Wednesday 23 July 2014

Top 5 favourite books



1.Watership Down by Richard Adams

    This book can be classified as animal fantasy. It has a real setting and real places in England.
    The characters are rabbits. The story is that two young rabbits, named hazel and fiver, escape their warren when it is destroyed.
    The rabbits speak in a language called Lapine, so you might have to check some words in a glossary at the end. They also tell each other stories about El-ahrairah, who is a character of their mythology. I think these things make the book very creative.
    Even though it is about rabbits, I think it might only be suitable for ages 10+. They fight sometimes and there are some gruesome descriptions.
    What I like most about Watership Down is the beautiful descriptions. In one part there is a few pages describing the moon shining on the forest. I also like it because the main characters are animals. It is my favourite book.


2.Warriors by Erin Hunter

    If you want to read all of the books in this series, well maybe you can't! Warriors is about twenty-six books long(and growing rapidly), if you don't count all the exclusives!
    This can also be classified as animal fantasy. The main characters are feral cats and they live in four different clans- Thunderclan, Windclan, Riverclan, and Shadowclan. Each clan has its own warriors, leader, and medicine cat and it is set in the forest, where they hunt, fight with each other, and gather once every month.
    They believe in another clan, called Starclan, where the cats go when they die. Starclan is actually real in the books, giving the clans prophecies and omens.
    In the first book, Into the wild, after Thunderclan is outnumbered and beaten at a battle with Riverclan, the Thunderclan medicine cat, Spottedleaf, gets a prophecy from Starclan that "fire will save the clan". The clan leader, Bluestar, says that it is impossible and doesn't believe it. Will the prophecy become true?
    I think Warriors is fun to read and pretty much limitless, so I can read as much as I want without having to read the same thing. One of the cons of this series is that there are a lot of characters and this can make things confusing. The pros are that it stays exciting and that you can start on any of the five series.


3.The trials of life by David Attenborough

    This book was written at the same time a TV series has been made. It is the third book from a trilogy that also includes Life on earth and the Living planet.
    Life on earth is about the origins of life, how animals evolved into what they are today. The Living planet is about evolution and how certain animals developed different features. The Trials of life is about animal behaviour. The whole thing is called the Life series.
    The Trials of life shows a lot of interesting facts told in an interesting way. Did you know that a type of bird uses sonar?
    It has 12 chapters about the different stages of life and the different activities useful in life for an animal, i.e. courting, finding the way, growing up, etc.
    I haven't read all of the book yet but so far my favourite part is a description of how army ants make their way through the rainforest in a swarming line and make their spherical camps not out of wood or dirt, but themselves, jammed in between two tree branches or under a rotting log.
    It is my favourite nonfiction book.


4.James Herriot's dog stories by James Wight, known as James Herriot

    James Herriot is a veterinary surgeon and he writes about his life in the Yorkshire dales. He has written many books, including a series of four books named after the lines of the first verse of a hymn called All things bright and beautiful. It goes like this:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

    James Herriot's dog stories is a collection from these four books. It has fifty chapters and they are all about dogs. James Herriot writes about other animals too. He has written about a voyage with a cargo of expensive sheep, and about cows and lambs. he has also written another collection called James Herriot's cat stories.
    A very sad story is when a dog named Amber, who has a beautiful shiny coat, gets a severe case of mange. I have also read a story called Only One Woof, about a sheepdog who never barks, not even once.
    In this book, there are all kinds of stories. They have good endings and bad endings, and a huge range of difficulties that the animals have, from a bad habit of chasing car tires to a dislocated hip. And they are all about a British country vet and his experience with dogs.


5.The way we work by David Maculay

    Written by the author of The new way things work, The way we work has interesting(and usually funny) pictures and understandable text that lets you know how the human body works.
     I used to have strong interests in things. One time, I was interested in the human body, so I got this book for Christmas.
    It covers everything about the human body from chemistry on the atomic scale to how organs like the stomach work. My favourite part is the page about the way signals travel along the spinal cord.
    As you can see on the cover, the illustrator is pretty imaginative. There are eye-catching pictures drawn of the different parts of the body and also arrows to represent signals or movement. This book is a perfect suggestion for anyone who wants to know how the human body works.

    Those are my top 5 favourite books. I hope you try some of them!

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