Here are 100 books that Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates fans have personally recommended if you like
Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates.
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Anyone who knows me knows that Christmas is my absolute favorite time of year! I devour all things Christmas, from decor to movies to music to cookies, so curling up with a magical holiday book is my idea of a very merry holiday!
This is a quintessential read for any Christmas bookworm. I read it every year at the holidays. It’s a quick read but such a fun way to immerse myself in the magic of that era. I recommend reading the book as it takes on a totally different feel in the mind than just watching the films.
Tom Baker reads Charles Dickens' timeless seasonal story.
Charles Dickens' story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by the three ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, has become one of the timeless classics of English literature. First published in 1843, it introduces us not only to Scrooge himself, but also to the memorable characters of underpaid desk clerk Bob Cratchit and his poor family, the poorest amongst whom is the ailing and crippled Tiny Tim.
In this captivating recording, Tom Baker delivers a tour-de-force performance as he narrates the story. The listener…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have been writing for the past 21 years on mystical themes with a good dose of Mother Earth Love tossed in. Fifteen years ago, I launched the spoken word website, offering one ten-minute recorded essay monthly on mystical/philosophical themes. Having published three nonfiction books, I decided to take my love of nature and interest in mysticism and write a novel for young philosophers and Earth-loving elders. My book follows the mystical journey of a rather practical eleven-year-old to an enchanted lake in the high Alps. It contains gentle animals, wise trees, kindred spirits, and healing waters.
This book is the story of a boy who runs away from his chaotic but loving home in New York City to try his hand at living in the wilderness of upstate New York.
I found it totally charming and instructive. He hollows out a tree to make himself a comfortable place to observe and embrace the Winter on the side of a mountain. This book is written more for child philosophers than Earth-Loving elders, but I read it to my husband, and we both enjoyed it greatly.
It is a different take on mother nature love than the others I have recommended, yet it still shines.
"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."-The New York Times Book Review
Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods-all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever.
"An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after…
To this day, I love stories and books that bring a sense of nostalgia to my heart. As I read now, many of these bring me back to my youth and those early days when I really started to love reading. For the most part, books on this list are seen through the eyes of a middle-grade protagonist—stories of overcoming obstacles and finding family in unexpected places. And characters who overcome mistakes, ultimately lending a hand. I love kindness and empathy in these books, whether spread throughout the story or reaching those qualities by the end, more than anything.
I love this book because of its emphasis on the growing pains (and love) of family. I enjoy the aspect of this story providing laughs, tears, and anger, and being able to identify with the situations throughout. I love the characters finding their way in navigating on a micro level (family) and a macro one (the world). I love the bonds between siblings, where kindness shines through despite misgivings they may have.
Millions of fans young and old have been entertained by the quick wit of Peter Hatcher, the hilarious antics of mischevious Fudge, and the unbreakable confidence of know-it-all Sheila Tubman in Judy Blume's five Fudge books. And now, Puffin Books honors forty years of the book that started it all, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, with a special edition--featuring a new introduction from Judy--to celebrate this perennial favorite.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
To this day, I love stories and books that bring a sense of nostalgia to my heart. As I read now, many of these bring me back to my youth and those early days when I really started to love reading. For the most part, books on this list are seen through the eyes of a middle-grade protagonist—stories of overcoming obstacles and finding family in unexpected places. And characters who overcome mistakes, ultimately lending a hand. I love kindness and empathy in these books, whether spread throughout the story or reaching those qualities by the end, more than anything.
I love this book for its focus on overcoming obstacles amid overwhelming odds while balanced with love and hope. I enjoy the aspects of the story that tackle the idea of what family and friendship truly mean. This is a modern and inclusive story, and I like the ideas around characters accepting new roles and challenges while learning forgiveness. I love this endearing story for balancing a light, loving touch amidst heady storylines.
The Pura Belpre Honor winning novel in verse, in which a lost dog helps a lonely girl find a way home to her family . . . only for them to find family in each other along the way. From the Newbery Honor winning author of Iveliz Explains It All.
"Trust me: this book will touch your heart." -Barbara O'Connor, New York Times bestselling author of Wish
Titi Silvia leaves me by myself to unpack, but it's not like I brought a bunch of stuff. How do you prepare for the unpreparable? How do you fit your whole life in…
In my writing about science, I am always keen to include the artistic and literary dimension that links the science to the broader culture. In Huygens, a product of the Dutch Golden Age, I found a biographical subject for whom it would have been quite impossible not to embrace these riches. This context – including painting, music, poetry, mechanics, architecture, gardens, fashion and leisure – is crucial to understanding the life that Huygens led and the breakthroughs he was able to make.
