The Mysteries of Harris Burdick

This book is marvelous for so many reasons. It is really a book about what it is like to be a reader of books. There are a number of illustrations, each one for a story. You know the title of the story, the illustration, and the caption for the illustration. That's all. The whole rest of the book is in your head: YOU are the one who has to decide how the story got from the title to the picture, and where it goes from there. This makes the book one of the longest very thin books I have ever read. In fact, since every time I read it, I make up different stories, I have yet to reach the end.

When author-illustrator extraordinaire Harris Burdick goes missing, all he's left behind are a series of images with accompanying captions, ideas for separate picture books.

But what can a picture of a nun quietly sitting in a chair floating in a cathedral have to do with a caption that says, "THE SEVEN CHAIRS: The fifth one ended up in France?"

Enticed to come up with their own endings, readers will marvel at the mystery behind these lasting drawings and the charm of an everchanging narrative.

Chris Van Allsburg truly awakens my imagination, his books are unlike any other. I had so much fun reading and looking at the pictures and pages in this book. I was utterly fascinated, each page is a completely different adventure, strange and enticing at the same time. Even though it is hard to pick a favorite, I really liked "Mr. Linden's Library", a picture of a girl asleep with a book in her hands with the caption, "he had warned her about the book. Now it was too late". I think this implies that the book takes the girl on a crazy experience within her dreams, the book comes to life.
I hope to share this book with my future students to get their creativity flowing.

A beautiful book which sparks the imagination. There are a collection of paintings with a single mysterious caption for each one. I think it would be wonderful to see what kind of stories kids could come up with for each illustration.

Great to use as story starters with middle school children. Such imagination inspiring illustrations and simply one line of text to get your mind going in all sorts of directions.

This is a collection of single page illustrations with a short sentence or phrase caption. There is no plot, no story, just a series of Van Allsburg's wonderful illustrations, each of which offers such a wealth of detail that you'll have no trouble making up a story to go with it. Or several.

An awesome book inspired by a set of paintings. Each one contains a short sentence or couple of sentsences that lead the reader to wonder what happened in each of the pictures. These are great stories to allow children to free write about "what if?".