Books for their baskets

I was just visiting at A Wrung Sponge, who was writing about what books her boys would be getting at Easter. I give my boys books at Easter too, since neither of them likes jelly beans or chocolate and I have to give them something or else they will be warped. My 3 yr old will be getting A Seed is Sleepy (can't get much more seasonally appropriate than that); I don't know what my 6 yr old will get. There are so many good picture books about gardens and flowers out there (and more just reviewed in the NY Times ), but there's not much for 6 year olds. All I can think of is The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds, which we have already. There are, of course, various Usbourne and DK books about plants and nature, and although informative and attractive, they aren't really the kind of books you hold to your heart.

Goodness, the internet is remarkable. In the last two minutes I have found this cool botany for kids website that has links all over the place. But still no book. Perhaps poetry.

As basket fillers, they are also getting seed packets...and I will make an effort this spring and we will actually take the microscope out, and press flowers, and peer at things with magnifying glasses, and do watercolors/pen and ink drawings of flowers (with their Latin names) etc etc instead of just reading about these things.

After the book sale is over

My most recent library book sale is over, in a sense; the money has been counted (about 900) and I am very tired of books. But I still have 2000 books left over, most of which I do not want to burden the Salvation Army with. Sometimes at night I sneak off into the woods and bury old hardcovers--it is a strange little graveyard of old encyclopedias (with volumes missing) and ex- library books that maybe have some interest to someone, but the someone and the book were fated never to meet. Today they are being offered free to as many of the general public as I could reach through craig's list and freecycle...tonight I must clear them away to make room for the animal shelter committee meeting.

However. A considerable part of the money we make gets spent on books, so I have the pleasure of making a new list of books to buy, based primarily on what I'm reading about on other blogs, to run past our children's librarian. Today I added Reaching for Sun, recently reviewed by Mother Reader.

What libraries look like

Now, my library will never win any accolades for style or aesthetics. It's an old red brick school, and that's just fine.


Here is a large blobby sea creature:


Just kidding! It's actually Prague's new library.

Nonsense Snakes for Poetry Friday

I am still thinking about snakes in children's literature (see post below), and for poetry Friday I went looking for poems. I had a dim memory of Edward Lear writing "s was a silly snake" for one of his nonsense alphabets, but he doesn't seem to have done so. However, here is R for Rattlesnake:


R was a rattlesnake,
Rolled up so tight,
Those who saw him ran quickly,
For fear he should bite.
r!
Rattlesnake bite!

Here is another Edward Lear snake:


"The Scroobious Snake,who always wore a Hat on his Head, for fear he should bite anybody."

There is a lovely Edward Lear website here with a very handy index. I highly recommend his botanical nonsense.

For those who want more adult snake poems, here is a collection of snake poems with commentary...

The poetry Friday roundup is at Chicken Spaghetti this week

Mabel Esther Allan--some are worth reading!

Our library has been slowly revamping its juvenile fiction, and some books by an English author named Mabel Esther Allan have bitten the dust. We are not alone in deaccessioning her, as indicated by the high volume and low price of her books (mostly exlibrary) on line. It seems that in the 1960s and 1970s those of her books that made it into American editions were standard fare--I bet there are still many libraries out there, like mine, which are a bit behind the deaccessioning times, and still have, perhaps, The View Beyond My Father and A Lovely Tomorrow, and a variety of titles that include Danger and Mystery (words I personally find incredibly off putting in a title).

Mabel Esther Allan was an incredibly prolific writer. Some of her books (most of the danger and mystery ones, are sort of silly--Mary Stewart light). But some of her books are well worth giving library shelf too. A Strange Enchantment is a lovely book about a girl in the English Land Army during WW II--fascinating historical information, character development, and a dash of romance. A Time to Go Back is a classic time slip story about the bombing of Liverpool in WWII; it is very well known and liked over in England by fans of time travel stories (has the term "time slip" made it into American English?). She also wrote some good ballet stories--The Ballet Family and The Ballet Family Again, for instance.

Some of ME Allan's more hard to find books are being republished by Fidra Books, a small press in Scotland; they have a full bibliography up on their website (well worth exploring in detail).

So if your library still has some Mabel Esther Allan's, do try them, before they are gone, especially A Strange Enchantment (which, being about farming and gardening, is (almost) seasonally appropriate).

