The SurRural Librarian

Just back from swimming lessons where I sat by the side of the pool and thoroughly enjoyed an article by Jill Lapore in the July 21st New Yorker on Stuart Little, the history of children’s libraries & children’s literary criticism.

To top it off, there’s a podcast about the piece with Jill Lepore & Roger Angell - whose mom Katharine White had a big role in the story. Seems as though getting yourself into a twist over kids books has been a hobby of librarians throughout the ages.

Listen to the podcast here, read the article here, and learn what made Tonstant Weader fwow up.

Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) has a brand-spanking-new YA Sci Fi novel out called Little Brother.

Cool guy that he is, he’s posted electronic copies of the book online for free. Instead of accepting offers of donations from grateful readers, he’s set up a site where potential donors can send a hard copy of the book to a school or library that requests it.

How does it work, you ask? Welllll, our budget spent for the year, I thought I’d see. On Wednesday I asked to be added to the list of libraries and our name & address were posted on their site. Today (Friday) I received a copy in the mail from an anonymous donor! How coool is that?

See his site for more details.

And Thank You Anonymous!! I’ll be spending my Mother’s Day in the hammock with our new copy of Little Brother (librarian’s privilege). By Monday - it’ll be in the hands of a student.

Pre-readers review: great title, super cover and jacket blurbs from Scott Westerfeld & Neil Gaiman. Ooooh!

Here in Vermont, we’re having a perfect storm of book awards. Voting for this year’s books and lists for next year are popping up all over.

The DCF committee is now offering online voting (yay Steve!) and their super new list is up too. (pdf) They’re going to get big props from my kids for including Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It probably won’t completely make up for the lack of Rick Riordan books, but it’s a start.

The 2008/09 Red Clover list is online.

Librarians need to send in the votes for both the DCF & Red Clover awards by Friday, April 11.

The Green Mountain Book Award tallies are due May 2nd, forms for reporting can be found one their site. The new list isn’t online yet, but was sent out to the listservs. Great books. (Sarah Vowell - wow!)

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Black and White by Paul Volponi
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Bucking the Sarge by Christopher Paul Curtis
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch
It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Nick Vizzini
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home by Nando Parrado with Vince Rause
The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci

The 5/6 are hard at work on their DCF projects. Everyone is working on a project using at least two computer applications and a good amount of creativity inspired by their favorite book on the DCF list. We’ve got comics, book covers, bookmarks and posters galore to share at the DCF conference in May.

A number of my students were swept away by TuxPaint & Comic Life. They really worked hard creating comic versions of their chosen novels, squeezing in computer time whenever they could.

Everyone once in a great while I am so moved by a book that I simply want the world to stop and join one big book group.

You all need to stop what you’re doing right now and get yourself a copy (or 24) of Shaun Tan’s elegant, moving, frightening, beautiful The Arrival.

This is a wordless book, and I’m pretty much at a loss for words myself. It’s just, great.

Clearly, I’m not the only one who thinks so.

A New York Times Best Illustrated Book
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2007
A Book List Editors’ Choice
A School Library Journal Best Book of 2007
A 2007 Parents’ Choice Gold Award
A New York Public Library Best Book for Reading and Sharing

More images can be seen here at this extract.

We have an immigration unit in our 5/6th grades, and I can not wait to read this with them. I love this book and will be getting copies for the whole classroom.

Done with H. Potter, The Golden Compass & Narnia, and needing something new? You’ve just GOT to read Un Lun Dun by China Mieville. I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in some time. This review from Salon is pretty great, so I’ll just link.

“Un Lun Dun” is a novel you can safely give to young readers without fear that they will come back wanting to enroll in a boarding school, take up the broadsword or join the Church of England.

Honesty, do NOT miss this book. What a joy!

Toys go out : being the adventures of a knowledgeable Stingray, a toughy little Buffalo, and someone called Plastic
by Emily Jenkins;  Paul O Zelinsky

I just picked up Toys Got Out, what a great book! An outstanding read aloud, it’s very much in the spirit of Winnie the Pooh, updated. It’s a short collection of stories with the same three main characters: a stuffed buffalo, a stingray and a rubber ball name Plastic (who experiences some existential angst in chapter two in a search for self-knowledge). There’s also a bath towel named TukTuk and a singing washing machine named Frank.

Really, what more do you need to know?

There are some fabulous little bits in this that gave my 5 year old and I full-on belly laugh attacks. And you know an author who has the dad doing the laundry has their act together.

And on a tangent… I was just in a workshop last week on Visual Thinking Skills, in which a super librarian insisted that picture books would make excellent material for VTS. The Zelnisky drawings in this book are a perfect example. They are beautiful, and tell a story, without being too literal. I’m going to try them out some time.

I abandoned Talk of the Nation soon after Ray Suarez, so I missed this until now.

Neil Gaiman, Christopher Paolini and Tamora Pierce were on back in December. Audio can be heard here.

I wasn’t planning on mentioning the Higher Power of Lucky broohaha. What more is there to say? Puh-lease.

But when my favorite Saturday radio show had a good laugh at librarians’ expense yesterday, I did just want to hide under the rug. For every rant about the “stereotypes” of librarians just not fitting anymore, there’s a ridiculous librarian out there making a bad name for us all.

Fortunately, a little sunshine was brought to my day by Neil Gamain with this lovely & helpful post on his blog…

An Absence of Scrota — your guide to quality literature…

I’ve decided that librarians who would decline to have a Newbery book in their libraries because they don’t like the word scrotum are probably not real librarians (whom I still love unconditionally). I think they’re rogue librarians who have gone over to the dark side.
…
Helpfully, over at http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/youth_literature_is_filled_with_scrotums.php you will find a list of books for the young, probably already in the libraries, with scrota (or even scrotums) in them. This is probably provided for rogue librarians who now need to hunt these books down and remove them, scrotums and all.

