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Well, in Jonathan's defense, he writes about "young adult literature"; it's just the headline that reads "best young adult fiction", so unless he wrote the head, it was someone else's fail. And I think middle-grade is pretty much a professional term used by librarians and booksellers and such. To much of the general public there are "kids' books" (picture books) and "young adult".

What are you implying?

Implication is far too subtle for the likes of me.

I am reminded of the scene in the beginning of one of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries (I think GAMBIT), in which he is ripping pages out of his recently purchased third edition of Webster's Unabridged and feeding them to the flames in his fireplace. He speaks to a potential client:

"Do you use 'infer' and 'imply' interchangeably?"

She did fine. [Archie, narrating, tells us] "No."

"This book says that you may."

Archie goes on to tell the new client that Wolfe once burned a cookbook because it said to remove the skin from a ham before putting it into the pot with the lima beans.

Lyle Blake Smythers

I'm not sure why the lead reads Best YA Fiction instead of Best YA Literature. We certainly discussed this and you'll note the introduction reflects this. Since this is the only list NPR will be doing for younger readers, we wanted a range of titles for teens *and* tweens, as the introduction also acknowledges.

Jonathan

It's true, as Wendy says, the the public seems to think YA fiction is 9 or 10 and up. What I find more troubling is publishing's neglect of true middle-grade fiction, of which When You Get Here (joke) is such a terrific exemplar.

Nancy Pearl has an NPR list up that includes LIAR, GOING BOVINE, WHEN YOU REACH ME, and BUBBLE TROUBLE.

Jonathan

Yes, but it is EEEEvil and it's illustrations are in the wrong places and none of it's links to excerpts seem to work!

Thank you for this - we will fix it for paperback, scheduled for 5/10. The world needs close readers.
- Amy Sohn

I'm just wondering how long it will be before someone mistakenly refers to the book as "The Lost Cymbal"?

That misplaced metaphor made me shudder. I haven't read either book, they're not in a genre that is my usual genre of choice, so I shouldn't pass judgement. And yet...

As an accident-prone person, I must say that I have never seen blood "shimmer" no matter which way the simile is arranged.

Actually the Joni Mitchell song is "Night Ride Home," but I guess that just reinforces your point about hard to remember titles.

I can never remember the title The Higher Power of Lucky.

I always want to say The Patron Saint of Lucky. Which doesn't even make any sense.

My problem this year was with Anything But Typical. Took me a good 4 months before I could beat it properly into my own brain.

That title sounds like the work of a committee. Like, what's the dumbest, most obvious thing we can call the next Dan Brown novel?

I have trouble with Looking for Normal, Waiting for Normal, etc. Also with Long Way Home, Long Way Round, All the Way Home. Too many similar titles!

My personal bete noir with regard to titles is the short, non-distinctive title; I particularly dislike two-word titles, and John Grisham is a longtime repeat offender: The Firm, The Client, The Testament. I mean, really. Give me a title like Stand on Zanzibar or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (famously changed to Blade Runner for the movie, but even that is distinctive and has pizzazz.

Lyle Blake Smythers, feeling like a curmudgeon

I did not agree that When You Reach Me is an unmemorable title (probably because I loved the book, and now just thinking about the phrase "the journey is a difficult one" makes me teary), until I started thinking about the title of a favorite adult novel, Then She Found Me. When You Reach Me. Then She Found Me. When You Reach Me. Then She Found Me. It's all over for me, as far as remembering EITHER title.

I was just thinking about Madeleine L'Engle's titles. She was a master, sort of, of long, convoluted titles, but mostly I can keep them straight. And I'm sure we all agree that A Wrinkle in Time was a perfect title and a practically perfect book. But I still remember trying to explain to a librarian, when I was a teen, that her new book was called An Acceptable Time, not Unacceptable Time. (I didn't know yet, of course, that I need not have bothered trying to get that particular L'Engle novel.)

nothing to do with Dan Brown (maybe a little to do with factoids)
Would it be possible to limit the number of times a contributor can post per day? or the length of his/her entry? this blog seems to have been taken over by LONGWINDED AND FREQUENT contributor who perhaps should set up shop on their own

Considering how often Anonymous pipes up around here, I'll certainly take it under advisement.

