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    Just So Stories
    Just So Stories
    Just So Stories
    Audiobook2 hours

    Just So Stories

    Written by Rudyard Kipling

    Narrated by Shelly Frasier

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Drawing from the oral storytelling traditions of India and Africa, Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling's vigorous, amusing tales offer imaginative answers to unanswered questions about animals and provide little pearls of wisdom. Kipling began inventing these stories in his American wife's hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, to amuse his eldest daughter. Over 100 years later, these classic tales, filled with playfully clever animals and people, are still entertaining children and adults alike. "How the Camel Got His Hump," "How the Leopard Got His Spots," and "How the Alphabet Was Made" are just three of the twelve enlightening short stories.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 25, 2008
    ISBN9781400178674
    Author

    Rudyard Kipling

    Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865. After intermittently moving between India and England during his early life, he settled in the latter in 1889, published his novel The Light That Failed in 1891 and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year. They returned to her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote both The Jungle Book and its sequel, as well as Captains Courageous. He continued to write prolifically and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but his later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. He died in 1936.

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    Reviews for Just So Stories

    4/5

    43 ratings35 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I only read two stories from Just So Stories, "How the First Letter was Written" and "How the Alphabet was Made." Both were incredibly fun to read, especially aloud. Kipling pokes fun at the stereotypes of parents and children with names like, "Lady-who-asks-a-very-many-questions" for the mother and "Small-person-with-out-any-manners-who-ought-to-be-spanked" for the child. In both stories the theme is the need for better communication skills and are meant to be read together. The first letter makes up the alphabet later on and one story is a continuation of the other. Rumor has it that both "How the First Letter was Written" and "How the Alphabet was Made" started out as oral stories, told to Kipling's daughter Josephine in 1900.
    • 4/5
      The narrator was very good at separating characters with different accents and rhythms. The poetry aspect of the book was also well delivered. Of course as an audiobook it doesn't explain the accompanying images that Kipling drew to explain the text.
    • 5/5
      This is truly magnificent. I can;t wait to finish listening to this. Geoffrey Palmer is FANTASTIC reading these stories. And the music that goes along with them are so sweet. I would recommend this to anyone who loves Palmer, or who has children. I could see listening to this with kids on a family vacation long drive. It is about 3.5 hrs long.
    • 4/5
      My favourite was ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’. The stories are short and funny, and each have a little message or something for the reader to think about. We have an edition illustrated by the author and he’s written lovely captions too.I’m so glad we own a copy of this one as I’m sure they are stories we’ll read again. And again. And again as each child grows into them.
    • 5/5
      If you have never read this, do it now. I don't care how old you are, or how snobby. If you have even a modicum of imagination, the Just So stories are one of the great pleasure in life.
    • 5/5
      This is an all time classic, featuring lovely animal stories written by Mr Kipling. A perfect read for parents to read out to children on a rainy day or just before bed. My favorite ones include "The Beginning of the Armadillos" and "How the Elephant got his Trunk". The original illustrations are also an amazing addition to the book. Highly recommended
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed these so much that I was crushed when I realized I had listened to the last story. The narrator was Geoffrey Palmer - I now have another reason to think he is marvelous, he was such a storyteller.
    • 3/5
      These are great stories to read aloud (even to yourself!)They are full of wonderfully luscious alliterative phrases, like, in the Elephant's Child: "on the banks of the great grey-green greasy Limpopo river", and, in the story of Armadillo and the Painted Jaguar: "'Son, son!' said his mother ever so many times, graciously waving her tail..."This is an illustrated edition, but sadly the images haven't been saved large enough to enable you to zoom in, so some of the detail can't be seen.The layout is good, but the content shows a lack of careful proof-reading. I started with the Armadillo story and stumbled over a bit of poor OCR that was so confusing I had to go online to find another copy to discover what the word should have been (this ed reads "I don't rib Painted Jaguar", where it should read "I don't like Painted Jaguar"). Hence, only 3 stars
    • 5/5
      These are storoes I have loved since I was a small child. Phrases from them e.g. "tidy pachyderm" and "satiable curiosity" were part of the family's language
    • 5/5
      eBook

      I've never read Kipling, but I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.

      I'm not sure where I got that idea, because it was wrongwrongwrong. He is so ... flippant? Insouciant? Sassy?