Link to Megan Whalen Turner interview

The sci fi channel has an interview with Megan Whalen Turner up here, talking about one of my most favorite books ever, The King of Attolia. It's one of the nominees for the Andre Norton YA Sci fi and fantasy award. I am still not entirely sure why I love this book so much, but it was one of only a few books I read as an adult that I started re-reading within a week, and a few weeks after for a total of 3 times in one month. Which, when you realize what a hard time I have finding time to do my other reading (there are still bills I haven't opened that came a few weeks ago), is remarkable.

Also nominated is Life as We Knew It, which truly has a brilliantly believable catastrophe. But I still think the author should have moved to Maine for a winter in an unheated house before writing it, so as to make the survival aspects of it all more realistic.

Two YA books about WW I: boy book vs. girl book

I recently finished reading The Foreshadowing, by Marcus Sedgewick, a ya novel about World War I. Alexandra sees when people will die. After foretelling the death of her oldest brother, Alexandra becomes desperate to forestall the death she sees happening to her other brother. With minimal training as a nurse in the hospital where her father is a doctor, she heads off to France to find and save him.

This book was recently described in the Guardian as a book "that could help boys read" -- these books, apparently, should be "action packed" and "attention grabbing," which The Foreshadowing certainly is. I enjoyed it, although I might not have checked it out of the library if I had known it was a boy's book. I was tricked by the female-ness of the narrator into thinking I was getting a girl's book. So much for superficial snap judgements, because I quickly came to the conclusion that The Foreshadowing was indeed more a "boy" book.

[nb: although the Guardian started the "boy book" labeling, I am now going to become equally culpable. My definitions of girl's book vs boy's book are my own idiosyncratic ones, and I feel guilty about using these categories, believing strongly that gender stereotypes are bad bad bad. So I am using the terms with tongue firmly in cheek, as a conceptual device to talk about the books I like (girl) vs books I don't so much (boy). And in the process I continue to worry about my own boys, and whether they will be permitted/inclined to enjoy many of my favorite books that aren't boy books. My six year old is ashamed that he likes Angelina Ballerina. I hope to heck he didn't pick up on that bit of gender stereotyping from me. But of course even when you say, "It's just fine for boys to like ballet," the act of saying it makes it clear that it's not the normative viewpoint].

But anyway. What The Foreshadowing doesn't have, that a good girl's book should have, is introspective inaction. Alexandra is certainly thinking a lot, but the Cassandra theme of her narrative is so great that she doesn't have space to be anything else. The other thing a good girl's book has are powerful relationships. Alexandra is pretty much alone throughout the book, and the author's tight focus on her mental distress keep her isolated. Her reactions to non-dying people (such as the wounded soldiers all around her) are not particularly deep and thoughtful. And a girl's book would have put in more romantic frisson between Alexandra and a man she meets in France, who also can see when people are marked for death.


A girl's book about wounded WW I veterans that I love to pieces is After the Dancing Days, by Margaret Rostkowski (first published 1986, still available in paperback, but with a much more "modern" cover than this old one). This book is also narrated by a teenage girl--Annie visits the veterans' hospital where her father works and makes friends with Andrew, a horribly scarred young solder. It is not actioned packed--not much happens on the outside. But inside, Annie is growing up, Andrew is healing, and Annie's family is regrouping.


After the Dancing Days is a book I re-read every other year or so, whereas, although I certainly liked it, and would recommend it to those who lean toward action, I will probably not be re-reading The Foreshadowing. (Do girls re-read more than boys, establishing close relationships with their favorite books and brooding over them? Do boys leap actively from book to book?)

And then there's my favorite WW I girl's book of all, Rilla of Ingleside, by LM Montgomery...

Library book sale-ing

The first weekend of my March library booksale has ended, and I've tidied the books away, ready to bring them out again next weekend. It was a pretty low quality booksale, but it can't be helped. Well, it could be helped by me leaving valuable books in the sale instead of taking them to book stores to trade. But at any even, I have cash in hand again to go book shopping, although I am pretty sick of books right now. Library egg hunt comes next...

My first meme

I've been tagged with my very first meme by Kelly at Big A, Little A-- I have to name five non kidlit blogs I read. This is a bit of a problem, because the only one I've ever looked at on purpose, as opposed to following random links, is Shrinking Violet Promotions, a marketing site for introverts.

I only recently discovered the kid lit blogs. I lurk at Sounis, the discussion group for Megan Whalen Turner's books, because I loved the King of Attolia so much I had to have company, and that led me to Fuse # 8, and then on and on to other blogs, until finally I wanted to join the party too. And although I still feel like a new kid at school, the older kids have been very friendly. There is much less wondering if l will have to eat lunch alone feel to the whole thing than I had thought there might be. I also happily have met an old friend from college again through my blog--she commented not knowing it was me-- which is an added bonus!

