By George!!! (warning: nitpickiness alert)

I've not had much reading time of my own lately, because my son is obsessed (OBSESSED!) with Curious George, and I've spent all my time reading this book instead of, say, catching up on the award books...

And while I loved George myself as a kid, I have to say that I HATE THIS BOOK! In particular I hate the opening lines of each of the stories in the treasury. Each begins like so:

This is George.
He was a good little monkey, and always very curious.
This morning George and the man with the yellow hat were at the...

Now, maybe I'm being really really nitpicky, but why switch your tense around like that? First George is present. Then he's past, like far far past. And then he's recent past, like this morning...

Why would you say, "He was a monkey" and not "He is a monkey" unless he is no longer a monkey?

Of course, none of these books were actually penned by the Reys. Anymore than the forthcoming titles, "George Talks on an iPhone" and "George Tries Out the New Spicy Chicken Sandwich at Wendy's". So I blamed that fact for the awful writing.

Then I went looking for the original (despite the politically incorrect illegal animal trade stuff) and found this:

This is George.
He lived in Africa.
He was a good monkey and always very curious.

So I guess the Reys were halfway there (in mixed-up-tense land) to begin with. BUT it should be said that the "IS" refers to the picture, and the "WAS" is used throught the story. And they don't then proceed with a "Four seconds ago" line... so that George doesn't seem dead in the original the way he does in "George Visits a Toystore" and "George Buys Chinese-made Clothes at American Apparel but then Drinks Free Trade Coffee After."

In any case, this will continue to bug me, and I will continue to read the dumb book to my son, almost always beginning on page 97 with "George Goes Camping."

At least twice each night.

Sigh.

I stole...

That's right. I'm a bad bad girl, an evil plagiarist.

And a terrible secret keeper.

Sorry I'm not blogging reviews...

I'm too busy meeting my heroes.

Can you identify this man?

Yeah, that's me. And my book. And my baby. And...

I'm cool!

(Or a cheeseball???)

Oh, who cares. It was FUN!

The Last Book...

It seems to me that we kidlitters should participate in this cool project:


Open call for collaborations (second call)

The Last Book is a project to compile written as well as visual statements in which the authors may leave a legacy for future generations. The premise of the project is that book-based culture is coming to an end. On one hand, new technologies have introduced cultural mutations by transferring information to television and the Internet. On the other, there has been an increasing deterioration in the educational systems (as much in the First World as on the periphery) and a proliferation of religious and anti-intellectual fundamentalisms. The Last Book will serve as a time-capsule and leave a document and testament of our time, as well as a stimulus for a possible reactivation of culture in case of disappearance by negligence, catastrophe or conflagration.

Contributions to this project will be limited to one page and may be e-mailed to lastbook.madrid@gmail.com or mailed to Luis Camnitzer, 124 Susquehanna Ave., Great Neck NY 11021, USA. In case of submission of originals, these will not be returned. The book will be exhibited as an installation at the entrance of the Museum of the National Library of Spain in Madrid at some point of 2008. Pages will be added during the duration of the project, with the intention of an eventual publication of an abridged version selected by Luis Camnitzer, curator of the project. The tentative deadline is March 31, 2008.

This call is open and we hope that it will be resent to as many potential contributors as possible.

Public Domain...

I thought this was of interest, a story sent to me by my very very good friend (and wicked smart-librarian) James:

Much of the world gets to celebrate today as Public Domain Day as well, the day when a whole year’s worth of copyrights enter the public domain for anyone to copy or reuse as they like.

In countries that use the “life plus 50 years” minimum standard of the Berne Convention, works by authors who died in 1957 enter the public domain today. That includes writers, artists, and composers like Nikos Kazantzakis, Diego Rivera, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jean Sibelius, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

In countries that use the “life plus 70 years” term, works by authors who died in 1937 enter the public domain, including works by J. M. Barrie, Jean de Brunhoff, H. P. Lovecraft, Maurice Ravel, and Edith Wharton. Since many countries with this term recently extended it due to trade agreements, they’re often seeing these works re-enter the public domain after being removed from it, but their return to the public is still appreciated.

In countries like the US and Australia, which are under 20-year freezes of all or most of the public domain, it’s not quite as momentous a day. Here in the US, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, we’re once again waking up to a public domain 1922, as we have since 1998. Our next mass expiration of copyrighted published material is scheduled for New Year’s Day 2019, 11 years from now.

I did not know this, did not even know about the freeze. Huh!

I cannot even begin to fully understand the why/how of this. Anyone care to explain?

