new posts in all blogs
Viewing Blog: Chicken Spaghetti, Most Recent at Top
Results 26 - 50 of 1,084
Susan Thomsen is the author of Elvis: A Tribute to the King (Andrews McMeel), which was once in the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian gift shop, that is.
Susan's work has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times (a Metropolitan Diary entry after years of submissions), and the anthology Girls (Global City Press). She was an editor of Global City Review's humor issue, and served as a theater reviewer at ye olde online guide New York Sidewalk. Susan and her family live in New England.
You can reach Susan at c_spaghettiATyahooPERIODcom
Statistics for Chicken Spaghetti
Number of Readers that added this blog to their MyJacketFlap: 62
Photograph by Saroy. Source: Flickr. Used under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDervivs 2.0 Generic license.
When I started this blog in 2005, my first idea was to make the whole thing about chicken spaghetti, a favorite casserole of my Southern childhood. I thought about posting variations on the recipe and photos of how they turned out. However, I soon realized that an audience for such a blog would be non-existent tiny. So, instead I turned my attention to kids' books, but kept the name since it seemed child-friendly.
I still think about the dish, though, and, after a Twitter search, have located my fellow casserole people. Like me, lots of other folks like their mom's version, Grandma's, Aunt So-and-So's, and when they're really pleased with their own efforts, they post pictures.
On Twitter, chicken spaghetti = happiness, and these tweets are music to my ears. I removed hash tags, added some punctuation, and stirred some of the short odes into a poem. Here goes:
Chicken Spaghetti: A Found Poem from Twitter
Y'all, I can cook.
Sauteeing burns my eyes
but it is worth it
in the end.
My dish!!
Chicken spaghetti.
Remember how excited we got
when we thought about
chicken spaghetti?
Ya girl throws down
chicken spaghetti
and garlic bread.
Anna Beth is at it again.
Chicken spaghetti!
Chicken spaghetti, rolls, corn on a cob,
kiss the cook.
And on the 8th day
God made chicken spaghetti,
and all was good.
I'm cooking collard greens,
chicken spaghetti and fried porkchops!!
Jalapeño cornbread! Boom!
If you can cook chicken spaghetti, I'll probably
marry you.
Although we take satisfaction in being a safe place for people to tell their stories, please don't get the impression that running a bookshop is all bittersweetness and light. Much of it is dusting and heavy lifting.
from The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, by Wendy Welch (St. Martin's Press, 2012)
A charming tale of "friendship, community, and the uncommon pleasure of a good book," this memoir is about two newcomers to a small Appalachian town who open a used book shop. Wendy Welch writes with compassion and smart-ass humor as she describes her and her husband Jack's adventures in "being independent booksellers in the face of big-box stores and e-readers." I thoroughly enjoyed The Little Bookstore, and had to finish it in a hurry as my eightysomething mother had already asked me twice to borrow the book.
The Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison announced the winner of the 2013 Charlotte Zolotow Award, which honors picture book text: Each Kindness, written by Jacqueline Woodson and illustrated by E.B. Lewis.
CCBC also named some honor books:
Flabbersmashed About You, written by Rachel Vail and illustrated by Yumi Heo;
Me and Momma and Big John, written by Mara Rockliff and illustrated by William Low; and
Sleep Like a Tiger, written by Mary Logue and illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. Nine additional titles were "highly commended." That's a lot of good reading ahead for all of us picture book aficionados.
I plan to share Each Kindness with the third graders and maybe with a couple of fourth-grade friends whose class is having troubles getting along. Monica Edinger, a fourth grade teacher in New York, reviewed the picture book at her blog, Educating Alice, citing its "exquisitely spare and poetic prose."
Over at Booklist's Audiobooker blog, I came across a great roundup of lists of best audiobooks of the year. In the Guardian I see that there's a new collection of Ian Fleming's first seven James Bond novels. Wouldn't that be cool to listen to in the car?
Right now J. (age 13) likes the audio version of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, a highly praised middle-grade fantasy from 2003. (I chose it from The Librariest's Top 20 Children's Audiobooks.) But while I appreciate Lynn Redgrave's narration and accents, by turns tony and sinister, sometimes I think that if I hear the word "book" again I may scream. Books, the love of books, book binding, book collecting, book thievery, etc., all figure into the story. Bookbookbookbookbook. Anyway, the plot is about to pick up, so perhaps that will distract me.