But anyway, I'm sorry I can't fulfill my meme obligation! Nor do I know enough bloggers well enough to pass it on...What happens to me now????

The reading out loud challenge

Last month, I signed up to take part in a Reading Out Loud Challenge, organized by Jennifer at her blog, Snapshot. The idea of the challenge was to set specific goals that would spur us all on. My first goal was to begin reading chapter books to my now almost four year old boy, with the specific hope of introducing him to my favorite book of Greek mythology (D'Aulaire's book of Greek Mythology--it has supurb illustrations that are based on real works of classical and rennaisance art, leading to shocks of recognigtion in college art history class). My second goal was to continue pushing my 6 year old son up the hill to independent reading while making time to read him the books he really wants to be reading--generally, non-fiction.

I like goals, because I enjoy daydreaming about meeting them. It is a very hopeful feeling, but sadly, reality happens. I might have met these goals if we had a third grownup around the house, to do the dishes and laundry, cook supper, etc. But one parent had to do those things, while the other had the two boys to read to, so the one-on-one time for reading complicated non-fiction didn't happen (except a little bit at bedtime). Instead, I fell back on non-fiction books they could both enjoy. My three year old does not want to read chapter books yet, and isn't interested in Greek mythology, and the moral of that story is that even though I was, and his brother was, he isn't and that's fine. However, we did read more wordy books than we have been (Winnie the Pooh, some of the longer Beatrix Potter's, etc.).

So the upshot of it was--I thought a lot more about reading aloud, I felt somewhat guiltier about not reading aloud more, and I think I did read more to them...and I really must find more time to "study" with my six year old, which he wants to do so badly.

Actually, the last few days what he has really wanted were craft books. So I have been reading aloud to him gems such as "Toy boats and cars you can make at home." Scintillating.

Finally, thanks Jennifer for organizing the challenge!

(This really is the best book of Greek mythology ever)

A new book by Michelle Magorian is on its way!

I just found out that Just Henry, a new book by one of my favorite authors, English writer Michelle Magorian, is going to be released in 2008! I don't really know how well known she is over here--for the most part, I bought her books while visiting family in England before they were released over here. But I imagine that Goodnight, Mr. Tom is pretty well known??? Fortunately for me, one book that I read the American edition of first was Not a Swan (English title A Little Love Song -- much ickyer).

The American edition is a most excellent book about a girl coming of age in WWII England, featuring a used book store. In this edition, three sisters must fend for themselves when their mother goes overseas to entertain the troops. In the English edition, the plot is the same, but there are only two sisters, and the book is much weaker in consequence. It's the most major change from English book to American I've ever come across.

But anyway. Here is Michelle Magorian's website.

libary book sale time

It is library book sale time at my library, and since many of the other friends of the library are a. unable to come help set up b. unable to lift heavy things by the time the sale is set up I will have picked up around 4000 books two times each (give or take). Mostly not very appealing books at that. However, the point of the book sale is to get more money to buy appealing books, many of which were recommended on other blogs, so it is all worthwhile in the end (?).

At one support group meeting from Friends organizations, one FOL president said that they didn't buy books, because that was the responsibility of the library. I thought this was strange. Our library has so much ground to catch up in j. and ya fiction that it needs all the help it can get (they seem to have stopped buying more than an utter minimum around 1970). The Librarians are busily purging (Over the Alps with Hannibal bit the dust yesterday), and we are all busily buying, and soon, I hope, more and more children will be leaving the library with fiction, and not just school report books. Our librarian is being careful not to throw books of value out, and anyway, they all come to me in the end for the book sale. The books that I like best, however, I checked out before I became a Friend of the Library, thus ensuring that they'll stay on the library's shelves and not make it to mine just yet.

Naming of Parts

Note to reader: Despite the title, this poem has nothing to do with The Higher Power of Lucky, nor with any other children's book. It has to do with Spring and War. It was written by English poet Henry Reed in 1942.


NAMING OF PARTS

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.

At the Henry Reed website there are links that clarify and illustrate the text. Up above is one type of Japonica, at left is another.
Visit A Chair, a Fireplace & a Tea Cozy for more Poetry Friday offerings!

