Great for the Holiday Break

Ah, yes, the holiday break should be in full swing for just about all of you. NO SCHOOL!! NO SCHOOL!! Ahhh--excuse me, I was just getting back in touch with my 10-year-old days. Anyway, there's two glorious weeks of NO SCHOOL!! and I thought it would be a good time to recommend some cool books and audiobooks. Audiobooks are great for those long rides in the car when you travel over the holidays.

So are regular books. The first is Alvin Ho: Allergic to Birthday Parties, Science Projects and Other Man-Made Disasters by Lenore Look. It's the third in the hysterically-funny Alvin Ho series. Never heard of them?? Well, then, you're missing a lot of belly laughs. Alvin Ho is one of the funniest kids I've ever met and his adventures (and misadventures) never fail to make me chuckle, laugh, and guffaw. I bet you'll do the same once you read these. (What??? You say you don't guffaw? You will when you read these books!)

Alvin Ho is a second-grader who's afraid of everything. I mean, really afraid. So afraid, in fact, that he carries around a Personal Disaster Kit. In this book, he gets invited to a birthday party, but not just any party--it's a girl party!! What do you do at a girl party? But there's another party for the guys at the same time. Which one should he go to? Will he do the right thing?
That might seem like an extremely brief plot summary, but, believe me, there's a LOT more that happens in this book. And all of it's funny!! Just wait until you read about his trip to the homes of dead authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson (the authors dead for 300 hundred years), the cowboys and Indians game with second graders hyped up on sugar, what happens when Alvin sees Emily Dickinson at the mall, and the advice on what to do at a girl party. AND THEN---just wait until you see what happens when Alvin finally gets to the party!!!! I won't tell you which one and I won't tell you what happens, but if you don't laugh, well, you just can't laugh!

This book receives the Iron Guy Seal as One Terrific Book!

There's a new one out: Alvin Ho: Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals, and Other Fatal Circumstances. I've got a copy now and cant wait to get to it.

Speaking of Alvin Ho, there is a really great audiobook version of the first two books. It's The Alvin Ho Collection: Books 1 and 2 and it's read by an actual 10-year-old boy! It's really funny, especially when the reader tries to sound like Alvin's dad.

Another good set of audiobooks is the Hank the Cowdog series, written and read by John R. Erickson. These audiobooks are really funny. Hank is sort of a canine Barney Fife, all full of himself and not as smart as he thinks he is. The first audiobook is The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog. In this one, Hank, the "chief or ranch security" gets wrongly accused of killing a chicken and goes to live with the coyotes. But then the coyotes decide to rob the hen house and attack the ranchers. Will Hank join them? The second is The Case of the Falling Sky. The ranch's rooster tells Hank that the sky will fall but Hank is too smart to believe him--until Hank has a strange dream and Pete the Cat tells Hank that it's all true. What if they're right?? Hank will do whatever it takes to save the ranch, even if it means climbing on the roof of ranch owner Sally May's beloved and beautifully-waxed car. As I said, these books are funny and John R. Erickson does a good job reading them. And I've seen how much kids and grownups enjoy them--the kids in my wife's carpool beg for them, my father-in-law enjoys them, and I actually saw a kid snort macaroni through her nose while laughing at one!

Well, I hope you check these out but I especially hope that everyone has a wonderful holiday season!!