H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, by R.J. Ivankovic

This is the third of three books retelling H.P. Lovecraft's stories, with artwork and clanky verse, both in the style of Dr. Seuss. The first was  H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers, the second was H.P. Lovecraft's Dagon for Beginning Readers. The first was fun, the second didn't quite work as well, but the third, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for Beginning Readers, is probably the best of the three. For one, it takes on one of the best of Lovecraft's stories, and it is a long story as well, which gives the reader a lot more text and many more illustrations to enjoy. Which makes one wonder about who really is the audience for these books?  Per the titles, they are supposed to be for beginning readers, but especially with the much more complex third volume, I wonder whether any beginning readers can actually enjoy these books.  Probably they are really for Lovecraft's older fans looking for a new way to re-experience the familiar stories. At least, that's how it works for me.  

Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats

Ursula K. Le Guin died  in 2018, with many highly distinguished books under her belt, plus a few real clunkers. Now comes Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats, from the Library of America, a slim hardcover with poems, some prose, and a whole lot of cat doodles by Le Guin, plus a lot of white space. No editor is listed, but one hears someone else's voice in the essay "The Lives of Ursula's Cats."  Overall it seems either a harmless ditty, or crass commercialism. This is one of her clunkers. For ailurophiles only. 

Galactic Pot-Healer, by Philip K. Dick

Every once in a while, when the modern world seems especially insane, I read another Philip K. Dick book as a kind of therapy.  Last time it was Time Out of Joint, ten years ago. On this very blog.  I concluded:  "I wonder: has the modern world come too closely to resemble Philip Dick's mindscape, that the impact of his novels is lessened?"

This time, I picked up Galactic Pot-Healer, and came away with similar if slightly different feelings. Earthman Joe Fernwright has a dead-end job, with diminished prospects, fixing ceramic pots, in a future America that seems depressingly familiar to our own present, with an overreaching government that is bent on repressing speech and thought, and crushing dissent and artistic expression. The Glimmung is a strange and powerful being on Plowman's Planet, who brings Joe Fernwright and a host of various odd aliens there to raise an ancient sunken cathedral named Heldscalla from the deep ocean. There these beings discourse on the meaning of life and whether the ever-updating Book of the Kalends is completely prophetic. The Earth-based initial chapters were almost too painful to read, but once Joe Fernwright gets to Plowman's Planet, Dick's bizarre imagination takes over. The ending doesn't quite live up to the set-up, but it still is a window into Dick's highly unusual brain. 

Dick wrote an earlier short children's novel about the Glimmung that was published posthumously as Nick and the Glimmung. There is a joy in reading it that is lacking in this adult novel. 

The Chas. Addams Mother Goose

In the wake of the popularity of the first Addams Family television series, which ran from 1964-1966, cartoonist Charles Addams published The Chas. Addams Mother Goose, an oversized volume which contains some twenty-seven familiar nursery rhymes, each accompanied by one or more Addams illustrations that give a macabre interpretation to the nursery rhyme. It is pleasant for what it is, but one could wish for a volume with four or five times the number of nursery rhymes.  Here are a few examples, enough to decide whether the humor is for you or not. 

                                                       Girls and boys, 

                                                         Come out to play.

                                                       The moon does shine

                                                         As bright as day.

                                                       Come with a hoop.

                                                         Come with a cal,

                                                       Come with a good will,

                                                         Or not at all.