(Thanks James!)

Happy New Year!!!

After an evening of sparkling beverages, fireworks, and late-night babies, we woke slowly...

and found our bathroom wall was rotting!!!

So we are starting 2008 by spending money we don't really have to retile a bathroom we barely manage to clean anyway (perhaps *that* was the beginning of the problems)...

But this only intensifies my need to finish THE DANG BOOK and turn it in. Because I can ill afford extra child care. Sigh.

All this to apologize once again for the intermittent posting. Really, I'm going to get CRAZY on this blog just as soon as "life calms down".

HA!

In the meantime, have you read Laura Amy Schlitz's A Drowned Maiden's Hair? I love it!

It's a gothic-ish tale, set somewhere between Baltimore and England. Which is to say that Schlitz is from Baltimore and set her orphan-stranded-in an-asylum-but then adopted-by spiritualists-and-taken-to-a-seaside-town-and-forced-to-work-seances (yeah, another one of those) somewhere nearby, but that it has the feel of a true Gothic tale.

I love Maud, the heroine, and I love the crazy seance-sisters, but most of all I love Muffet, the deaf/mute with a limp who mkaes odd noises.

And of course, I looooooove Baltimore, and "Cape Calypso", which reminds me of Beach haven, or Rohobeth, or Bethany, the beaches of my youth!

Totally leebossa!!!

Don't let this ick-en-spick new cover fool you, The Secret Language is just as leebossa as you remember it. And I'm plugging it today because the recent Terebithia movie got me thinking about Nordstrom's only book.

Both are books about lonely kids, and about deep singular friendships and secret imaginings that make the world a bigger place. And while in Terebithia it's a pretend place that bonds the kids, in Secret Language, the shared device is an invented language

(I don't think I have to translate leebossa or ick-en-spick for you, even if you've never read the book. Remember your context clues?!)

My own childhood was this way. I only had one friend-- one REAL friend. But my faith in that friendship (and the private imaginary universe we constructed together) was what made the "real" world feel safe to me. And so books like this struck a real chord in me.

Now, as an adult, reading such books reminds me of what it truly felt like to be a kid. The same way that sitting under the dining room table can still make me feel eight years old.

There were different vantage points back then. Perspective was different. Experience somehow a little richer.

The Secret Language is a good book for bringing back such perspectives. It's a tree to climb, a fort you've built from pillows. Reading this book is like opening your eyes underwater to search for the penny.

(It doesn't hurt that it's set in a boarding school. I always wanted to go to boarding school. Then again, I also wanted to be an orphan. This seems crazy now, but that's because I'm a grownup now. Dang!)

Not entirely a coincidence...

That I happen to be taking a few Pinkwaters with me on vacation this week, at the very same time that somebody else has just interviewed Daniel Pinkwater, America's Greatest Writer.

Not *entirely*.

What I'm up to...

Yeah, yeah... excuses excuses...

No, really, I *have* been reading. But mostly I've just been reading this over and over and over again, to my elephant-addicted son. And while I don't love it enough to blog it, my son's discerning toddler-tastes would indicate that Gilles Bachelet is a total genius, and worthy of kidliterati status.

No really, it's cute.

But enough about my kid. What about ME?!

Well, I'm awful busy, over here, getting organized and blogging for the Class of 2k8. You should check it out!

(Oh, and it turns out to be true-- the running-away latke and the Hannukah goblins are officially the best Jewish-winter-holiday-books on the market. Says ME!)

Genius...

I just found out that Lewis Carroll invented the work "chortle"! A hybrid of the words "chuckle" and "snort".

Did you know? Probably you did...

But I find this to be a wonderful thing, and I'm feeling glad I didn't let my editor change my word "glop" to "blob" as she desired...

So glad I'm chortling.

New site!!!

My new site is live and AWESOME... if I do say so myself.

Stop by for a sneak peek of some of Jaime Zollars' amazing artwork for Inside the Slidy Diner.

Great great thanks to Jeff Skinner, my superdoooooper designer.

No, no, no...

To the person who got here with a google search: ferdinand the bull gay.

You are stupid.

Ferdinand is not gay. Nor is he straight. He is a bull. And let me tell you, the average bull is likely to fornicate with just about anything that fits when he has a mind to. But I do not think he forms romantic attachments.

Not even Ferdinand.

I wonder if you are assuming that anyone who likes flowers is gay. Or that anyone who does not like to fight is gay.

If so, color me gay.

The no-review review...

I cannot tell you about my favorite Chanukah picture book because....

As far as I know, no truly amazing Chanukah-book-for-kids has yet been written.