      This book was a delight to read, and as charming as it is, I was also surprised by its brutality. It's very subtle, but almost all these stories revolve around moments of terrible physical peril. This was most notable and most threatening in "How the First Letter Was Written" as we watch the little girl put the stranger in great jeopardy simply by drawing a few ambiguous pictures. In most of the other stories, the threat seems a little more innocent (possibly because it involves animals rather than people), but it's always there, looming.
    • 4/5
      I just love these stories. They remind me of my childhood, and in their whole style and structure they're just made to be read aloud. In a very childlike way I want to nod sagely and tell the world, "yes, that's how it must have been that the elephant got its trunk or the camel its humps!" after every story.
    • 2/5
      Children's stories, published in 1902, that provide fantasy explanations for the origin of things - animal features, writing etc. Famous as children's stories, they also provide the epithet for tendentious evolutionary reasoning. Interesting. Also my first book read on the lap-top from a Project Gutenburg text. On-screen reading is not as easy as it should seem! Read March 2009
    • 4/5
      Beautiful and wonderful. Works of genius by a man who freed himself enough that he could give himself up to that genius instead of trying to make sure that it came out perfectly. As pleasing as his other works are, none I've read can match the joy, humor, simplicity, and odd truth of these.Like children's literature should be, these stories never lose their humor or punch. Despite some redundancy with actual myths and some cases of artificially lowering complexity for children and hence growing transparent, eminently enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      A nice little collection of short stories that tell why this or that animal is the way it is. Amusing tales written with a very engaging style. Check it out, O Best Beloved. Read it to your kids or something.--J.
    • 5/5
      Every child should know these stories, although some of Kipling's attitudes may need to be discussed.
    • 4/5
      I especially recommend these stories as read-alouds. The narration is written directly to the listener and the use of repetition make these stories ideal read-aloud material. There are 12 stories in the book and we've been reading one story every day. Many of the stories are fanciful tales of how an animal received one of it's special characteristics, such as How the Camel Got its Hump and these were our favourite ones. Ds 7yo just laughed and laughed through these and I enjoyed them just as much as he did. Lots of fun!
    • 5/5
      Kipling's take on these stories, many of them ones he gleaned from the cultures around him, are lyrical and fun, and make for a great book. I wish I had had a copy of this one when I was a kid.
    • 2/5
      A lot of these were re-printed in my 1963 World Book Encyclopaedia children's extra set (ten volumes covering famous places, people, classic stories, fables, general crafts and how-tos, etc). The elephant bit still gets me.
    • 2/5
      Just So Stories was just so disappointing. Like Aesop's Fables with less fun to them and mostly lacking morals to the stories. The language was repetitive and very dated and boring. I've been told Kim is a very good book, so I'll give it a shot, but I don't have high hopes.
    • 5/5
      I never actually read these as a kid. I remember having them read to me, but I never read them for myself. Which, as Phillip Pullman says in the introduction, is a shame, because they're wonderfully playful and easy to read, and even if there are words you don't understand (there weren't, for me now, but when I was little...) they're bright and lively and I can bet I'd have had more fun imagining what they might mean than actually finding out. These stories were definitely the kind I couldn't help but whisper to myself. I think they'd make even a non-synesthetic taste the words. I enjoyed the illustrations and the notes that went with them, too. In general they were just playful and fun to read, even now I'm all growed up. I especially liked the armadillo one, but perhaps that's because it included a character called Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog, and I do adore hedgehogs. The next one we rescue in our garden will have to be called Stickly-Prickly, I think.
    • 5/5
      Written into my memory, with rhythm repeats and long words
    • 3/5
      Done in the style of fables, but about the length of traditional fairy tales (think Grimm or Perrault). The animals in the fables encompass creatures from all over the world (India, Africa, Amazon off the top of my head). I'd say about half the stories captures my attention (and maybe imagination). It feels a bit dated, even though nothing really sets it off (no outmoded language or horrible stereotypes). A decent collection.
    • 5/5
      I have always enjoyed Rudyard Kipling and Just So Stories was one of my childhood favourites.
    • 4/5
      I will always love this book for the story The Elephant's Child. My father read this to me as a bedtime story and I will never forget him reading the portion of the story where the elephant's nose has been caught by the crocodile (oops, spoiler), and how my father would pinch his nose in order to change his voice to read that. Still makes me smile.
    • 4/5
      The stories are still quite entertaining to read. I will definitely read it to my children should I have any
    • 5/5
      This is one of those books you'd wish you'd read as a child...so you could, in turn, read to your OWN child. I would LOVE to have read this to PJ as a baby. The stories are enchanting and written very much as if Kipling were speaking to his own daughter, and each is more fascinating than the last, presenting fanciful explanations for commonplace questions, like, how the Camel got his hump. Or how the first letter was written. Or my favorite, what happened when the butterfly stamped his foot. Brilliant stuff, this, and it should be a part of every library...and on your list of books to read to YOUR child!
    • 3/5
      Cute stories of how the animals got to be who they are...
    • 4/5
      A bizarre collection of fantastical explanations for things such as how the camel got his humps. Clever, and imaginative, useful in the classroom as vocabulary building, and how-to's, as well as creative writing. Some of Kipling's attitudes are questionable, and may need to be filtered.
    • 4/5
      Rudyard Kipling's collection of fairy tales and fables formed the majority of my childhood literary diet. I can't tell you how much I was fascinated by his (maybe somewhat secondhand) myths of a primordial world, where men and animals competed and coexisted in more than one sense, where ancient untold wonders and unspoken secrets abound, and where a man helps his daughter design the English alphabet.Don't let my rose-colored glasses fool you - it's really an amazing work. Stop reading this review and pick up a copy.
    • 2/5
      I didn't bother to finish this book - had really expected more of it but actually the stories are not the kind of golden childhood story that you get with many other classic children's authors. This particular copy of the book has illustrations in it and large paragraphs that are placed as subtext in the middle or bottom of the page so they are somewhat interrupting. I just found much of the book nonsensical, but not in a good way. I think the concept had more potential than the stories actually were able to unfold into.