Dear Anon:

Perhaps it would be best to recall Virgil's admonition to Dante: "Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by."

Yours truly,
Mrs. Manners.

whar a tactful - and graceful and well-deserved - reproach from Melinda!

:) All hail Dante!!

I have the same feeling when (and wow, there is no way to say this without sounding like a horrible snobby Brahmin tool) I read fiction about Harvard. It is amazing the stuff they get wrong -- and it's often written by people who went to Harvard, too. Gah.

Ever read a newspaper article about something that happened with which you had first hand experience? Important facts are always wrong in some way. Now, to my mind, THAT's something to ponder.

ifahren

I'm always intrigued by what we'll buy and what we won't in movies and fiction. No problem with the talking animals, but hey! they don't have X kind of animal in Y! We'll also believe Sean Connery is whatever nationality he says he is and he doesn't even have to change his accent...

Ok, I'm going to (mostly) skip over the many things I could say about how Harry and Sally could never have gone to U of Chicago as undergrads(way too good looking and well adjusted, and didn't argue about the Peloponnesian Wars once, just for starters) AND the laughable way Harvard and Boston blue bloods are portrayed in fiction and movies. Instead, I'll try to get to my point. In movies, putting a subway stop where one doesn't exist (Rent), shooting a scene in a lecture hall that is actually used as a dining room (Beautiful Mind, a laughable portrait of academics if ever there was one) etc is poetic license--these aren't documentaries, they are meant to capture the spirit of something, in a sort of crowd-pleasing, not- too-challenging Hollywood way.

I catch mistakes in historical fiction all the time, and it's often a question of dialog or music. I won't name the novel set in the 1870s where they sing Happy Birthday, but that bothers me more than watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid, which is basically a romp that happens to be set in the (wildly anachronistic, but who cares) wild west. Butch Cassidy doesn't claim to be an accurate depiction of an era, but the book I referred to does. And to me, that's the distinction.

In other words, how seriously accurate do the books or movies in question claim to be? Are the credentials and purported historical accuracy flogged all over the publicity materials for the book?

For my money, perhaps the most agonizingly anachronistic movie of all time is Titanic--and what bugs me is how much money James Cameron spent making the ship historically accurate in every detail. You think he could have done the same with the dialog--say when Kate Winslet says to Leonardo diCaprio "They're off to tell each other they're masters of the universe." That phrase, as we know, was coined by Tom Wolfe in the 1980s. But that's showbiz.

Oh, yes -- my fellow librarians in Pittsburgh always like to point out the moment in Konigsburg's Father's Arcane Daughter when the characters walk out of the Carnegie Library and go left towards Squirrel Hill, instead of to the right. But then again, we also get irritated when our Post-It notes aren't stacked neatly in a caddy.

When I was in high school, I played bass clarinet because I loved it better than the pipsqueak clarinet. Then I read this mystery novel about some guy finding Beethoven's 10th Symphony and secretly rehearsing it, Lord knows why, and the conductor said, "Bass clarinet, you need to be louder."

And I said, "That symphony is a FRAUD! The bass clarinet wasn't used until Wagner's time!"

So that blew up the plot right there.

TV's "Little House on the Prairie" was always good for errors and anachronisms. My favorite is the episode where Laura and Albert help grant their terminally ill friend's dying wish to see the ocean. They head WEST from Minnesota in the 19th century when the Atlantic would have been so much closer, not to mention easier to reach. And, not only that, when Pa realizes what they've done, he immediately heads WEST, too, without even wondering which ocean they'd have gone to. In Hollywood, there's only one, I guess.

And, you know, if it'd have been me, I'd have taken him to Lake Michigan and pretended it was the ocean. By then, he was weak and limp and his mouth was trickling blood so he would never have known the difference and he would still have died happy.

Oh, I hate it when books or movies are in an area I know and mess it up. West Wing became a lot less enjoyable since moving to DC. (Sure, they get the local NBC Breaking News screen right, but they think that Fort Meyer is Maryland? Or that when driving from the White House to the State Department they should go by the National Cathedral?!)