A favorite of ours last year was The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, written by Christopher Paul Curtis and read by LeVar Burton. Funny, sad, and thought-provoking, this autobiographical middle-grade novel details an African American family's road trip from Michigan to Alabama during a troubled time in our country's history. The Watsons was a Newbery Honor book back in 1996.
Audiobooks
Inkheart, written by Cornelia Caroline Funke and translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Read by Lynn Redgrave
Random House/Listening Library, 2003
(library copy)
The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis
Read by LeVar Burton
Listening Library, 2003
(library copy)
In case you're reading this post on a mobile phone, the above work of art reads,
A poem doesn't do everything for you.
You are supposed to go on with your thinking.
You are supposed to enrich
the other person's poem with your extensions,
your uniquely personal understandings,
thus making the poem serve you.
Gwendolyn Brooks, (1917-[2000]), "Song of Winnie"
The sidewalk on the south side of 41t Street leading up to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue is called Library Way, and contains many of bronze plaques like the one above with quotations about literature and writing. Sponsored by the New York Public Library and the Grand Central Partnership, Library Way stretches from Park Avenue to Fifth, and was created by the artist Gregg LeFevre.
The Gwendolyn Brooks excerpt is about poetry, sure, but it's also an extended metaphor, encouraging an active engagement with life and the world around you. That's why I liked it so much, and took a picture one sunny morning last summer.
For other poetry posts this morning, see the roundup at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.
At the start of the school year in September, I found out that Ms. B. had moved up from 2nd grade to 3rd. Ms. B. was the teacher in the public school classroom where I read picture books aloud for the last two years, and I insisted on following her she invited me along to Grade 3. I happily made the switch. Ms. B. runs an efficient class in which the children seem happy, and she treats her students with respect. There are 30 kids in this year's group, much too big a contingent for the reading rug, which is both good and bad. No more elbow wars among the back-row listeners, but harder for everyone to see the pictures in the book. I try to walk around alot.
Because of weather and consequent half days, delayed report-card conferences, and so on, I've been lucky to read once or twice a month. (As a volunteer, I aim for weekly.) But we've still had a good time. Well, except for the day I read Mrs. McTats and Her Houseful of Cats, a Seussian tale of stray felines, when guffaw-inducing descriptions of dog house-training challenges (completely unrelated to the book) overtook the post-reading discussion. It happens.
Several weeks before, the class and I had had the most fantastic conversation about It Jes' Happened, Don Tate's picture-book biography of Bill Traylor. A self-taught artist and former slave, Traylor (1854-1949) began creating his art in his eighties, drawing from his memories of the Alabama farm where he had grown up and lived. The kids were intrigued, and had lots to say about the book. Since they're citified Northeasterners, I explained what a mule was; the donkey-horse crosses and other animals were some of Traylor's favorite subjects. Ms. B. turned to the computer-connected Smart Board projection system and showed some examples of Traylor's work.
One boy wanted to know about Traylor's wife: "Is she dead?" (A very third-grade response. I remember my 13-year-old at the same age.) Others wondered what happened to Traylor's children. Were author Don Tate and illustrator Gregory Christie his sons? (No, but wouldn't that be cool?) They puzzled over Traylor's living circumstances; he was homeless at times in Montgomery, AL, and sometimes bedded down in a funeral parlor. Many seemed amazed (and relieved) that museums now held many pieces of Traylor's art.
As I was leaving the class, one of the girls pulled me aside, and quietly asked, "Are mules really real?" "Yes, " I whispered back. "They are." I loved the idea that someone thought that the hardworking farm animals were in the same magical realm as unicorns and dragons. Maybe Traylor thought so, too.
Books
Mrs. McTats and Her Houseful of Cats
Written by Alyssa Satin Capucilli; illustrated by Joan Rankin
Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2001
(from our personal library of favorite picture books)
It Jes' Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw
Written by Don Tate; illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
Lee & Low Books, 2012
(review copy)
For additional information, see "Guest Post: Don Tate on 'It Jes' Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw," at the blog Cynsations, and "Jes' a Hit: An Interview with Don Tate," at The Brown Bookshelf.
