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I think in this case, pictures are worth a thousand words, right? We have sold just over 100 books off the Powells wish list for Ballou Library and it is truly wonderful to see these titles unpacked with so much excitement. This is why we do the book fair - because we know how much the books are wanted and will be enjoyed.

In all honesty though, sometimes I feel as if I am nagging the entire internet with posts and tweets trying to cajole folks to spread the word and help us sellout. I wish it was easier; heck, I wish it was unnecessary. I wish that I didn't get emails from people disappointed that we were staying with the same school as years previous, that we had not found someplace "needier". I wish I did not have to explain why Ballou still needs our help and I wish I didn't get frustrated and even a little angry at how a school library in our nation's capitol that has not money for new books deserves lots of novels and science fiction and romance (even with vampires) and all of those other types of books that don't sound serious enough to some folks but are desperately wanted by teenagers everywhere.

Just look at that girl with Redshirts - pretty darn happy, don't you think?

The spring book fair formerly ended yesterday but I'm going to leave the list open for just a little while longer. I can't help but think that seeing these pictures might prompt a few folks to buy a book or two or let some folks know about the book fair who might have missed the initial Guys Lit Wire post. I do hope everyone will share these pictures far and wide though - it's pretty cool to see how excited teenagers can be about the gift of books, isn't it? They make me feel hopeful in a thousand different ways; hopeful and pretty damn happy.

And we are back!

As longtime readers know, this time of year over at Guys Lit Wire we get hard at work to help librarian Melissa Jackson at Ballou Sr High School in Washington DC fill her school's shelves. From our previous efforts, starting in 2011, we have helped Ballou move from a library that had less than one book for each of its 1,185 students to a ratio now of FIVE books per student. While this is all kinds of wonderful and something we are quite proud to be part of, the American Library Association advocates eleven books for each student. Ballou is still operating at a serious literary deficit and so we are staying with them until they are busting that minimum standard and knee deep in all the reading these students could ever want or need.

The most exciting news for Ballou is that a new structure is in the works for the school and should be completed by January 2015. As the existing building dates to the late 1950s and is in disrepair, to say the project is overdue would be a vast understatement. But while the new Ballou is going to be a great and wonderful thing, it is not the answer to all its students' problems. The bright and shiny 2015 Library and Media Center will be 5,800 square feet of awesomeness but there is no money in the budget - nothing from the DC public school system - to actually provide books for its shelves.

Wrap your head around that fact for a moment, please. The library space will be grand, the library contents...not so much.

The main problem for Ballou's library, the thing Melissa Jackson is constantly working on, is getting new books. Her students want what all teen readers want - popular and newly released titles that speak to them. Specifically, the Ballou teens are asking for science fiction, romance, fantasy, graphic novels, historical fiction, thrillers and realistic fiction.

Sound like basically every other teen you know?

So while there are plenty of congratulations all around to DC for building the new school, the walls and windows will do nothing to actually get books into the hands of these kids who happen to be smack in the middle of one of the most challenging environments in the country. On the city's most recent standardized tests, only 22 percent of Ballou 10th-graders were proficient in math, and just 18 percent were proficient in reading. To improve their lives, we need to make books an easily accessible part of their school experience and, just as important, we need to make sure these are books that will get them excited about reading.

So, you know the drill - a wish list has been created at Powells books that has been vetted by both Melissa and her student literary leaders. We continue to partner with Powells because they do a killer job of getting the books out fast, they offer lots of sale titles (be sure and watch for those) and their "Standard" used copies a pretty much like new. Plus, we are supporting a bricks and mortar store in the fine city of Portland, Oregon which is nice way connecting both sides of the country in one outstanding literary effort.

Yeah, we love Powells.

Our 2013 Wish List for Ballou, (here's the link if you want to embed it in a post: http://bit.ly/GLWBookFair), has a lot of manga, urban fiction, poetry, paranormal titles and a boatload of big sellers. (Margo Lanagan, Ellen Hopkins, Sherman Alexie, Cassandra Clare, Paolo Bacigalupi and Walter Dean Myers are all front and center.) As a fan of nonfiction I'm delighted to see books like Courage Has No Color, The Elements, How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial and The Pregnancy Project on the list and there is also a healthy collection of adult crossover titles like Here, Bullet, (Brian Turner) The Grey Album (Kevin Young) and The Intuitionist (by Colson Whitehead). There is also a lot of urban fiction, as requested by the students, and since Melissa is working with a reading population that varies in literacy levels from 5th grade to college prep, we have liberally mined the resources of the ALA Quick Picks list to discover books with older teen appeal but manageable reading levels.

