Pukman @ WinK: the community that time didn't forget

The Usborne Young Reading series is a very popular one among students; recently, the Usborne First Reading series, designed for readers for whom Usborne Young Reading is a bit too difficult, has become even more popular.

"May I go to the Ball as well?" [Cinderella] asked, in a scared whisper.

"You? Go to the Ball?" said her stepmother. "You must be joking."

Everyone knows the story of Cinderella. In fact, there are hundreds of versions of this story told throughout the world. This version is in the Usborne Young Reading series. The pictures are very cute, and the Fairy Godmother is very interesting. I recommend this book.

Cinderella, UYR1, a traditional story retold by Susanna Davidson. YL:1.5 Words: 1600

Babe is a clever, polite little pig, but can Fly, the sheepdog, teach Babe his sheep-pig lessons?

Do you know the movie Babe? It was very popular more than 10 years ago. It's about a pig who is very clever and wants to be like a sheepdog, guiding the sheep on his farm. He succeeds because he respects the sheep and learns to speak their language. 

This book is very nice; I recommend it and its sequel, Babe: Pig in the City.

The series is Penguin Readers, YL is 2.4, words 8100. 

Since I seem to have a recent theme of CUP books, let me remind you of the Cambridge English Readers series. I recommend that you read all the books at Starter level (my favorite is Dirty Money) and at Level 1 (my favorite is Inspector Logan) to start with, building up your fluency and confidence. A classic at level 2 is Jojo's Story.

Here's the list of all the Biscuit books available! The Jack series looks good, too.

I get regular emails from HarperCollins, a publisher, about children's books. The one that arrived today has an interesting list for the Thanksgiving season. One of the books on the list was Happy Thanksgiving, Biscuit. Do you know the Biscuit series? Biscuit is a dog who is very cute and very popular with children overseas (and also with PUK students). I hadn't heard of this title before, so maybe we will get it for the PUK library. You can find out more about the Biscuit series and other books by the same author at her website. Anyway, please take a look at the list and see if there are any titles that interest you.

Recently, I've been buying a lot of books. Two of them are about health and are quite interesting. Another was a fantasy work by Katharine Kurtz. It's in the Deryni series, which I remember enjoying very much when I was about 15 or so. At that time, there was just one trilogy, but now there are many, many books. Unfortunately, most are out of print. So I tried Amazon Marketplace for the first time, and bought the book secondhand. It was just as good as I remember the original Deryni books being when I was a teenager.

If you're interested in fantasy, check out the Mythopoeic awards page (in Japanese).

There's another Katharine Kurtz site, created as a wiki so that fans can contribute information.

The Magic Tree House series is very well-known and respected in the US. We don’t yet have any of these books in the PUK Library. How about at KGU?

Do you know the famous story The Gingerbread Man? If you liked it, you should try

The Gingerbread Girl. She is the Gingerbread Man's sister and she has learned from his mistakes!

I recently read

Yeh-Shen, which is the Chinese version of Cinderella (or it may be more accurate to say the Cinderella is an adaptation of Yeh-Shen). The differences with the Cinderella that I knew were very interesting. I recommend this book and also any of the other Cinderella books that you can find on this site.

You may be interested to hear that the PUK Library has just obtained the 15 books in the Primary Classic Readers series. Check them out in LibraryThing! (You may need to log in to view this page.)

All the books are retellings of traditional tales. They offer you a good chance to read any stories you don't know, and also an opportunity to re-read stories that you already know.

I've created a new account on LibraryThing to show the PUK Library collection of graded readers, leveled readers, and other readers for students. The account is pukreaders, and you can see the collection here, or navigate there from the WinK People group (click on "_____ members" from the group homepage). I recommend that you make pukreaders a friend, or monitor the pukreaders collection.

Although there are at present 1866 books in the collection, it is not complete yet, and I will continue to add covers and to tag all the books. Please check out the tag cloud.

Note that you need to log in to LibraryThing to use some features.

Do you know Stories of Monsters, from the Usborne Young Reading series? You can see some sample pages here, and listen to an excerpt here. If you like it, why not borrow the book and CD together?

Check out the search widget in my sidebar, and use it to search the KGU English Reading Garden collection. Some sample searches to try:

• Usborne
• I Can Read
• Bookworms
• Cambridge

(This was created in GarageBand and converted to Windows media (.wmv) using VisualHub.)

If you visit my catalogue in LibraryThing, you should see something like this near the top of the window.

If you click on "use it", the display should change to one showing book covers on the left. More interestingly, there is a Google Books column on the right. If you click on Book info for a book, for example for Abadeha, you'll see a screen like this:

This gives you access to much more information about the book, including where to buy it, reviews, and sometimes even the opportunity to read a few pages of the book.

You can set the view that you want visitors to your LibraryThing catalogue to see by clicking on the pen icon in the top left of your catalogue:


You can customize all your displays if you wish,

but I recommend focusing on these two options near the bottom of the screen:

It seems that the Cinderella story originated in China, and has been adapted and interpreted in many countries and hundreds of versions. Check out the collection of Cinderella-related books in my LibraryThing account. You may need to sign in to LibraryThing to see the collection as it's supposed to be seen. If the display doesn't work properly, go to my collection and search for cinderella.

Do you like Cambridge English Readers? I think they are great. One interesting-looking recent release is Love in the Lakes. You can read a short excerpt here. If you like love stories, some other good ones are Just Good Friends, Staying Together, and When Summer Comes.

Read more about CER on one of my other blogs.

Many students like the Oxford Reading Tree series. I think this is the best of the leveled readers (as opposed to graded readers) series. Check out these sites to get a bit more information.

This is a great book, in the Penguin Readers series (Level 4), although it's rather difficult for me and took about 4 hours to read. Oliver is a poor boy who lives in an orphanage.