Note
from Susan: For the fourth year in a row, my husband, Norman, has written about his favorite books of the year. He's the reading-est guy I know, so seeing him hard at work on his list always makes me happy, knowing that I'm about to read—and share—some great recommendations. Hit it, Norm.
As
the year 2012 comes to a close, I am happy to share with Susan’s readers my
list of the best books that I’ve read over the last 12 months. The three most
powerful were The Yellow Birds by Kevin
Powers, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in
a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo, and Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman. These books were so well-written and
engrossing that they were hard to put down and stayed with me long after I
finished them, despite the difficult topics (the effects of war in The Yellow Birds; the devastating poverty
of people living in an Indian slum in Behind
the Beautiful Forevers; and the hard life of a young girl growing up
in a trailer park outside of Reno, Nevada, in Girlchild). The Yellow Birds
and Behind the Beautiful Forevers
received the wide critical acclaim and recognition they deserved; one was a
finalist for this year’s National Book Award in fiction and the other was the
nonfiction winner. I hope that over time more people will read and appreciate
the excellent writing and unique storytelling in Ms. Hassman’s book.
Adding
two more to come up with my top 5 reads of the year is easy: This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz and The
Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín. Díaz’s collection
of stories about love and family is at times moving and at times laugh-out-loud
funny, but always smart and entertaining. And Colm Tóibín is just a beautiful storyteller, and this novella about
Jesus’ mother is both courageous and thought-provoking.
With the exception of Girchild,
I’d expect that most people who like to read will have heard of the above books.
So, now I’ll turn to some very good, solid books that were not as widely
discussed and publicized. On the top of my “next of the best” list is A Partial History of Lost Causes by
Jennifer DuBois. This fascinating book, with a great title, moves between time
and place as it tells the story of a young woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
who, like her father, has Huntington’s disease, and a young Russian chess
champion looking to unseat Vladimir
Putin. Taking place over a non-linear span of 30 years and two continents, this
story is a must read. Other good
novels that took me to less familiar places are Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron (set in Rwanda), The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
(set in North Korea), All That I Am
by Anna Funder (set in Germany and London, largely in the 1930s), and The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger
(partially set in Bangladesh).
Three
excellent books with young protagonists are Me
and You written by Niccolò Ammaniti and translated by Kylee Doust, The Fault In Our Stars by John Green,
and The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau.
The first was a best-seller in Italy, and with good reason; the second, which came to me via a recommendation from a children’s librarian at the
Westport Public Library, is a young adult novel that could be read by anyone—or I should say should be read by everyone—over 15 years old; and the third is a hard-to-read yet hard-to-put-down story of a teenager whose family is
killed in an unnamed Muslim country and a mother in the United States who wants
to find out about the death of her soldier son. Though not quite as memorable
as those three, I would also recommend The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont, which is a suspenseful coming-of-age
story set in a boarding school. On the other end of the age spectrum, I enjoyed
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
by Rachel Joyce, which tells the story of a retired man who walks across
England to visit a terminally ill old friend and co-worker, and How It All Began by Penelope Lively, a well-crafted
work centered on a woman in her 70’s.
And
what would a year be without a few good family sagas and dramas? My top choices
are The O’Briens by Peter Behrens, I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits, Those We Love Most by Lee Woodruff, The World Without You by Joshua Henkin, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, Heft by Liz Moore, Alys, Always by Harriet Lane, The
Chaperone by Laura Moriarty, and The
Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg.
Finally,
I’ll pass along some other titles well worth the read:
- Defending
Jacob by William Landay (best crime drama I read all year);
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne
Frank by Nathan Englander (I found the short stories of Englander and Díaz to be far
more satisfying that Alice Munro’s stories in Dear Life);
- Watergate by Thomas
Mallon (best historical fiction);
- Catherine the Great:
Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie and To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through The Civil Rights Movement by
Charlayne Hunter-Gault (both excellent non-fiction books);
- The Coldest Night by Robert
Olmstead (a romance and a war story not to be missed); and
- Gathering of Waters by
Bernice L. McFadden (most imaginative book I read in 2012).