You can check out the list, make your selections for the school and please know while we prefer new it is perfectly fine to purchase used copies of a book (more bang for your buck). But check and make sure the book is in "standard" used condition and not "student owned" (you will have to click on the title and leave the wish list to check this). The "student owned" copies are very cheap for a reason - they are written in and thus not a good choice for this effort.

Once you have made your selections head to "checkout" and you will be prompted to inform Powells if the books were indeed bought from the wishlist. This lets the store know to mark them as "purchased" on the list. After that you need to provide your credit card info and also fill in the shipping address. (If you have already done this in the past the info will be saved to your Powells account.) Here is where the books are going to:

Melissa Jackson, LIBRARIAN
Ballou Senior High School
3401 Fourth Street SE
Washington DC 20032
(202) 645-3400

It's very important that you get Melissa's name and title in there - she is not the only Jackson (or Melissa) at the school and we want to make sure the books get to the library.

After that you pay for the books and you're done! Please head back over here when you get a chance and leave a comment letting us know who you are, where you're from and what you bought. Also be sure to follow @BallouLibrary on twitter where Melissa will be updating on books as they arrive and student reactions. You can also let her know what you have ordered via twitter - I'm sure she will be delighted to let the kids know what's coming their way.

As always, the crew at GLW and especially me personally, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping us in this effort. The book fair is one of the best examples of what we all believe in - getting as many books as possible into the hands of kids who need them. Books matter so much - actual physical books that can be checked out and shared and read dozens of times over by kids for whom owning an e-reader is a distant dream. The Book Fair for Ballou is all about letting kids in a tough spot know that someone out here, someone they will never meet, wants them to read great books and is willing to put forward some of their own hard-earned dollars to make that happen. This level of caring is a powerful thing folks, and it can change the world in significant ways.

Buy a book, send a tweet, post on your blog or at facebook. Spread the word for Ballou and never doubt how much your help is appreciated. And now, enjoy a few recent pictures from the Ballou Library facebook page showing just how much this library is appreciated!

Toriko! Vol 2 is on the list! (And we would be happy to add many more in the series... :)

Chess Club getting serious in the library

Annual African American "Read In"

Women's History Month celebration

Here are the numbers:

• 2,208 people were on board the RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage
• of these, 891 were crew members and 1,317 were passengers
• yet she carried just 20 lifeboats that could have held a total of 1,178 people
• she sank, after hitting an iceberg, on April 15, 1912
• only 712 people survived

But numbers can only tell us so much. They don’t convey the excitement surrounding the largest and most luxurious ocean liner ever built at the time, the confusion and fear on board when disaster struck, the bravery of many crew members and passengers, or the heartbreak of realizing a loved one did not survive.

As the subtitle of Deborah Hopkinson’s Titanic: Voices from the Disaster implies, this is a human history of the Titanic. After describing the building of the ship and giving readers a sense of its massive scale, Hopkinson introduces some of the crew and passengers (from several countries, and different social backgrounds) who were on board. Their memories add depth and intimacy to events, engaging Titanic buffs as well as readers less familiar with the disaster. Hopkinson does an excellent job weaving multiple voices together—first describing, well, “normal” life on the Titanic for passengers and crew, then the chaos after the iceberg was spotted—with contextual information regarding different aspects of the Titanic (both in terms of what was known or custom at the time, and based on what we know now) into an organically flowing narrative.

Numerous images (photos, reproductions of telegrams, and more) spread throughout the book provide additional atmosphere; it’s one thing to read about some of the amenities on board, but seeing photographs of the gymnasium and a life preserver made of cork give the details even more impact.

The back matter is another thing to rave about here. Seriously, it is awesome, especially if you love back matter as much as I do. It’s comprehensive (comprising about a quarter of the book!), including a glossary, timeline, selected bibliography, source notes, additional biographical information about some of the passengers, and an excerpt from the British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry Report.