And I don't mean an acceptable book. I don't mean a "Wee-ell, it's pretty good, and the pictures are nice, and if we don't give them something they'll read Frosty the snow-man or How Little Bun-Bun Went to Jesus Land..."

I mean GOOD! Nothing GOOD is out there... GOOD like Christmas has good stuff. Good like the Peanuts Special, or the Christmas chapter in Little House in the Big Woods where Laura gets a WHOLE penny, all for herself. Gift of the Magi GOOD or A Christmas Carol GOOD.

Why is this? Why does Christmas only require a special time of year and "spirit", and so it can do a whole range of things... but Chanukah sends us to pancakes and dreidels and candles and that's IT! Why can't there be a Chanukah "spirit" with which to infuse books, so that we might abandon our oily foods as a theme?

Oily foods are NOT A THEME!

And one gets tired of the Maccabees. And the pogroms. Didn't anyone ever celebrate Chanukah in any other place and time than Israel, Poland/Poland-ish place, or [insert present-day name of wherever you happen to be]. Weren't there Chanukahs happening in like, Medieval England? The Wild West? Burlesque stages in the 30s?

Can you imagine if every bit of Christmas media was required to mention candycanes, paperchains, and Jesus?

What's that you say? YOU DO KNOW OF A GOOD CHANUKAH BOOK?

Bring it on!

(and don't you dare send me to look for Moishe and his dumb fry-pan. I'm over the shtetl thing. And don't you DARE send me to look for Sammy the Spider. Sammy the Spider is sooooo last year.)

Cures for Heartbreak...

Margo Rabb's Cures for Heartbreak kicks total tush.

I do not, as a rule, read a lot of YA fiction, and I'll admit I only read this one because it landed in my lap and (full discoslure) I happen to know Margo. A little bit.

But wow.

Because of my recent resolution to stop overthinking, I will not pick it apart. I will just say this-- I cried.

This is a book like life, a little messy and a little little brutal and a little embarassing. But in the end, full of wisdom and honesty and love if you look at it the right way. It is not adorned. It is not oversmart. It is not trying to impress you. It is just telling a true and terrible story.

There are places where my own memories of teen pain and angst and self-awareness overwhelmed me. I too have a weird dad. I too overthought what I wore each day. Thank God I do NOT have a dead mom.

I did find myself wondering how today's teen responds to outdated references to Depeche Mode and the Gogos (I loved these references, since I'm old) but I don't really care. The book rocks. Really.

Lots of Good Books...

So, I was going to review The Mysterious Benedict Society, but I crashed my car, and while I was embroiled in that insanity, I began reading the Neddiad...

Then I was going to review the Neddiad, but I crashed our other car!!! Two cars!!! And while I was embroiled in *that* insanity, I began reading the Canning Season (although the hardback cover is tons better than the paperback you can see on Amazon)...

So now, here I sit, (in my rental car, duh) with THREE new books I want to talk about... even though I started this blog primarily because I couldn't FIND enough new books worth reading/talking about.

So THAT's GOOD!

But here's the thing-- I've recently gotten some flack for "overthinking" kidlit, and now I'm pondering my methods of reviewing-- my way of talking about children's books online. I'm wondering whether I shouldn't just tell you, in less thinky ways, what I REALLY think of these books. What I like and don't.

So I will attempt to do that right now.

All three of these books are GOOD, though none are "GREAT" (In the true sense of greatness. None of them will save the world. None are Narniastic). But they are all very very very good books.

All are funny and silly in different ways. All offer us endearing and odd and memorable characters. All are old-fashioned in one way or another. All are (however much the authors might protest) literary. Careful with language. Clever. But the books are different from one another.

In short:

Benedict Society (Trenton Lee Stewart)-- I LOVE the cover, the puzzles, the orphanhood, the setting, the precociousness of the main character. If it fails at all it's just because it goes on too long for a middle grade book. It takes too long for things to get where they're going. I got just a teensy bit bored (sad to say), but the book is wonderfully written and reminds me a little of John Bellairs book.

The Neddiad (Daniel Pinkwater):

I love the tone. LOVE the tone. The humor, which is subtle and perfect here (quirky humor is hot right now, and often teeters over into random/dumb. But NOT this one. Never dumb or gratuitous). I love how this book wanders. I love that it is set in Hollywood in the fifties (the world my mom is from). But The Neddiad wraps up a little too fast. I found myself fingering the last 4 pages and thinking, "How is this gonna end in FOUR PAGES?) However-- this book stands up to a Dahl comparison, and that's pretty rare. High praise coming from me. There is something of Dahl in this book. It surprises quietly. (editor's note. Extrmem abuse of the word "Quirky" has been modified. Please forgive...)