As always, I’d like to thank Martha, Maggie, and David, who make
up our little book group of four and are three of the most well-read and
intelligent people I know; my friends and fellow riders in the Tuesday morning
Spinning class at the Wilton Y who arrive before our 6 a.m. class and sometimes
stay after class ends so that we can discuss life and books (if only we didn’t
have to cycle like fiends for an hour!); and my wife, Susan, and our son,
a.k.a. Junior, both of whom share my love for reading and make me realize that
life is way more interesting beyond the pages.
Happy reading to all in 2013!
More lists for all you list lovers! You'll find another good list of lists at SCC English, the blog of the English department at Dublin's St. Columba's College. The SCC list o' lists is geared toward books for adults.
100 Scope Notes At this fine blog, new to School Library Journal's roster, two school librarians choose the best of the year.
Amanda Craig. A best list from the Times' (UK) children's book critic.
Atlantic Wire. YA/Middle-Grade Book Awards.
Booklist's Editors' Choice selections.
Horn Book Fanfare
Ireland's Gutter Bookshop list includes books for children.
Morris Award finalists. Prize honors YA books by debut authors. Winners announced in January.
MotherReader. She knows her picture books.
NPR: "The year's outstanding 'backseat' reads, for ages 9-14"
San Francisco Chronicle. Holiday gift guide for children's books and Christmas books.
Smithsonian.com's Top Books of 2012. Not a list of children's books, but plenty of good gift ideas for teens and grown-ups.
TimeOut New York Kids: Best pop-up books for pre-K and elementary-school kids
Vogue. Good list of books for adults. (My first job out of college was at Vogue. I learned a lot there!)
You'll find many more at Chicken Spaghetti's page "The Best Children's Books of 2012: A List of Lists and Awards."
Every day a new "best of the year" lineup appears, and our wish list grows. Recent addtions to The Best Children's Books of 2012: A List of Lists and Awards include the following:
New York Public Library: 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing
Los Angeles Public Library: Children's books and teen books
New York Times Book Review: Notable Children's Books of 2012
Booklist: Top ten science & health books for youth
Good Comics for Kids' gift guide. New and older titles on this list.
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books: Gift guide. (2010-2012 titles on list.)
Geek Mom: Gift guide of books for adults and children
The Guardian (UK)
Tablet Magazine: Best Jewish-themed books for children
YALSA [Young Adult Library Services Association] Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults: Finalists
The Goodreads Choice Awards were announced.
Another timely arrival is Hanukkah Read Up!, a PDF file listing the best Hanukkah books, from the Association of Jewish Libraries.
Recent additions to Chicken Spaghetti's Best Children's Books of 2012: A List of Lists and Awards include two favorite annual roundups, National Science Teachers Association (NSTA): Outstanding science trade books for students K-12 and Good Comics for Kids' gift guide. One newsworthy announcement today was the New York Times Book Review: Notable Children's Books of 2012.
School Library Journal begins announcing its best-of-2012 list this evening on Twitter.
Also newly added to the Chicken Spaghetti list:
Abby the Librarian (blog): Nonfiction
Boing Boing Gift Guide (long list includes several children's books)
Columbus Dispatch
Costa Children's Book Award shortlist (UK)
Cuyahoga County Public Library. Kudos to the snappy-looking design of this guide.
Drawn Blog: "Favourite comics, art books, and more" list includes some titles for kids (Canada)
Irish Book Awards. Scroll down on the page for the children's book categories. See also the shortlists for senior and junior categories of children's books.
Kirkus Reviews
Slate (one picture book on list; rest of books for adults)
Let it snow! For those of us who love a good list, the last two months of the year bring a flurry of online "best of the year" roundups of books. Starting in 2008, I've been collecting the lists for children's books, including links to various newspapers, magazines, journals, and blogs, as well as different literature prizes and awards given out. I update the big list often.
Here is a link to this year's page:
The Best Children's Books of 2012: A List of Lists and Awards
Also, David Gutowski collects all the "best of" lists for books (for grown-ups and kids alike) at his blog, Largehearted Boy.
Meanwhile, speaking of snow, don't miss Kids' Science Books for Stormy Weather, at Scientific American's Budding Scientist blog.
If you are like me and forgot to watch the announcement on the "Morning Joe" show, Publishers Weekly has the scoop.