Book details: middle grade nonfiction, published 2012 by Scholastic, ISBN 9780545116749

Book source: public library.

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.

The Russian Far East, early December 1997.

Vladimir Markov is dead, killed in gruesome fashion. The killer is obvious: a Siberian tiger. What little remains of Markov’s body is torn and tattered. When Yuri Trush arrives at Markov’s cabin, he records the scene with a video camera.

The camera doesn’t waver as it pans across the pink and trampled snow, taking in the hind foot of a dog, a single glove, and then a bloodstained jacket cuff before halting at a patch of bare ground about a hundred yards into the forest….

The temperature is thirty below zero and yet, here, the snow has been completely melted away. In the middle of this dark circle, presented like some kind of sacrificial offering, is a hand without an arm and a head without a face. Nearby is a long white bone, a femur probably, that has been gnawed to a boneless white. (p. 14-15)

Trush lead the Bikin unit of Inspection Tiger, an agency charged with investigating forest crimes, specifically those involving tigers. Inspection Tiger was created to protect Russian wildlife—Primorye territory, bordered by China and North Korea, is a Boreal Jungle, as John Vaillant terms it, “unique on earth, and it nurtures the greatest biodiversity of any place in Russia” (p. 25). It’s home to the most valuable timber in the Far East, and the animals that make their home in the taiga are just as valuable. For most people living there, the animals provide essential sustenance. Poaching, though illegal, is common because of the widespread poverty. However, a few poachers target not wild boars or badgers, but the most fearsome creature in the taiga. A tiger carcass will fetch $30,000 on the black market, a stunning amount of money, especially when you consider that most people in Primorye may not make $1,000 in one year. Inspection Tiger tries to stop poaching, but in this case, the tiger is dangerous, attacking and eating humans. It must be stopped.

At its heart, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival is not just the study of a tiger. Vaillant uses the circumstances of Markov’s death and the hunt for the tiger that killed him as the framework for an absorbing exploration of the confluence of history (both natural and Russian), geography, and ecology in Primorye, and of the relationship between humans and tigers living there, focusing on one particularly shocking and fascinating incident. Some readers may consider Vaillant’s scope too broad, with digressions into human evolution and predators in other parts of the world that slow the momentum of the narrative; I found them fascinating.

Perhaps the most haunting, disturbing part about Markov’s death is the calculation with which the tiger deliberately stalked Markov and, later, its second victim. The tiger, it seems, held a grudge against Markov and the results were brutally obvious.

Book source: public library
Adult Nonfiction
Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2010
ISBN 9780307268938

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.

Last Monday we unveiled the Powells wish list for the Guys Lit Wire book fair with great excitement. This was our fourth year of running a book fair for a struggling library in the US and we have always done astonishingly well. Between past efforts for incarcerated juveniles in LA County and schools on the Navajo and White River Apache reservations, plus last year at Ballou SR High School in Washington DC, supporters have purchased more than 2,100 books off our wish lists and had them sent to the respective schools. Last year at Ballou we busted all records with 800+ in the spring book fair and another 150+ in a smaller holiday fair in November.

You can understand how hopeful we were last week to do this wonderful project all over again.

As I explained in my post at Guys Lit Wire, we elected to stay with Ballou because this school is literally building a library from the ground up. Last year they had less than one book for each of their 1,200 students - only 63 in the fiction section. Through our efforts and others, they had two books for each student this spring. (The American Library Association standard is ELEVEN books for student in school libraries.) Ballou was suffering from donor fatigue however - most of their support has disappeared but their need remains the same. The library is an incredibly vital part of the school (chess club, manga club, poetry club and on and on meet there), and we want to help them make it the crown jewel it deserves to be.

We are all book lovers after all - how could we walk away when the job was not done?

So we put 525 books the list with the advisement of Ballou librarian Melissa Jackson and we started the book fair with great optimism. Our outreach this year was without parallel; I am not exaggerating when I say that hundreds of thousands of people heard about the book fair via blog mentions, facebook updates and countless tweets. I was frankly stunned by how much help we received in spreading the word. Folks started buying books immediately and it looked like we were set for yet another sellout.

