Tales To Tickle the Funnybone Books In Order

Publication Order of Tales to Tickle the Funnybone Books

Tales To Tickle the Funnybone is a children book series by the Award winning America Author Gary Paulsen. Gary Paulsen is the author of more than 200 books, over 200 magazines articles, several plays, and short stories all mainly targeted at young adults. In 1997 Gary Paulsen won the Margret Edwards Award from the American Library Association for his lifetime contribution in writing for young adults primarily teenagers. Gary Paulsen was born on May 17, 1939, in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States of America, and writes in the non fiction, young adult, and adventure genres. Gary Paulsen started writing the Tales to Tickle the Funnybone children novel series in 1990 with the first book The Boy Who Owned the School. The series has six novels the last novel being, The Amazing Life of Birds: The Twenty Day Puberty Journal of Duane Homer Leech, which was written in 2006. The Tales to Tickle the Funnybone series can be read in any order because each book is a stand alone novel i.e. each novel is independent of the other novels in the series.

The first novel of the Tale To Tickle the Funnybone series is The Boy Who Owned the School. The Boy Who Owned the School is a novel that gives a humorous look at teenage life, complete with a distorted self concept. The novel is mostly centered in Jacobs’s high school where he wants to get around unnoticed. Jacob is a classic loser and very often finds himself cornered by some bad boy. Jacob suffers all manner of humiliation in the hands of these school bullies from being thrown into the trash bin to being staffed into the locker. While running laps around the school gym, Jacob inadvertently tramples Maria Trasser who is the most beautiful girl in the school. Love strikes and Jacob in a hopeless infatuation moves from one disaster to another. Be it as it may, Jacob wins a date with the girl of his dreams!

In the book Jacob Freisten is a thin freckled boy and according to his own assessment, he is the ugliest boy of all time except for one! He is a total clod to boot, and has perfected the art of stealth mobility or being near invisible; he is there but not there! Jacob leads a kind of overly painful life that needs precise planning and timing so as to avoid attracting attention. If he gets noticed, a comic disaster always results. Jacob is a mess, and even goofs up in his daydreams. Jacob’s parents are drunkards, and his mother is particularly devoted to his elder sister’s blossoming career as a beauty contestant. Jacob is not fairing well in his English class, in fact he is close to failing the subject. He needs to pass in English and for this his English teacher gets him to work, for extra credit, on the stage crew of his school’s production of The Wizard of Oz. Somewhat appropriately, Jacob is been assigned the job of being the under stage controller of the fog machine. This task provides him with an excellent opportunity to work with Maria Tresser, the most beautiful girl in the school. Jacob has a crush on her and it rapidly intensifies. However, the opportunity to work with Maria Tresser is a mixed blessing because when its time to fog, Jacob, though a timing expert messes badly and in the resulting confusion lets out his feelings for Maria. Maria astonishingly accepts his feeble invitation for a date and romance blooms as Maria assures Jacob that he is a winner.

Harris and Me is the second novel of the Tale to Tickle the Funnybone series. The novel was first published in 1993. The book is a collection of vignettes with a subheading that previews each chapter. This novel is rated as one of Gary Paulsen best works ever. The book honestly holds to the true nature of a mischievous boy. Harris and Me is full of funny, rib cracking episodes of young boys living out their adolescent imaginations. The theme of the book is that no matter where you live try as much as you can to have fun, Enjoy! Harris and Me is a story about a 12 year city boy who is taken to live with his uncle and aunt during the summer because his parents are alcoholics. There he meets his cousin, Harris, a 9 year old wild country boy. They become friends and the two boys embark on a summer like no other. In the beginning, Harris is not a friend of choice, in fact he isn’t a friend at all. To the city boy, this unruly cousin of his doesn’t seem exactly respectable. To begin with, he goes mouse hunting, fights chicken, wrestles 300 pound pigs and rides a motorbike! Harris doesn’t seem to have a moral guide. Harris is crude and rude, and gets into trouble with every step. He leads his city cousin into all manner of activities from daredevil jump out of a barn loft to wrestling slippery 300 pound pigs. And as if that is not enough, Harris takes his city cousin swimming and to watch cowboy movies. However, Harris’s mischievous ways offer some valuable lessons to his troubled city cousin who is finding his way. Though farm life is a hard life, it is never lonely, and before long Harris’s cousin feels he has found a place where he belongs. Why can’t the summer last forever?!

The main character of the novel is a nameless boy who grew up in the city and had neither been to the country nor to a farm. As the boy explains, he was 11 years old in that early 1950’s summer when a deputy Sheriff took him to his uncle and aunt on a North Country farm. This was because his parents were alcoholics. The Larson’s were sturdy rural people and his uncle Knute was a quite man though he was the source of Harris rich profane vocabulary. Under Harris, the city boy learns rural life the hard way. Ignored by the busy elders, Harris gives his rich imagination a free rein and the two boys get into all manner of trouble, as dangerous as it is hilarious. The trouble involves two big horses, a runaway motorbike equipped with his aunt’s gasoline washing machine motor and daredevil jumps from a barn loft. By the end of the summer the city boy has pretty learned to match his cousins wild pranks and has understood the true humanity of the characters or people he so comically and vividly describes .