Fiction allows for the portrayal of a kind of absorption in the processes and materials of a historical period that is unusual in nonfiction. It can give a powerful sense of how time actually passed for people. Vermeer’s chaotic domestic routine as a painter was splendidly imagined by Tracy Chevalier in Girl with a Pearl Earring, for example. But the technical innovators of the Dutch Golden Age – the telescopists, the astronomers, the surveyors and engineers – are yet to be celebrated in this way. Sadly, nobody has written the story of Simon Stevin, who built a sand-yacht that could outrun a galloping horse as it whipped along the Dutch strand, or of Cornelis Drebbel, who demonstrated a submarine for King James I that mysteriously managed to stay underwater with its crew for several hours in the River Thames.
However, Stella Tillyard has performed this service on behalf of…
A 'magical, haunting' (Philippa Gregory) novel of a tragic love affair in a threatened world
In 1649, Jan Brunt, a Dutchman, arrives in England to work on draining and developing the Great Level, an expanse of marsh in the heart of the fen country. It is here he meets Eliza, whose love overturns his ordered vision and whose act of resistance forces him to see the world differently.
Jan flees to the New World, where the spirit of avarice is raging and his skills as an engineer are prized. Then one spring morning a boy delivers a note that prompts…
I've been going by the handle ‘Dr. Coffee’ online for over a decade now. I really do have a PhD. in coffee! In 2007 I embarked on a doctorate and wrote my thesis on ideas of quality in the coffee industry. The inevitable question is then, ‘what do you do with a PhD in coffee?’ and my answer was to open coffee shops, first in the UK and then in Canada. In recent years, I've switched from owning a coffee shop with books in it to a bookshop with coffee in it, but it still manages to satisfy both passions. I firmly believe there is no better combination than hot coffee and good books.
I am a fan of historical fiction anyway, but historical fiction and coffee? Brilliant! Liss’s book is set in 17th Century Amsterdam, which at the time was the centre of commerce in Europe, and in particular, one of the first ports to trade in the newly discovered coffee commodity. The main character, Miguel Lienzo is loosely based on Pasqua Rosé—the historical figure credited with opening the first coffee house in Oxford, England. There are diabolical schemes, adventure, plenty of double-crossing, flawed but likeable characters, and a very satisfying ending. To my knowledge, this is extremely historically accurate as well.
Amsterdam in the 1690s - a boom town with Europe's biggest stock exchange and traders who will stop at nothing to get even richer.
Lienzo, a Portugese Jew, stumbles across a new commodity - coffee - which, if he plays his cards right, will make him the richest man in Holland. But others stand in his way - rival traders who do all in their power to confuse the exchange and scupper his plans, his brother who is jealous of his financial wizardry and even his brother's beautiful wife who both tempts and spurns him in equal measure.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I believe there is a supernatural spirit that guides the universe, and I am passionate about the God who created it. From the many experiences in my life, I have learned that there is a bigger picture. That picture is God. You can believe in his power to change lives or not. You can believe in him and his son or not, but that does not mean they don't exist. I may not believe in life in other galaxies, but that does not mean they are not out there somewhere.
This is undoubtedly the most captivating biography I’ve had the pleasure to read.
This woman, in the prime of her very ‘alive’, but somewhat distorted sexually active life is confused by her childhood, accosted by the Germans during the war, yet brings inspiration and love to those in the Nazi camp she finds herself living as wars escalate. She is hope.
On 8 March 1941, a 27-year-old Jewish Dutch student living in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam made the first entry in a diary that was to become one of the most remarkable documents to emerge from the Nazi Holocaust. Over the course of the next two and a half years, an insecure, chaotic and troubled young woman was transformed into someone who inspired those with whom she shared the suffering of the transit camp at Westerbork and with whom she eventually perished at Auschwitz. Through her diary and letters, she continues to inspire those whose lives she has touched since. She was an…
I have written stage and radio plays, poetry, short story collections, and, beginning in 2013, novels that comprise The American Novels series, published by Bellevue Literary Press. Unlike historical fiction, these works reimagine the American past to account for faults that persist to the present day: the wish to dominate and annex, the will to succeed in every department of life regardless of cost, and the stain of injustice and intolerance. In order to escape the gravity of an authorial self, I address present dangers and follies through the lens of our nineteenth-century literature and in a narrative voice quite different from my own.