And then everything just slowed down.

As of today we have sold 117 books off the wish list. We are in the middle of the second week and seeing number similar to the second day for the past book fairs. I have honestly no idea why this has happened. Some people have suggested we held the fair too close to tax day, but that has never been an issue in the past. Some have suggested the Powells wish list, which requires you to manually type in the school's address, is too complicated. As we have always gone through Powells and strongly support independent bookstores, we just don't see how to change that and hope it is not an issue this time.

Some have suggested that the economy is a factor but as we are economically in better shape now than at any point during the previous book fairs, that is a hard one to accept. Additionally, many of the books on the list are less than $10, even with shipping, so the cost of helping is really quite small. Some have gone so far to suggest library fatigue and honestly, that one is just too painful to imagine.

One former donor told me she did not contribute this time because she preferred we choose another library and not give more than once to Ballou. While I certainly respect her choice to not help us, this one really hurt. We want to stay with Ballou partly because so many others have walked away and left the work unfinished. We thought we were doing the best thing possible for the school and students by not quitting now and yet I can not help but think that if I had another school with a fresh compelling story it might have gotten more support. But honestly, who knows.

This is all, quite frankly, enormously frustrating.

In

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.

The Guys Lit Wire annual book fair is going on right now! Please support the Ballou Senior High School Library by purchasing a book or two (or more) on their behalf.

A woman finds herself in a park, her body aching, with no memory of who she is or what she was doing. She survived some kind of attack–the ring of motionless bodies surrounding her is an obvious clue–and finds a letter in her jacket pocket which begins

Dear You,

The body you are wearing used to be mine. The scar on the inner left thigh is there because I fell out of a tree and impaled my leg at the age of nine. The filling in the far left tooth on the top is a result of my avoiding the dentist for four years. But you probably care little about this body’s past. After all, I’m writing this letter for you to read in the future. Perhaps you are wondering why anyone would do such a thing. The answer is both simple and complicated. The simple answer is because I knew it would be necessary.

Killer opening, right? And, for the most part, what follows lives up to the promising start. Which is saying something, since the book is nearly 500 pages long.

The letter writer, Myfanwy Thomas, warns the woman reading the letter that she is in terrible danger. The original Myfanwy (rhymes with Tiffany) considerately gives her the choice of starting a new life, with a new identity, or continuing to live Myfanwy’s life to find out what happened her. New Myfanwy is no idiot. She’ll take the new life, thank you very much. Why would she want the old Myfanwy’s life, when strange people wearing latex gloves want to harm her? Only, before she can follow Myfanwy’s instructions, she is attacked. She has no idea how the people after Myfanwy have found her so quickly, but it changes her mind about which route to take. She will remain Myfanwy Thomas. And in a few days, she will go to work as if nothing happened to her and try to figure out which of her colleagues betrayed her.

If she can find the time to investigate, that is. Myfanwy is a Rook of the Checquy Group, which exists to protect England from supernatural dangers. Okay, Myfanwy’s an administrator, a paper pusher, but she’s very good at her job and she knows it. Well, the new Myfanwy knows that the old Myfanwy was good at her job, but trying to hide the fact that she remembers nothing about her old life while reviewing the budget for the removal of plague-infected bodies, observing the interrogation of a man apprehended by the Checquy, and dealing with a sentient fungus, among other things, is not easy.

The reader learns about the Checquy and original Myfanwy’s life along with the new Myfanwy, through letters and the contents of a giant purple binder the original Myfanwy wrote before her memories were taken from her. These sections are informative without feeling infodump-y. Plus, they’re filled with mentions of past supernatural threats (or assets, in some instances) Myfanwy had to deal with that, many of which were refreshingly imaginative and frequently hilarious.

This, and the distinct voices and personalities of the two Myfanwys, make Daniel O’Malley’s The Rook a clever and entertaining and very fun read. Yeah, some of the chess-related aspect of the Checquy’s structure felt a bit underdeveloped (why, exactly, organize it around chess?), and, once the plot really gets going, some Myfanwy’s letter intrude on t

So this is it - I'm pulling down the wish list tonight (Quick link: http://bit.ly/GLWBookFair) and the book fair will be over. There are still well over 100 books left to purchase so if you have been waiting until the bitter end to get some books to Ballou, now is the time! (I have been waiting so you're not alone.) Lots of great titles remain such as:

THE BIG SEA by Langston Hughes (we want 2 copies of this one as it is only available in tpb) for $7.98

LEARN TO PLAY GO $18.25
BEGINNING CHESS $17.99 (let's get these kids learning some awesome strategy games!)