Little things like these usually don't bother me unless they're so obvious to me that they pull me right out of the story.

They say the devil is in the details, and they're right. I've had novels that I've been enjoying destroyed for me when I run into a factual error. Even the talking animals must live in the right areas! But I bring you an extreme case of being too careful: an editor I worked with at a development house squawked loudly about a historical fiction piece about the livesaving trip to Nome because we had invented a character and placed him on one leg of the journey as a musher. He insisted that we had to use one of the real mushers. So I ask you, was he right or wrong?

What does it say about me that I was bothered by a book scene featuring a quart of a certain flavor and brand of ice cream that only comes in pints?

Actually, Tom Wolfe was riffing on the Mattel toys/characters when he used the phrase "Masters of the Universe."

Factual errors even in blog comments! It can happen anywhere!

Jennifer showed me this about pumping your own gas in New Jersey: http://blogs.bccls.org/carlie/index.php?/archives/214-Shortlist-for-the-Morris-Award.html

(Sorry, I've lost the imbedding instructions again.)

Right or wrong, isn't it thrilling to find your own neighbourhood -- where you live & breath -- detailed in a book? We recently read "Just call me Ernie" which takes place right on our street, one block from our home. Our girls could not have been more thrilled.

UC Berkeley students watching The Graduate when it was first released in 1967 howled and booed when Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) drove his convertible the wrong way across the Bay Bridge to see his sweetie - everyone knows that traffic on the upper deck of the bridge (filmed from a helipcopter) goes west from Berkeley to SF, and supposedly Hoffman was driving from SF to Berkeley (to do that he would have to driven on the lower deck, not visible from a helicopter.) Big boos, too, when Hoffman followed Katherine Ross around the "Berkeley" campus - it was filmed at arch-enemy UCLA. These things seem trivial, and they are - in the general scheme of things. They wake us up from the fictive dream, but they're not really historically inaccurate.

On the other hand, some people carry historical accuracy a bit far. One person at the IMDB website complains of a "goof" in the movie Titanic (which is full of much bigger goofs) by saying "The button on the left side of Jack's borrowed jacket is a 'Kingsdrew' button, first made in 1922" (ten years after the sinking.)I guess we all have our areas of expertise, from Berkeley to buttons, as well as our tolerance for inaccuracy.

I wonder if this is easier to stomach in a movie? I adore Dennis Potter's Dreamchild, loosely based on the true event of Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) traveling to NYC to receive an honorary degree related to a Carroll celebration. Off the ship they hop into a car with a steering wheel on the right and then then the hall where she receives the degree --- definitely NOT Columbia! I always smile at these things, but they don't bother me. Is it more of a problem in a book where you are creating your own images in your mind and this sort of thing is more jarring as a result?

For me, the annoyance always comes in when I feel the author is specifically trying for authenticity and failing. A made up subway stop in Rent doesn't bother me because I never felt that anyone was trying to show me New York.
On the other hand, I read a book set mostly in Beacon Hill, and I felt the author really wanted to put a lot of details about Boston in. The one that got me was describing her character walking from Kenmore (which she described as sketchy) down Beacon to Brookline, passing many dangerous neighborhoods along the way. I have made that walk at least a hundred times, and I don't consider BU kids, mansions, and restaurants dangerous. A made up T stop would not have bothered me, but the author going out of her way to describe something and getting it wrong irked me.

Sometimes even the locals get it wrong. I remember sitting through a screening of Witness here in Amish Country and not being able to hear most of the dialogue because of the running commentary on whether the movie got things wrong or right regarding the Amish. The audience practically screamed at the sight of a can of Campbell's soup in Rachel's kitchen cupboard, certain that the Amish do not buy commercially available canned goods. But they do! I've been in Amish homes and stores that cater to the Amish, and they're not above a can of alphabet soup. So--y'know--you can live in a place and still not know everything you think you know.

(I was personally thrown by how the Amish in that movie all spoke English with German accents, when they have a distinct accent that is all their own.)