Ian Frazier’s Shouts in Murmurs in this week’s New Yorker is hilarious. He starts with this excerpt:

Check books out of the library instead of buying them. . . . New releases of hard-cover novels cost $25 and more these days. If you buy just two a month, that’s $600 a year.
—From “Ten Sure Ways to Trim Your Budget,” in the News.

Then follows extremely amusing letters in response, such as…

Mitch Gelman, West Hempstead, New York: “As an accountant, the first thing I tell my clients is ‘Get a library card!’ Otherwise, you’re too subject to temptation, and liable to find yourself in over your head. Few people know that the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is the ‘Clan of the Cave Bear’ novels. You overspend on one, and, just when you begin to dig yourself out, the next installment comes along. Public libraries began during the Depression as a government measure against this very problem. They’re there for our protection, so we should use them.”

Go read it, it’s short.

I’m still disappointed by the spotty information I’ve found on graphic novels for k-8, but this new pamphlet from ALA has some interesting tips on shelving and challenges.

Graphic novels: Suggestions for Librarians
 (pdf)
ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has prepared a downloadable PDF booklet (with artwork by Sergio Aragonés), in conjunction with the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, that offers tips on how to develop a graphic novel collection, ways to deal with challenges in libraries, and where to shelve them….

I had planned on doing a book talk* on Criss Cross with my 5-8th grades this week. I loved that book. But when I got to school, I slipped into the 5th grade class for a visual. It helps me to visit a class when I’m planning. Notes never really help me remember the unique personalities in each room. (You know - a picture of each class would be a great idea. hmmmm)

I took one look at those kids and realized, ugh, they’re going to hate it. The room is majority sports-loving, book-disdaining young boys.

I dashed back into the library and searched the DCF list for something with some action and recommended for 4th grade. Grabbed The Giant Rat of Sumatra. I liked it alright over the summer, pirates are big, no problem.

Well. I have yet to perfect the talent of reading a book as if I were a kid. I had completely missed the fact that the vocab is dense and pre-Victorian. This Trollope fan enjoyed it, but those 5th grade boys - not so much.

It’s a tough read. I had to stop at every sentence and explain what the heck was going on. The only thing that kept me from being egged were the little pirate tidbits I threw out every few minutes. Thanks Johnny Depp.

What broke my heart was seeing some of the boys straining to understand. They were so excited about a pirate book. When a kid has a very hard time reading, does it help for me to expose them to difficult language? Or did it just freak them out? One boy did bring it home, but he’s a big reader.

I still recommend Rat for those precocious Redwall (or Henry Fielding) fans. But it could send reluctant readers screaming from the library. I think I blew it.

*Does anyone have a better word for book talks? It sounds like it should read as BookTalk TM to me. Drives me nuts.

I first heard of Neil Gaiman from the students at the college where I used to work. I bought the Sandman series for that library and won instant approval for being so cool. Of course, I hadn’t read them and still haven’t (it’s easy to impress when you’re a librarian. You just buy stuff and the kids love you. You don’t even have to read it.) But now I’ve got a huge pile of Gaiman for grownups next to my bed, waiting for me to have a second’s break from YA.

Why the sudden interest, you ask?

The Dad I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish is about as close to perfect as picture books come. I’ve been raving about it to everyone who will listen. (Your turn!)

Goldfish is the bomb. It’s hilarious. It’s one of the books that’s a perfect storm of excellent writing and fabulous illustrations. My four year old and I crack up just listening to it in the car on my iPod. But the pictures - bam! So funny. Dave McKean, what a guy.

I’m also searching for the time to read Coraline with my 5th graders, and can’t wait to try out The Wolves in the Walls with the 3rd graders who keep asking me for “darker” books. (Really they do. They want books on Black Sabbath too.)

Gaiman is one of the few writers who don’t underestimate the intelligence of kids. I just love how he doesn’t lay everything out, he leaves you something to ponder. Why does the dad just keep reading his paper? Why the Queen of Melanesia? Why does his kid sister mumble when his mom comes home? (An excellent example of an illustrator and author working together.)

I’m sure Gaiman’s not for everyone. As in many of Raold Dahl’s books, his grownups are often clueless. The dad in Goldfish, and the parents in Coraline, might as well be mumbling like the parents in the Peanuts TV shows. The books are dark, and sometimes a little bit scary.

Like I said, perfect.

I’m a big lover of nineteenth century literature, so since I started working with children, I wanted to see if I could share that love with them. I thought I’d try out some of my old favorites with my four-year old. Wow, not what I had hoped for. Guess maybe my tastes have changed since I was five (thankfully).
Winnie the Pooh went great, Alice in Wonderland - she loved,even though it’s pretty nutso, honestly. Then we got to Peter Pan, oy vey. I’m not sure what bugged me more, the bogus gender roles, the racism, the violence. Here’s the passage that finally got us to just put the darn thing back on the shelf…

On the trail of the pirates, stealing noiselessly down the war- path, which is not visible to inexperienced eyes, come the redskins, every one of them with his eyes peeled. They carry tomahawks and knives, and their naked bodies gleam with paint and oil. Strung around them are scalps, of boys as well as of pirates, for these are the Piccaninny tribe, and not to be confused with the softer-hearted Delawares or the Hurons. In the van, on all fours, is Great Big Little Panther, a brave of so many scalps that in his present position they somewhat impede his progress. Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas [Diana = goddess of the woods] and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish [flirting], cold and amorous [loving] by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet.

Um, yuck.