Read ALL the Newberys!

The 1923 and 1924 Newberys had no Honor Books, so I'm going to lump them together, and 1925 - which had two Honor Books - as well.

(I really wish the history of the deliberations was public, you know? Or made public after a certain time, like census records are, when the particular award had ceased to be CURRENT DRAMA. I know that for the first year any librarian could make a nomination and anything nominated got onto the list, after which they switched to a committee format; but it's only a guess that for the next two years the committee worked on a "pick only one book" plan, till 1925 changed their minds somehow.)

( 1923 )

( 1924 )

( 1925 )

Mmm...kay. We get to the first book I've heard of on the list! It is not enticing. ;-)

The edition I have is a brand new Signet Classic, checked out of the library's "Popular" section. I am now side-eyeing the library fairly hard, because I have heard it rumored that the Dr Dolittle books are pretty racist. (I could get into a whole debate over what belongs in a library's "Popular" section, but I won't. Unless people want to start it in comments. *g* I'm always up for polite discussion in comments.)

Me, myself, I've never read this book at all that I know of, and only a couple of excerpts from the first book, The Story of Doctor Dolittle - I know I've read the part where he learns to talk to animals from his parrot and becomes an animal doctor (Ka-ka oi-ee, fee-fee? is Parrot-speak for "Is the porridge hot yet?"; I spent SO MANY hours as a four-year-old trying to parse the syntax there... no wonder I fell in love with The Lord of the Rings at ten, come to think on), and I've read an excerpt about the Pushmi-Pullyu but I couldn't tell you which book it was from. Honestly, I didn't know there was more than one until I started poking around Newbery Medal history and learned that the first book was published the year before the Newberys started.

Looking at some other Newbery reading blogs (I've linked a few on the comm profile now), I suspect I'm going to start running across books I know from excerpts in ancient school readers but have never read in full. Some of the synopses sound very familiar.

But for now - off we go! With *reads back of book* Dr Dolittle and young Tommy Stubbins.

( snippity snip CUT )

So there you have it! Insensitive in spots, definitely colonial, but so much better than most other things I've read from this list I can't even.