Here are some of Don's favorite books:
It’s OK, Slow Lizard is a sweet book that makes me happy and makes people I love happy. Whether one identifies with Slow Lizard or not, visiting Lizard and friends in this book is time well spent.
Imagine you are a professional magician today, and while you are performing a trick someone is Googling your name and trick so that he can tell everyone you are trying to entertain how you did it. This is just one of the many, many areas of magic Joshua Jay covers in this thoroughly enjoyable book. From the magical greats to how people perceive magic and why they enjoy it to how magic adapts to the times, readers with any degree of interest in magic will be thoroughly entertained.
On Fragile Waves is a beautiful immigration story told with grace and strength. An Afghan family, using the encouragement and distraction of storytelling, makes a series of journeys hoping to find a new life in Australia. Yu’s prose carries readers along with the family through hope and heartbreak.
Taking the form of a letter to visitors to our planet, If You Come to Earth is a beautiful book on diversity that shows how life on our planet can fill us with joy and wonder, make us happy and sad, and, even in our uniqueness, make us deeply connected.
Koh embarks on the magical journey of language through telling her story by juxtaposing it with, and gaining inspiration from, her mother’s letters. Koh includes an image of each letter and provides her own translation from Korean into English. This relationship to the letters adds to the intimacy of the memoir.
After attending the dying Queen Elizabeth I, Frances returns home to her family home, content with the management of the estate and, especially, collecting herbs and creating healing remedies. Against her wishes she is summoned to the court of James I where she will be an attendant of the King’s daughter. Frances’s reputation for healing proceeds her, and she soon finds herself under suspicion in the King’s campaign to rid the kingdom of witches.
Historian Tracy Borman is a natural storyteller, creating historical fiction that is both believable and compelling.
This is the story of a girl on the day before her 13th birthday who must search for her mother in a strange, comical, and worrisome land. She meets many dear and dangerous characters in her search and must find ways through the obstacles of a world that at first make little sense. Rat Rule 79 is a coming of age story and a story about feeling the weight of change.