The Canning Season (Polly Horvath):

This book is WEIRD. And it doesn't need a bunch of obviously weird weirdity. It just IS weird. Because it's human, and humans are weird.

In addition to being weird, humans are also mean, and so this book has meanness in it too. Delicious meanness. A reliable (and brilliant and fabulous) source tells me that Canadian authors (HOrvath is one such) are more subversive than American kidlitters. They can handle the mean...

Set in Maine in the present-day, but in the creepy old home of two spinsters (Tilly and Penpen), surrounded by lots of hungry bears, with no TV/phone, etc. It appeals to me (though it might not to you) in part because it is the only middle grade book I ever read with the word F*ck in it. Not to mention cancer and cigarettes and mothers who cut off their own heads and drunk driving and all kinds of things you usually only find in "edgy YA" There is a "mystery" aspect to the book I like a lot-- the main character (Ratchet) has a deformity , referred to (awesomely) as "That Thing". There is a little bit of trashiness in this book too. It's a GOOD book, and it comes close to Great, but I fear a lot of parents won't be able to hang with the F*ck.

Did I manage to avoid thinking these books too hard?

Perhaps, but I think I overthought the overthinking...

Sigh.

I yam what I yam...

More excuses...

Okay, so I had TWO car accidents. TWO! And I know I'm way behind on my blogging, but did I mention that I had TWO CAR CRASHES???!!!

And then, on top of that insane mess, I FINALLY got permission to show you THIS! It's the cover of my book (done by the remarkable Greg Call). MY BOOK< "Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains", coming out next August from Random House.

So really, I can't be expected to blog about other people's books when I have THIS to show you. Right?

Right?

Soon, soon...

I really want to blog about the Mysterious Benedict Society. But I crashed my car, lost my Grandma, and discovered that both my sons have fevers. All in one day.

So it'll have to wait.

Say a little prayer?

Dumbledore is gay!!!

So, the kidlit threads and blogs are alive with the Gay Dumbledore saga... and in fact, it's fascinating.


One big question is HOW we teach when we have "secret information" from a living author. Information not in the text (though there's nothing in the text to refute).


Another issue is whether Rowling chickened out. Whether she should have/could have been more opaque, more detailed in her exposure of Dumbledore's romantic life.


A third topic is whether this suits the needs of the nasty-minded, since Dumbledore was an older man, a priest-model, and Harry a young orphan in need of love.


A fourth is whether Dumbledore (if he is in fact gay) is the ONLY gay man in the wizarding world.


And my thoughts? I think that Rowling didn't *know* her headmaster was gay in book one, but that by book 6 or 7 she was envisioning him as a gay character. I'm guessing that she made this apparaent in an early draft, and was edited down. If this is all true, I'm glad she outed him at Carnegie Hall (in any case, really) since I think the HP7 audience is exactly the population that needs to be more open to discussions of identity/lifestyle.


What makes me sad is that a heartfelt scene about Dumbledore's struggles against the stigma would totally fit into the book. In book 7, Dumbledore gets unearthed and destroyed in the press, and it would make perfect sense iof he love life came out in that process. It would further make sense for Harry to struggle with this a little, and to then ASK Dumbledore about it in his dream/post death conversation with the headmaster.


And this would have been such a good way for Dumbledore to create a GOOD stereotype as an older gay man. To show the world that because his lifestyle was so hated (like Lupin, actually) in the wizarding world, he was denied a chance to marry and have kids, and so became the headmaster of Hogwarts (instead of minister of magic), where he could put his love of children to good use.


Which ties it all together. Dumbledore pours his love into Harry in such a healthy way NOT because he's a dirty old man, but because he's been denied a family by the closed-minded world around him. This Harry would be able to understand I think, after being hunted/hated himself.


I feel like Rowling missed her shot. But I'm glad she's outing him now.

Young Readers' Guide to Contemporary Poetry...

What would people think of such a thing? A truly contemporary list of poets who might interest young (let's say high school) readers. And tips on how best to teach and best use their work?

Last I checked, ee cummings was still being taught as "wacky new poetry".

My kind of blog...

Okay, so I'm a fan of finding adult themes in kidlit. And (as we all know) I'm a freak for Edward eager. So THIS BLOG is pretty much rocking my little world.

"Collective Farming Experiment" indeed!

I'll be adding Oz and Ends to my daily reads...