The nominees for the Young People's Literature prize are as follows:
William Alexander, Goblin Secrets
Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach
Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down
Eliot Schrefer, Endangered
Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build―and Steal―the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon
Junot Diaz's latest book is This Is How You Lose Her, a collection of short stories, released in September by Riverhead. Yesterday the MacArthur Foundation announced its annual awards, the so-called "genius" grants, one of which went to Diaz. $500,000, no strings attached.
On the day before the grants were announced, the New York Times Magazine ran a short interview with the author, focusing on short fiction. I was intrigued by the collections Diaz cited as influential; I have not read any of them. He mentioned
Aha! Books to look for on the next trip to the library. Walking the dog in the rain this afternoon, I coped with the downpour by coming up with a roster of short story collections I admire. Everyone's lists are so different! Here's mine. What's yours?
Image borrowed from Powell's Books. Links go to Powell's, also. I do not get any money from the store for linking. I have had good experiences ordering books there.
Yesterday my son and I spent the afternoon by the river. The spot we like is not a whole lot wider than a creek; at that point, the water is shallow, and clear and full of stones to skip. Junior fished, and I read. He caught a trout. I showed him how to hold the fish firmly while you unhook it. He did that, and then threw it back. Too small to keep. He continued fishing, and I finished Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies, an illustrated meditation on pools and competitive swimming. Lately, the almost-adolescent and I are butting heads lot, usually over screen time, but our hours by the water yesterday were unhurried and sweet.
The blog of Boomerang Books, an Australian bookstore, brings news of the Aussie children's books of the year, announced today.
Bob Graham's A Bus Called Heaven is the picture book of the year; it's available here in the US, too. I could live in a Bob Graham book and be perfectly happy—humor and generosity abound.
The website of the Children's Book Council of Australia, sponsor of the prizes, seems to be down at the moment. When it's fixed, I will link it here.
Added later: Children's Book Council of Australia: Book of the Year 2012 Winners
The Junior Master Gardener Program and the American Horticultural Society announced the winners of the "Growing Good Kids" Book Awards on July 20th. This year's blue-ribbon crop is as follows:
The Mangrove Tree: Planting Trees to Feed Families, by Susan L. Roth & Cindy Trumbore (Lee & Low)
Meadowlands: A Wetlands Survival Story, by Thomas F. Yerzerski (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Planting the Wild Garden, written by Kathryn O. Galbraith and illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin (Peachtree)
For more information about the prizes, which honor "engaging, inspiring works of plant, garden, and ecology-themed children's literature," go to the Junior Master Gardener website. Don't miss the list of classics, which includes Miss Rumphius, The Lorax, Too Many Pumpkins, among many others.
I've been catching up with the last few months' announcements of awards for children's books, and added some to the page "2011 Best Children's Books: A List of Lists and Awards." (The honored books were first published in 2011.)
Carnegie Medal: Shortlist and winner (UK). Similar to our Newbery award.
Children's Book Council of Australia: Short Lists and Notables.
E.B. White Read-Aloud Award
Ezra Jack Keats New Writer and New Illustrator Awards for Children's Books
Greenaway Medal: Shortlist and winner (UK). Similar to our Caldecott award.
Minnesota Book Awards. These honor mostly titles for adults, but do feature one category for kids' books.
Scottish Children's Book Trust Awards: Shortlist
Storytelling World Resource Awards
Some years back I spent a grand Fourth of July sitting in a long line for free Shakespeare in the Park in NYC. To get into the play, you had to line up early and wait until 6 or so when the Delacorte Theater handed out evening's allotment of tickets. I forgot what we saw, though I remember loving the play; maybe it was "Much Ado About Nothing" or "Twelfth Night." Several people in our group had brought along bags of fresh cherries, which arrive in plenitude in the city's Korean delis around the first of July. We snacked, shot the breeze, and let time drift by until the ticket guy appeared. I'll always associate the happy feeling of friends, Shakespeare, and cherries with the Fourth.
On the Fourth this year I finished reading the history play "Henry IV, Part 1," and also stumbled across Oxford's Emma Smith's free online lecture about Falstaff, the play's most interesting character. Smith even compares the "fat-kidneyed rascal" to Homer Simpson! Both are funny because they're countercultural, she says. The talk is part of the "Approaching Shakespeare" series of podcasts, which can be found here.