Maybe — actually, certainly — because they were obviously intentional, I loved the planted inaccuracies in The Royal Tenenbaums, which signaled that this was Anderson's personal New York, not any place for you to fact check. The gypsy cabs, the 375th Street Y, etc.

My book "Down in the Subway" by Miriam Cohen was called out by Betsy Bird for lack of 125 Street Station subway accuracy in her AOL review many moons ago. It was that review that brought us together later on to become friendly compatriots. Told her I respected that she was doing her job correctly. But also let her know that my directives straight from the author's lips to my ears that the subway ride I painted was a "trip to no where". Just in case anyone else wants to correct me ;) What was I going to do, send out the vigiliante? Teeny tiny me and my 82 year old author?

Roger, you are now linked to my new blog.

Cheers, Melanie

My husband, an ardent birder, rose screaming from his movie seat when we saw "Mary Poppins" in Cardiff, Wales. It happened when the robin was singing and twittering away in a duet with the nun Maria. . .oops, with Mary P.

It was an American robin, a large thrush with a red breast when everyone in the movie theater knew an English robin is a much smaller non-thrush bird with an orangey breast.

He didn't make any kind of fuss about Dick Van Dyke's accent.

I'm very critical of movies set in New Orleans. Characters with the stereotypical Southern accents, Mardi Gras parades in the French Quarter (there are none), Cajuns living in New Orleans....this will ruin a movie for me.

I am amused, more than annoyed, by the requisite slow ceiling fans (they do have air conditioning there), jazz funeral, and voodoo queen.

You're right, Roger. It's a don't sweat the small stuff question. It may drive me crazy (and, frankly, make me feel a little smug) to know when someone makes a local mistake. The big problem is when does the small stuff become the big stuff? When does the weight of inaccuracies alter the sense of time and place?

Betty Carter

I've been listening to the audiobook of the second Maisie Dobbs mystery, where at one point the heroine "gri-MACED." I wondered if this was one of those British pecularities like prin-CESS or ur-I-nal but I got Egmont's Doug Pocock on the phone to say the word like he was back home. Nope, the narrator simply messed up, much as in that memorable Lily Tomlin routine in which she recalls herself reading aloud in school, and all is fine until she gets to the word "island," and became known as Lily "Iz-land" Tomlin for the rest of her schooldays.

More proof Sally went to Northwestern... she faked her Big O.

Signed, a fellow UC grad

In Grey's Anatomy, set in Seattle, the latte capital of the world, Bailey kept asking people to bring her a "mocha latte." What's that? She either would order a mocha or a latte.

And in "Sleepless in Seattle," there's no way Tom Hanks and son would have rowed a little boat from their house boat on Lake Union all the way to Alki Beach in West Seattle. They would have had to go through the Ballard Locks with all the big yachts and ocean-going vessels, then out on Puget Sound for quite a distance.

these errors exist to thrill the copy editors among us

These things exist to thrill the copy editors among us. Where would we be without our chances to show off?

I belatedly note that gri-MACE is the pronunciation favored by older British sources and is indeed still considered acceptable. There's even a poem about the "arriviste" pronunciation GRIM-iss.

Wow. I love the idea that anyone can plant a flag and decide what is or isn't poetry. There must be a group like this composed of all those people at art museums who say "My 5 year old could draw better than this."

My society is going to be called "Charlotte and Wilbur's Barnyard Broads." We will not recognize any allegories or books in free verse as children's literature, and in our free time we will circulate a petition to ban the works of Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett on Broadway.

How silly! It sounds like a Monty Python skit, doesn't it? Michael Palin as a representative of the Queen's English Society, goosestepping around & making pronouncements about meter and rhyme & bonking people over the head? "Naughty, naughty!"

I especially laughed at the idea of "word-things" that give someone "a special pleasure" - that sounds like the introduction to George Carlin's Filthy Words act (or Martin Mull's classic, Talk Dirty to Me.)