"Boys' Books" --good thing, bad thing, or whatever

There's an article in the Guardian today, in which the British Secretary for Education proposes that every secondary school have a "'boys' bookshelf' stacked with contemporary authors such as Melvyn Burgess and Anthony Horowitz to provide 'positive, modern, relevant role models' for boys who are reluctant to read or nervous about being bullied..." At the end of the article is a short list of books that might qualify, including one I just checked out of my library --The Foreshadowing, by Marcus Sedgwick.

I'm not sure I like this idea. I suppose (tongue in check) that once the boys start reading they will naturally learn to love it and not care anymore if they are carrying around books with strong female characters, or books with pink covers and sparkles, and I suppose that boys who like old fashioned fantasy or gentle character driven books are a. doomed anyway b. strong readers who don't need a boys' bookshelf. And I realize that girls aren't the point of this, but I for one am utterly put off by books labeled as "boys' books" and have probably refused to read many good books in consequence.

This article struck a chord in me. I just read my 6 year old's report card, and one area where progress is needed is in "choosing appropriate books." Apparently he has been choosing inappropriate ones left and right. What this means beats me. Has he begged to cross the lines of gender stereotypes? Has he begged for books that name body parts? Or has he simply asked for books he can't read yet (which includes most of the books in the world)?

The idea of Official "Books for Boys" Pickers telling my children what books to read is not a comfortable one.

Here's The Foreshadowing. A book for boys.

Fiction books about women's suffrage

This being Women's History Month, I have been musing about children's fiction books about women's suffrage. It was not a long muse, because I could only think of one-- Miss Rivers and Miss Bridges, by Geraldine Symons (MacMillan, 1971). We are the only library in Rhode Island that still has a copy, which is a shame as it is a great book (I was the first person to check it out in 15 years, saving it from the discard pile by a hair). 13 year old Pansy sets of for London at the beginning of last century, little knowing that her friend Atalanta is going to get them arrested for their enthusiastic participation in the Suffragette movement. There are several books about Pansy and Atalanta, all good reads.

Even when I tried to widen my mental book search to "good fiction directly about women's rights" (not including the "women have careers" or "go to college" genres) I came up with very little. There's The Mills Down Below, by Mabel Esther Allan, which is also dated, out-of-print, and English. Sure, there are lots of books with references -- one I like is Jean Thesman's The Ornament Tree (in print and American)--but I couldn't even find much on line. Maybe my heart just wasn't in the googling, or maybe America has been satisfied with those dry sort-of-dull-cereal type biographies that children across the country seem forced to check out of the library when they are in third grade or thereabouts -- "I Am Susan B. Anthony" etc. Or maybe there are really good fiction books out there that I don't know about or have forgotten.

Blow out the Moon and other boarding school stories

Among the books I recently picked up for my library was Blow out the Moon, by Libby Koponen (2004). I was at my local independent bookstore, which was having a clearance sale, when I should have been at work, so I was scooping up books based on their covers--Blow out the Moon has just come out in paperback, but I like the hc cover (at left) much better! I was pleased to see, once I unpacked everything, that I had come home with a book about an American girl who goes to an English boarding school in the 1950s, when her family moves to England.

It is based on the true experiences of the author, and it is filled with little sidebar snippets of old photographs, notes, letters etc. from the life of the narrator (but not necessarily the author--I am a bit confused on this point. Anyway, they look real). All this extra stuff distracted me, but I bet a lot of the 10 year old girls who are, after all, the intended audience, liked this aspect of the book. Things started off strong, with the exciting move to England, and Libby's first dismal experience of English school life, but once Libby was sent to boarding school (at the shocking age of 8), everything was so idyllic I was not quite as interested. But again, girls younger than me may well find that half of the book incredibly appealing for its fantastical otherness.

Libby Koponen has a great web site: http://www.ifyoulovetoread.com/ with lots of pictures!

I'm a hard core fan of English boarding school stories, and this was an interesting comparison. My fondness for English school stories began with my extensive reading of Enid Blyton's school stories as a child. I found myself at the age of five at a British school in Portugal, being told in rather unfriendly tones--"You stand there with her--she's another American." So, like the Libby who narrates this book, I found myself becoming more fiercely American than I had been before (like Libby, I wouldn't sing the British national anthem). Enid Blyton was about the only author available in English in northern Portugal at the time, so I devoured her St. Claires and Mallory Towers books. About 10 years ago I discovered, through the yahoo group Girlsown that there are many other wonderful school stories out there -- by authors such as Antonia Forest, Evelyn Smith, Josephine Elder, and Margaret Biggs. My husband has built more bookcases.