Emma Smith figures in Me and Shakespeare: Adventures with the Bard, by Herman Gollob, a Texas-born book editor (Doubleday, 2002). Seeing Ralph Fiennes in a Broadway production of "Hamlet" changed Gollob's life, and he began to study Shakepeare on his own. Part memoir and part guide, Gollob's book is full of good recommendations (particularly for books and films) for people who want to deepen their appreciation of the Bard. Gollob's adventures include a three-week summer course at Oxford taught by...Emma Smith.
A local company is performing an outdoor "Romeo and Juliet" soon, and that will probably be my next brush with Shakespeare. The Washington State cherries have hit the stores, too.
Links:
Shakespeare in the Park (now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary)
"Shakespeare After All: The Later Plays," with Marjorie Garber. A free video series from the Harvard Extension School. I haven't seen this yet, but it sounds great.
Shakepeare on the Sound. The Bard in the 'burbs.
This summer I'm spending some time thinking about the picture books I will read to next year's second-grade class. My volunteer gig at an ethnically and economically diverse city public school is an all-time favorite activity of mine, but I'm always looking for ways to improve the experience for the children. When fall rolls around, I'd like to be better prepared with a strong list of books and additional background reading of my own.
Keeping in mind prior classes will help, too. For example, when we talk about "fiction" and "nonfiction," I'm going to put the words out on index cards so the children can see them written out. In lovely and heartfelt thank-you notes from the last group, a couple of the spellers-by-ear thought I was saying "fishin" and "nonfishin," which is adorable, but note cards will go a ways to clearing that up.
In terms of selecting books, this terrific list, among others, will come in handy: "50 Multicultural Books Every Child Should Know," from the Cooperative Children's Book Center, at the University of Wisconsin. It offers a good selection of titles, broken down into age groups ( "Preschool," "Ages 5-7," etc.). I wish I'd remembered to read Uncle Peter's Amazing Chinese Wedding to the 2011-2012 students. Reading through these books this summer should be fun!
I'm borrowing this format from the What Do We Do All Day? blog, who employs it on Fridays.
Listen: Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson. Cool book, set in Revolutionary War-era New York and told by an enslaved girl. I am loving the history. 12-year-old Jr. and I listen to this one in the car.
Read: Henry IV, Part 1, by William Shakespeare. I am actually listening to this on audiobook, too, as I read the text. My first time with Prince Hal, Falstaff, and Hotspur. I am using a BBC Radio recording (rawther expensive at $14.95 on iTunes), and right like it.
Puzzle Over: A Passage to India, by E.M. Forster. Brits in India. Forster's syntax confuses me more often than I'd like to admit, but I think I'm going to stick with it. Something terrible is going to happen, yes?
Think About: Books for second graders. (I'm a volunteer classroom reader.) This year's Top Three were Bark, George, by Jules Feiffer; Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems; and SpongeBob and the Princess, by David Lewman (Clint Bond, illustrator). Several children knew the first two from kindergarten, and everyone knew SpongeBob. I'd like to find slightly longer books that the group will like as much as these for next year. Also popular was playing Mad Libs with the students.
Add: To the library list: Quinn Cummings' The Year of Learning Dangerously: Adventures in Homeschooling. Due in August. Quinn Cummings! If you were a kid in the seventies, you remember this very funny writer as a child actor ("Family," "The Goodbye Girl"). She blogs at The QC Report. Hat tip: Melissa Wiley.
Recommend: 1. Pulphead, by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Essays, profiles from magazines like GQ and the Paris Review. The collection includes a somewhat disrespectful but fascinating piece on the Southern Agrarian Andrew Lytle. Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times, "Most of the essays in 'Pulphead' are haunted, in a far more persuasive way, by what Mr. Sullivan refers to with only slight self-mockery as 'the tragic spell of the South.'" 2. " 'Not Everyone Can Read Proof': The Legacy of Lu Burke," by Mary Norris, at The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog. A copy editor leaves a million dollars to a library. A town vs. library dispute ensues. Mary Norris is a friend of mine, and I am a huge fan of her always excellent writing and storytelling.
Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White, was published nearly sixty years ago, on October 15, 1952. Eudora Welty reviewed the now-classic children's novel shortly thereafter, in the New York Times Book Review. She wrote,
"What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time. As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done."
From Eudora Welty: A Writer's Eye: Collected Book Reviews, edited by Pearl Amelia McHaney, University of Mississippi Press, 1994.
I highly recommend the audiobook, read by White himself. The kiddo and I listened to it with pleasure this spring. Some pig!
A few highlights from this week's reading:
Tanita S. Davis, author of the newly released YA novel Happy Families, pens a wonderful tribute to the late Jean Craighead George's novel My Side of the Mountain. I loved that book when I was a kid. Loved it. Jean Craighead George died recently at the age of 92.
In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review (available online now), Judith Shulevitz writes about listening to audiobooks with her children. I smiled at her choices, "...or they’re books we’ve always meant to read but needed children as an excuse to do so" because I've felt the same way. See "Let's Go Reading in the Car."
The Nonfiction Detectives review Kelly Milner Hall's Alien Investigations: Searching for the Truth About UFOs and Aliens. I added the title to our library list immediately; my 12 year old can't get enough of this subject. Don't miss the other articles on the Detectives' blog; you'll find all kinds of good recommendations for young nonfiction fans.
After following a link from Page-Turner, the New Yorker's revitalized book blog, I was happy to add Rohan Maitzen's Novel Readings: Notes on Literature and Criticism to Google Reader. In a recent post, she makes the case for Middlemarch and book clubs, providing a number of helpful tips to taking on George Eliot's 1,000+-page classic. Maitzen is an English professor at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University.
I'm bookmarking this post from Misadventures of the Monster Librarian because of the folktale recommendations for second graders. "My" second graders (the class I read to once a week) like folktales a lot.
Speaking of second graders, I read Lita Judge's excellent nonfiction picture book Bird Talk: What Birds Are Saying and Why to them a few weeks ago. My crew was particularly delighted by the scat-bombing Scandinavian Fieldfare, mentioned by NC Teacher Stuff in his review. In our conversation after the read-aloud, I found out that several of the kids own parrots. Parrot stories abounded.
This week J. (my 12-year-old son) and I finished the audiobook version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in J.K. Rowling's epic series. We started listening to the first one in September 2010. J. was just starting sixth grade at a new school, and, until then, J. would have nothing to do with the series whatsoever. (Occasionally, and unfortunately, people become competitive about who has read what, and the same holds true even in elementary school.) I had read only the first book, and was neither here nor there about it. But the audiobooks! We became complete converts to the series and to Jim Dale's fabulous narration. Some evenings we sat in the car in the driveway, just to hear what would happen next, and I almost cried exiting I-95 as the last book came to an end. J. has read the books many times over, while I read ahead only once, preferring to be surprised.
As the HPs got longer and longer, I did need a break between 5 and 6. We listened to and enjoyed When You Reach Me, Rebecca Mead's Newbery-winning novel, although I have to admit that I am thick-headed when it comes to understanding time travel. I loved the New York setting and could completely picture those kids working in the sandwich shop.
Now we're onto a classic, Charlotte's Web, read by its author, E.B. White. Isn't that so cool that you can still hear E.B. White's voice? Out of nowhere J. remarked, "This is a good book." High praise!
My friend Mary Parmelee at the Westport Library says Eva Ibbotson's One Dog and His Boy, read by Steve West, is one of the best audiobooks she's ever heard. Now that we're dog owners, this novel sounds perfect. The online card catalogue summarizes the story this way, "When lonely, ten-year-old Hal learns that his wealthy but neglectful parents only rented Fleck, the dog he always wanted, he and new friend Pippa take Fleck and four other dogs from the rental agency on a trek from London to Scotland, where Hal's grandparents live." I'm putting it on the list now.
I was so sorry to hear this news this morning. The New York Times and other news outlets are reporting the death of Maurice Sendak, "widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century," as Margalit Fox writes in an obituary. NPR's "Fresh Air" will be devoting today's show to him.
What's your favorite Sendak book? Mine is Swine Lake, a collaboration with James Marshall, about a wolf and a pig ballet and the power of art.
View Next 25 Posts