ONE MILLION THINGS: Space, Animal Life & Planet Earth - all under $15 (SALE!) and all excellent choices for reluctant teen readers. (Lots of graphics, great info, not intimidating or insulting.)

EONA by Alison Goodman ($19.99 - the first book is on the way; love to see the 2nd go too!)

GREAT EXPECTATIONS in beautiful HC edition for $20 and in illustrated pb for SALE $6.95 (both, please!)

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. DuBOIS for only $7.95 in HC

And, well, I could keep going and going and going. All the books are fantastic, all will be much appreciated and I'd love to see any and all of them go from Powells to Ballou. So please dig deep, do what you can and help us in this final day. We have accomplished so much in the last two weeks; I'd love to go out as strongly as we began.

Thanks guys, from the bottom of my heart, for all you have done already.

Mailing address to complete your order at Powells:

Melissa Jackson, LIBRARIAN
Ballou Senior High School
3401 Fourth Street SE
Washington DC 20032
(202) 645-3400

Oceans cover about 70% of the earth’s surface, yet only about 5% of the ocean has been seen by humans. In fact, we actually know less about the ocean than we do about some parts of our solar system.

In 2000, Census of Marine Life launched. Over the course of ten years, 2,700 scientists from around the world participated in 540 different expeditions that surveyed many different areas of the ocean. The goal of the Census was to “assess the diversity (how many different kinds), distribution (where they live), and abundance (how many) of marine life.” Although the exploration phase of the Census is complete, it will take many more years to sort through and study everything that was collected.

Journey into the Deep: Discovering New Ocean Creatures by Rebecca L. Johnson introduces readers to the Census and some of the creatures the Census discovered. The book is divided into sections based on the area of the ocean being studied, beginning with shallowest regions surveyed to the deepest.

Johnson joined scientists on a range of expeditions and effectively conveys the experience of, for example, sampling the ocean’s shallow edges or sorting through mud gathered from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, picking out the animals. She describes each oceanic environment and some of the methods scientists used to survey the area by writing in the second person, putting readers in the scientists’ shoes, as in this paragraph after a submersible carrying scientists descended to the ocean’s deep slopes:

Farther down the continental slope, bubbles start fizzing past the porthole. For one terrifying moment, you’re sure the submersible is leaking air. The scientist calmly explains that you’ve arrived at a cold seep, a place where gases are bubbling up from the seabed. The gases are methane and hydrogen sulfide. If you could smell the water outside the submersible, it would stink like rotten eggs. (p. 24)

As engaging as Johnson’s writing, however, the book’s real draw are the numerous photographs of remarkable creatures on every page. There’s the brightly colored squat lobster (p. 11); the barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma, p. 18), which has a transparent head (I need to repeat this—it has a transparent head!); the hairy-legged yeti crab (Kiwa hirsuta, p. 50; and a sea cucumber (Enypniastes eximia, p. 55) that sheds it skin when attacked, to name just a few.

There are some nice design touches, as well. Sidebars, which I usually dislike, are used effectively here, in large part because of the page layout. Paragraphs are never split on to two pages, but contained in their entirety on a single page. Also, each of the sections for the eight different oceanic environments Johnson observes begins with an inset depicting both the depth of the ocean and where, geographically, the expedition took place.

Backmatter includes a glossary, source notes, a selected bibliography, index, and a “Learn More” section that includes books, websites, and DVDs. Journey into the Deep is a great resource for middle schoolers, but readers of all ages will be drawn to photographs.

Including the new creatures discovered as part of the Census, only about 250,000 marine species have been identified. Since there could be more than 10 million ocean species we haven’t found yet, there’s still a lot more exploration to be done.

Book source: public library.

Cross-posted at 0 Comments on Journey into the Deep by Rebecca L. Johnson as of 1/1/1900