My favourite Book - a teen review

My favourite book is a Dr. Seus book that I got when I was four years old. It was called “bedtime story” but it was always my favourite. Like all Dr. Seus books, the book was one big poem filled with stange and wonderful creatures. This particular book was about one bug who yawned. This yawn was then passed throughout the world as everyone fell asleep. It told the tale of how all of the different creatures fell asleep.

          When I was younger I always requested this as my bedtime story, so much to the point that my parents could not stand it anymore. I especially liked it if I couldn`t go to sleep. It was as if the yawn that was spread though Dr. Seus` land reached me in my bed.

          Even before I could read I would spend hours looking at this book. The pictures were so funny and colourful. I used to laugh at some of the funny beds that those strange creatures fell asleep in.

          I love all of Dr. Seus` books but this one is by far the best. Sadly I am still yet to find another person who has read this book. They don’t know what they have been missing out on!! 

In Love with Keats

Any time I’m asked a question involving one book, I instantly feel that cloying indecisiveness that is my love for a seemingly endless list of books. So being asked to write a blog post about the one book I would bring to a desert island is torment! After much deliberation between The Golden Treasury left to me recently by my grandmother, and a tatty volume of Keats, I’ve decided to go with Keats, as I’ve fallen totally in love with its decrepit charm.

The book came to me last year. Imagine the bustling streets of the town of Gorey, in Wexford, where I sometimes go to shop with my family. There’s a small café there, called “The Book Café”, if I’m remembering that right, with the kind of atmosphere that makes me want to play chess (though I’m awful) and drink hot chocolate. Go through to the back of the café and you’ll find shelves and shelves of second hand books. In short, a reader’s heaven! It was here that I found a bookcase devoted to poetry, and hiding unassumingly between some larger, sterner looking volumes was my Keats volume, and I say ‘my’ with great pride and satisfaction.

By then, the book had seen its fair share of wear and tear, the pages are browned and the denim-y cover is a little stringy along the spine, but, to me, that’s all part of the charm. It cost five euro, which I’m mentioning because it adds to my happiness around having snatched it up. I must now have read “Ode To A Nightingale” a thousand times, so I’ll close by quoting my favourite lines:

“O, for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth.

That I might drink and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim.”