplified in the legend of Mohammed's sojourn in a cave while on his way to Medina. We're told he was chosen as a prophet to spread the true word, yet he was, as usual, rejected by his people and at one point was forced to flee for his life. According to this book he took an unexpected route to throw pursuers off his trail, and he encamped in a cave for a while. So far so good.

These behaviors are smart, and they make perfect sense if you're threatened and have no protection. They make no sense if a god is supposed to have your back. Why did his god make him run? Why didn't his god help - by for example transporting him to his destination instead of leaving him to fend for himself? We see this kind of thing routinely in religious stories - no matter what the religion is. The Bible is full of them.

But this is where this story wandered once more into the fantastical and why I quit reading at this point, because by this time it had seriously begun to feel much less like a biography that I had been seriously interested in reading, and much more like a work of fiction. We're told spiders came by in the hundreds and wove cobwebs over the cave mouth so it looked derelict, and thus he escaped attention. He had a camel to complete the journey and finally settled where the camel gave up the trip and settled down itself. I just don't get why, if his message was so important, he wasn't given more support in getting it out! Why did he pretty much have to do everything himself? And why do we see this same circumstance so often in so many different religion-founding stories?

Most seriously for me though, was that this same kind of question arose when it came to the content of the book. Obviously none of the above quesitosn were addressed, which was a problem for me, but additionally there's clearly a real story of a man's religious experience here, and surrounding that is the inevitable mythology which unfortunately grows up around these events. I don't feel the author did a good job of demarcating the two. There seemed to be far too much speculation, not over events, many of which are recorded and not in dispute, but in imputing people's motivation, and what they 'must have been thinking'.

We can guess at that of course, but we can't know, and it seemed both disingenuous and disrepectful to assume so much. This for me was the core reason why I must reject this biography. All religions have a mythology and some of it is quite beautiful, as was much of it here, but I wanted to understand the man behind the mythology, and I felt like I really didn't get a fair shot at that from this book, which is why I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Goodnight, Santa by Dawn Sirette, Kitty Glavin

Rating: WORTHY!

For my very last children's christmas book review of 2020, I can't think of a better one than this one. This sports a light-up Moon - which isn't as impressive as it sounds, but is activated by a hidden pressure button on the cover. It also has a battery accessible (and turn-off-able!) module at the back, so there won't be a time when it runs down and becomes useless.

What I loved about this book, and what put it over the top as the best one I've seen this year, was the silhouette illustrations by Glavin, which are beautifully done; the book is worth getting just for those alone. The girl and her plush toy want to say goodnight to Santa, and end up taking a rather magical and Moonlit stroll through the winter landscape saying goodnight to everyone but. It's a fun and inventive book and I enjoyed it.

Merry Christmas, Mouse by Laura Numeroff, Felicia Bond

Rating: WORTHY!

Mice are always a lot more enjoyable in books than in real life aren't they? The mouse here is called Mouse and previously appeared in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie which sounds like fun just from the title. Mouse is intent upon decorating the tree and enjoys counting as he does it, so this Christmas story educates as well as entertains. And it's cute! It's a colorful pasteboard book written by Numeroff (she does the counting, get it?!) and illustrated by Bond, Felicia Bond.

Here Comes Santacorn by By Danielle McLean, Prisca Le Tandé

Rating: WORTHY!

This is another pasteboard book with glitter on the pages no less, and in it, the reindeer have colds and are unable to pull the sleigh. Fortunately, there's the Yulicorn who sports a candy cane striped horn, and who can help. The Yulicorn can pull Santa's sleigh by herself, as the rhyming text by McLean explains and the sweet illustrations by Le Tandé nicely demonstrate. A fun Christmas fantasy.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: A Christmas Activity Book

Rating: WORTHY!

No one gets credit for putting this together which is why I tend not to review books of this nature, but it's Christmas, so here goes, this once! This is exactly what it says. Most of the sixty-some pages are coloring pages, but others are word searches, or puzzles or of the word-scramble and 'find your way home' sort, and it includes everything from the old Christmas animated cartoon: the North Pole (which in reality is melting fast, so get it while it lasts!), the Island of Misfit Toys, and the Bumble, as well as Rudolf and Santa, and the misfit elf. And it comes complete with five colored pencils sporting pencil toppers of the main characters. This will keep your kids occupied while you get at the egg nog and the Christmas movie! Or even take that nap!

Merry Christmas, Baby by Dubravka Kolanovic

Rating: WORTHY!

Part of a " Welcome, Baby" series, this one is another colorful pasteboard book about Christmas for young 'uns. There's a shrinking concentric set of holes through the cover and the first few pages, colored in green and red, and inviting inquisitive chubby fingers to poke around and explore. The book is essentially a series of cute animal images with minimal text. It's a great way to introduce a growing and curious infant to Christmas traditions, if that's where your culture leans. Even if it isn't, it never hurts to educate a kid about traditions celebrated by others, which was the aim of my own The Very Christmassy Rattuses book for young children. We seriously need some inclusivity right now.

The Snowiest Christmas Ever by Jane Chapman

Rating: WORTHY!

This is a sweet and nicely-illustrated color pasteboard book about a family of bears, the children of which wish for snow, and that old adage about 'be careful what you wish for' comes into full fruition as the house is almost literally inundated with snow. It comes in the windows, through the door, and down the chimney, but in the end, the family manages to cope and enjoys some play and some sledding. It's a cute and fun story for young kids who like snow or who might never even have seen snow but would like an idea of what it's all about. Of course these books never tell you about the downside: how cold and dangerous it can be, but that has no need to be a part of this story!

How Did They Do That? by Caroline Sutton

Rating: WORTHY!

I label this as a worthy non-fiction book, but this is sometimes in a loose sense because there seem to be some stories in it where fact and fancy have not been adequately discriminated, but overall I enjoyed it. It makes for a great restroom book because although there are three hundred pages of short (some longer, some very short) stories of the origins of various things, ideas, and people, and so on, most are quite short. The stories are eclectic and no attmept whatsoever seems to have been amde to organize them by any method - topic, category, chronology or otherwise.

The stories themselves are fun though, educational and intriguing. They're largely US-centric, be warned, but not exclusively so. They may cover the building of the Great Wall in China, the building of the Empire State building in NYC, the secret marriage of Mae West, the origin of coffee, Ford's union-busting brutality, how they made Superman fly in the Christopher Reeves era, and who made the first parachiute jump.

I found the book entertaining and fun, and I commend it as a worthy read.