Impulse and happenstance set the syllabus of my reading, and so it was that, shortly after reading Lydia Davis’s Madame Bovary, I chanced to see a notice for her rendering into English, from the Dutch, a selection of the very short stories written by the late A. L. Snijders. He wrote plainly, eschewing elegance and complications of form and syntax in favor of simple sentences that laid out, in workmanlike prose, his casual, wry observations of, and on, his fellow Dutchmen, Dutch women, and also Dutch animals, of whom he was fond. Here is no Modernist heroic ambition, no Postmodernist archness, no posturing, or overbearing intellectual or moral superiority. He wrote thousands of his peculiar miniatures, we are told by Davis in her foreword on the writer and on the problems of translation in general.
Those she chose for Night Train rise above anecdote or sketch, despite their Dutch…
Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass eye: uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders's "straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness." Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here-humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely-are something like daybook…
I am Robert Loewen, the author of The Lioness of Leiden. Imagine that you were born between 1910 and 1925, and the war in Europe is raging. You're a university professor in Berlin who holds meetings at your home to resist the oppressive regime that has imprisoned prominent members of the opposition. Or maybe you are a Jewish man who plans to use your linguistic talent to succeed in a Czechoslovakian business venture, but you just received an order to report for transportation to a place called Auschwitz. Perhaps you are a Dutch university student who joins the resistance when the Third Reich invades your country.
This is a history about three young women in the Netherlands who resisted the occupiers by murdering enemy soldiers.
The story told in Three Ordinary Girlsabout young women who assassinated German soldiers had already been told partially in the memoirs of the survivors.
The story of Hannie Schaft, the ring leader and a student at Amsterdam University at the outset of the war, is now part of the history told to students in Dutch schools.
But author Tim Brady does an admirable job of bringing new perspectives to these heroes by weaving a story that reads like a novel even though the facts are documented in his footnotes.
“The book's teenage protagonists and their bravery will enthrall young adults, who may find themselves inspired to take up their own causes.” —Washington Post
An astonishing World War II story of a trio of fearless female resisters whose youth and innocence belied their extraordinary daring in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. It also made them the underground’s most invaluable commodity.
May 10, 1940. The Netherlands was swarming with Third Reich troops. In seven days it’s entirely occupied by Nazi Germany. Joining a small resistance cell in the Dutch city of Haarlem were three teenage girls: Hannie Schaft, and sisters Truus and Freddie…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I'm an Anglo-Dutch writer living in the Netherlands, and the author of two books. Growing up in England I never thought much about rivers, but in the Netherlands they’re hard to avoid, and I’ve become fascinated by them. These days, when we all work remotely and (when rules allow) usually travel by car, train, or plane rather than boat, it’s easy to think of rivers as just scenic backdrops, rather than anything more important. But the truth is many of our cities wouldn’t exist without the waters which flow through them, and waterways like the Rhine, Thames, and Seine have had a huge influence on the history and culture of the people living alongside them. If you want to understand why somewhere like Rotterdam, London or Paris is the way it is, you could spend the day in a library or museum – but you’d be better off going for a boat ride or swim, poking around under some bridges and talking to the fishermen, boatmen, and kayakers down at the waterline.
This book tells the story of how the people of the Netherlands – the country where I’ve lived for more than a decade, and which I wrote my first book about – have not just managed to survive below sea level, in a land riddled with rivers and canals, but managed to turn their boggy environment to their advantage, becoming grandmasters at building dikes, draining land and constructing water-pumping windmills. The book isn’t a heavy read – the emphasis is on photos, maps, and interesting factoids – but it’s full of insights into everything from how Amsterdam was built to why the Dutch aren’t too worried about climate change. Perfect reading when I’m sitting in my garden in the Dutch countryside, with water on both sides.
All over the world, people learn in school that the Netherlands is a country that lies below sea-level. Dikes, polders, windmills and wooden shoes are well-known icons of this unusual nation, while its sturdy dams and storm surge barriers also enjoy world fame. But how does it all work? How can a country exist under such circumstances and even be prosperous? One would expect the Dutch to panic about climate change but they don’t seem to be; how come? This book will tell you all about it, both in words and photos, striking a balance between developments in the past,…