That said, I prefer the Donne poem to the one by Michael Schmidt. But that's personal taste, not a definition. I like what Richard Wilbur said about form: "I have never aimed at a monumental quality in my poems, and I don't much like it in the poems of others. It pleases me always to endanger whatever form I'm working in. I've written very few sonnets, but when I work in the sonnet, I try to threaten the form, expressively, in the way that my hero John Milton always did. Milton's sonnets freely overrun the tidy divisions of the sonnet form for expressive purposes, and therefore if his poems are 'perfect,' they're not perfect in the sense of being neat. They're perfect in the sense of treating the form in such a way as at all times to put it at the service of the meaning."

Dear Mr. Lamb,

You should take care
When making free
With edicts on
True poetry.

For some who write
With perfect rhyme
Can still commit
Poetic crime.


Jane

Kelly,

I'd better check to see that all my "word-things" meet this group's criteria for what poetry is. Just because some "word-things" have rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, etc., doesn't necessarily guarantee they will be fine poetry. I'm sure that there would be a lot of tripe that might meet the "poetic" criteria.

Touche`

I vote for a required course in which queer theory is used for reading Shakespeare. I (and others) are already using it with children's lit.

Rebecca Rabinowitz

In an English department meeting during which we voted to add YA lit to the requirements for students seeking teacher certification (something that only passed because we were told that NCATE, the major accrediting body for English Ed., would make us add it if we didn't do it ourselves), one of my colleagues asserted that "It's not Shakespeare." I spent the next few minutes imagining an all-Shakespeare curriculum. Without the queer theory angle, I'm not sure we could come up with enough classes.

What got my goat was that at my university, you could study Shakespeare but not Dante or Homer. I considered that a cold-blooded crime. Though my Medieval Lit professor was nice enough to include a unit on Dante in the syllabus just for me.

A queer theory class regarding Dante would probably not turn out so well.

I opted for SS in college but I guess you can't expect everyone to do it.

BlueRectangle Books

Pearl-clutching indeed! Someone has really gotten their Brooks Brothers boxers in a twist! I agree that "Shakespeare" (to borrow the report's repetitive, snide use of quotation marks) is being held up here to represent a whole nexus of conservative ideals, which the report's authors seem to feel need to be defended against a rising tide of diversity, inquiry, and inclusion (God forbid). I love the reference to viewing literature through the lens of gender and sexuality as "sensationalized content." (Makes you wonder if these folks have actually read Shakespeare, the master of the bawdy double entendre.) Funny what people choose to get worked up over.

And speaking of getting worked up over things, it was interesting to look back at the Edward Tulane discussion. I was struck that once Anonymous #1 said that he or she found the WRITING egotistical, there was something worth talking about.

Thanks for the discussions, Roger.

hm

Isn't it possible that the report doesn't include a rationale for mandatory Shakespeare classes because they're just assuming that their target audience already understands why Shakespeare is crucial to a liberal arts education? (Much as, I assume, you consider public libraries crucial, a belief you probably wouldn't feel the need to explain to the readership of this blog?) Why has the assertion of a canon of foundational works (Shakespeare, Plato, etc ad nauseum) somehow become an inherently authoritarian, nefarious concept somehow synonymous with teaching "obedience and unquestioning respect for authority"?

It seems to me like you're using "Shakespeare" as "a word to bully people" just as much as they are--since in your case, you're using it as a stand-in for backward-looking, book-burning conservatives who only respect the achievements of old white men. That seems to me just as unfair to the "old-school English majors" as any of the many unwarranted insults to things like queer studies.

Foucault and Derrida and all the other parents of post-modernism and post-post-modernism all started with the basics, building their cities on solid foundations. Don't their disciples deserve the same opportunity?

RW, I think the problem is that the report is using "Shakespeare" in no context at all, canonical or otherwise. Not only does it not explain why Shakespeare needs to be required reading, it doesn't tell us with what frequency Shakespeare is being taught. In its neatly-designed charts of comparative information, surely there would have been room to state whether or not each college offered a course in Shakespeare, perhaps even how many or how often.

I'm contending that the survey did not seek to identify such classes because to do so would water down its already leaky point. To discount courses that only "include" Shakespeare does the same thing. To ignore the roles that faculty advising and student choice play is just dishonest: would it have been too much work to identify what percentage of B.A.s in English go to students who have (or have not) taken a class in Shakespeare?