Here's a basic guide to some of the better known writers: http://www.gatewaymonthly.com/girlauthorb.html

Reading non-fiction aloud

I have two boys, 6 and 3. They must be read to, they must learn to read, I must help their young minds unfold like the petals of beautiful flowers (ha ha ha). I must find decent non-fiction to read to them, in order to do all of the above. They also happen to like non-fiction.

Non fiction for 6 year olds these days seems to be divided into two groups --the banal learning to read books, about which I will say no more, and the lavishly illustrated, lots of information in clumps all over the page, style (ala the D.K. "Look Closer" series).
Now, I am a good reader out loud. I can even handle Magic School bus books with grace and aplomb (including reading all the dialogue bits and random thingies). But I am getting really tired of these non-fiction books that break up the text into info. bits. They are hard to read, and because they aren't written for reading out loud, the prose is often stilted. Even when the prose is just fine, it can be tough going (The Way Things Work. Heavy going, pun intended). So I find myself editing, altering, explaining and expanding, to keep their interest up as we bounce through the books. Not very relaxing, even with a beautiful and informative book (like Tide Pools).

So I got out my own non-fiction books, read repeatedly during my well-spent youth - the Fish/Birds/Reptiles/etc do the Strangest Things series (Random House Step Up Books Nature Library, mostly 1966). They are not beautifully illustrated, they are not at the cutting edge of information transmittal to the young, and somethings are even wrong. But darn it, they have large pieces of text that can be read aloud, not quite by my six-year old, but almost, they use straightforward language, and they keep the interest of both boys, even though the interesting facts are contained in the text and not floating around the page.

Just another small grievance with the banal You Can Read Non-Fiction book genre -- what's all this 1st person business? "I am a shark" "I am a snowflake" "I am a wolf" (it could be just my library's fault). I've never been a fan of first person narratives. Are publishers somehow trying to connect readers to words by making it as personal as possible? Is it part of some hideous self-actualization process that they think young readers have to go through to Master the Text? Or is it simply that "I" is easier to read than "you"?

In very poor taste--"book titles you'll never see"

I found this, lifted from one of the Guardian's bookblogs, rather funny...

The Game, by Diana Wynne Jones

A new book by a favorite author is always a happy thing, and The Game, by Diana Wynne Jones, made my weekend much happier. It is a fast paced tale of orphaned Hayley, raised by a strict grandmother and much more friendly grandfather, who gets unceremoniously dumped into an enormous house in Ireland, full of strange cousins and aunts (no uncles).

DWJ can be a twisty writer, and she made me a tad nervous a few pages into the book with a throw-away reference to something us readers had no clue about, but it was soon explained.  All is not as it seems in Hayley's family, and "the game" her cousins play turns out to be rollicking, sometimes alarming, excursions through the (primarily Greek) mythosphere.

There's a lot of action, Haley's a likable character, and it's a good read. But there isn't a whole lot of numinosity (the sort of thing that makes you hold your breath with the wonder and enchantment of it all and the hairs on the back of your neck rise). It's only 192 pages; I wish DWJ had made it longer and deeper. Oh well.

Poems that would make great books #1- Cargoes

Here's a poem for mad March days that we like very much --Cargoes, by John Masefield. There's something about the emphatic downbeat, especially in the last verse, that has great appeal to my boys (perhaps because emphatic downbeats are such a natural part of their lives). And the words are magical. Even if you don't know, for instance, what exactly gold moidores are, it doesn't mater.

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Wouldn't this be a great picture book? I see each verse on its own page,with a lavish double page illustration, followed by a page, or several pages, of non-fiction gloss, explaining it all, with maps of trade routes and cut away pictures of the ships and explanations of the cargoes etc. etc.

John Masefield was also the author of two great children's books published in the 1930s-The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights. They are both stories of the magical adventures of orphaned Kay Harker as he tries to foil the evil intentions of a local coven of witches (one of whom is his governess, Sylvia Daisy Pouncer), find the great treasure his ancestor lost in The Midnight Folk and keep the Box of Delights from falling into their hands in the second book. There is a very charming cat featured, lots of action,talking pictures, mysterious journeys. How could one not warm to a book that opens with a mysterious stranger approaching on a snowy night, to tell you that "the Wolves are Running!" (first chapter of B. of D.). Sadly, they aren't in print anymore, but if your library has them, or you see a cheap copy, go for it!



Here's one cover for a paperback edition of The Midnight Folk.