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.

One day, a man by the name of Harris Burdick walked into a publisher's office with a handful of drawings that accompanied his stories. When the publisher lights up and asks for the stories, Harris Burdick promises to return with them, leaving his artwork behind. He never returned, and the images, with only captions of information, bore into the publisher's mind. Many stories have been written to accompany Chris Van Allsburg's beautiful drawings. This simple picture book demands your imagination. This book is the recipient of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards.

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.

The ultimate fill in the blanks story book - a picture to get your creative ideas started. Inspirational and creative.

This was a very unusual story as the author introduces titles or phrases from stories that could have been. The illustrations are absolutely intriguing and beautiful. Pictures are worth a thousand words is very applicable to this story as the reader must take the title and phrase and imagine what would have been a story. From a personal aspect, I absolutely love the inferring skills applicable to this work. I do wish the author would have create these stories from the book, which is why I gave the book 4 and 1/2 stars. However, from an educator stand point this would be a great book to spark older student's creative writing for a writer's workshop and write the stories for the author.