The questions the report pretends to raise (and the questions you actually do) are good ones--I'd be very interested to see an analysis of real data about who studies Shakespeare--but it's instead a model of research driven by the results you want to get. Do I think English majors need to know Shakespeare? Yes. Do I think this report proves they don't? Nope.

I'm with RW. And will add that HM's equating Shakespeare with Brooks Brothers is a total red herring.

It's really too bad that Shakespeare isn't required viewing. That's the way it makes the most sense, and maybe then more people would read it, required or not.

It's interesting that the report isn't just about neglecting Shakespeare--it says the universities and colleges listed don't require a course in either Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer. What those three authors have in common is they're very challenging to modern readers. Maybe what they're getting at is that the curriculum is becoming increasingly easy, not just that Shakespeare is being dropped.

Roger, is there any one YA author or book that you feel one MUST read in a YA course if that's the only one they're taking? Cormier, maybe?

I think the report is tacitly saying that the curriculum is lazy, but its methodology is equally so, because they make no case for the Shakespeare requirement being evidence of anything. It's just an easy hook. Had the report researched, for example, the number of English majors taking a Shakespeare class, and found it wanting, we might have something. But that would force the ACTA to shift some blame onto the students, which would defeat what I think is its real agenda of instilling hostility toward institutions and faculty who don't toe a conservative line.

Over on the Reading Class comments, Elaine Magliaro wrote "A close friend of mine is an English Language Arts curriculum director in a school system in Massachusetts. She is discouraged that so many prospective high school English teachers she interviews have never had a college course in Shakespeare. How can they be expected to teach about Shakespeare if they've never read any of his works?"

The report brings up this problem specifically, but I don't think you can assume that every English major becomes a high school teacher. Most don't (I'm guessing). I don't think it's been true for a long time (if ever) that you can assume either that an English major has taken a Shakespeare course, but isn't that why colleges provide transcripts to potential employers? I know that I had to demonstrate coursework in children's literature for my library jobs.

Roger,

I'm not talking about all English majors--I am talking about those who are applying for jobs as high school English teachers.

On another topic: Here is something else that concerns me regarding the education of prospective elementary and middle school teachers. I believe there are many teacher education programs that do not require that students take a course in children's literature. I believe there are also states that do not require teachers in training to take a children's literature course in order to qualify for a teaching license. I know this: The children's literature course I was required to take as an undergrad (back in the dark ages of the 1960s) was the most valuable education course I had.

At least they didn't add a "said Rog" tag line to the quote.

Yo yo yo! Me an my peeps are gettin down wit some books at the Horn!

I must say that was oddly liberating. Though I've never actually heard anyone talk like that.

What's more likely is that the writer typed an abbreviation while he was getting a quote, then forgot to unabbreviate it. I'm sure it's happened to me a million times!

Ok, Melinda, I take your point about the quote, but I did actually hear someone say (or type) "The Horn" once. Eons ago,before blogs, AOL had a Tuesday night children's book chat. Writers and others interested would log on and there was a guest. One week the guest was Roger, and a young man got on and complained that he couldn't get a job in Boston publishing because he couldn't get an internship at "The Horn." Roger replied "First of all, we don't call it 'The Horn...'" and I thought to myself "This guy's toast." I also remember a different man asking why Roger hadn't reviewed his self-published work, "Rooker the Manatee."
By the way, does anyone know, are those chats archived somewhere in AOL land? They used to be...

I still say it should be called "HoBo". If we're going to be completely ridiculous, that is.

I'm just sorry they deleted your line about the ALSC Dragon Ladies (women librarians 50 and older), which was my favorite part of the original online version of the story, especially as it was positioned to make me look like the Chief Dragon Lady.

I'm still working on my fire-breathing routine for Annual Conference, in any case. Hope you like your Newbery Banquet steak well-done.

KT--the online version itself omitted my own inclusion among the ranks of dragon ladies, so the dais is going to be positively aflame! Heh.

Roger, you're always welcome in the Dragon Ladies club. Just don't forget to wear your white gloves.