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Kindl & Roberts FTW, indeed! Totally two of my favorites!

I adore OWL IN LOVE. Whenever I mention it, people say huh??? Maybe now...

Okay - now that I think about it, I did read a Patrice Kindl novel awhile ago - Goose Chase. She still exists.


And of course, Willo Davis Roberts died in 2005.

Considering how much I adored (and read to death) THE GIRL WITH THE SILVER EYES, I'm shocked I haven't heard of more of these. Will definitely have to go look...

Nice article, thanks for the information.

Oh, I can't wait to listen to the podcast! (someday when I've dug myself out of this heap of work...) Thanks for posting it.

Ditto what Aquafortis said. Still that debate over YA novels has been extremely interesting. I read an excellent post by Scott Westerfield on the subject.

LOVED what Scott had to say - very funny.

That link to the Beginner's Guide to Steampunk... that is truly awesome!

I love Abebooks - I think that list is well worth the pain of the lengthened list - call it reference reading!

My mom sent that to me! I don't know where she gets the time to find these things, but it's awesome. :)

Lovely thoughts, whether on a Wednesday or, erm, a Saturday... ;)

I love the bit about the person who "if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly." And of course I adore Shel Silverstein.

I just love the thought that it makes critics deeply unimportant. ;)

YES. That, too.

As you know, the bit about critics is especially relevant to me right now, as is the bit about "anything can happen." *wiping off dust, sweat and blood.*

Outstanding list. Really.

And how much do I love zombie stick-figure Marie Curie??

Hmmm. Either one would be great, but the books eating the television is a great idea!

Hah! I am not sure they realized they'd be making Pac Man the international symbol of "Reading Beats Tv," but I'll take it!

I know; I LOVE that the books are eating the television.

Did you notice that your note about comments says "No flaming..." ?!?!? HAHA -- there was plenty of flaming in that video!

What I was going to say was, Off to play with my Easter candy...

Only movie-appropriate, Peep-and-chocolate-related-flaming. Within reason.

Happy playing, Cuz!

That is a FAB cover! I can't quite say I loved this book to bits, maybe, but definitely a fascinating premise and an enjoyable read.

The men get to stomp more than the women. No fair!

I loved the dancing but found the numbers distracting.

Love your poem!

At my children's school, they have DEAR time every day. Isn't that great?

I love Drop Everything And Read! Wish I could have that every day, too...

My own poor little picture book (Chicken Little told with dinosaurs) ended with the approach of the killer asteroid (the sky really was about to fall, and any kid worth their dino salt would know what was going to happen to the protaganists), and sadly, although my agent did her darndest, no one wanted it. Sigh.

But it might have had other things working against it besides the violence.

Moving away from Me, it seems to me that there are violences
and violences. I have no trouble with my boys reading Edward Gory's Alphabet of ghastly death, because it's so emotionally removed, and therefore untraumatic. But I have no intention of letting my 10 year old read The Hunger Games (he's asked for it)--I don't want that particular brand in his head.

I hadn't come across Susie Townsend's response yet, but I disagree utterly (based on my on limited experience). My boys are moved by the small and the immediate--both have wept over Owly. But probably by "kids" she means "teenagers," and I have no experience with those yet.

For the moment, I'm happy for my oldest to (repeatedly) ask me to tell him the story of To Kill a Mockingbird...and I can only assume that when he reads the book it will knock his socks off.

It really depends so much on the way it's told. As a six-year-old I could casually read my way past all sorts of nail-barreled, head-severing grue in the Grimms and other collections of fairy tales and mythology without batting an eyelash. But show me a single picture of a skull or a horror movie poster like this and I'd have screaming nightmares for weeks. It didn't trouble me to have horrific things *mentioned* in a book, but not lovingly described a la Stephen King, and definitely not if there were visuals involved.

And in any case, I didn't read the fairy tales FOR the gore; I read them in spite of it. So yes, I think it's very much a mistake to assume that all children relish buckets of blood & guts. Even my 8 year old son who loves robots, aliens and monsters was shaken and sickened to the point of tears by a book of how to make your own horror makeup that he found at school.

Like you, R.J., I could read fairy-tale/mythological gruesomeness no problem, but was so easily terrified to the point of nightmares by horror TV/movies that I made my parents despair. (Even Twilight Zone was too scary sometimes.) For me, it wasn't so much gore or violence that disturbed me, but the uncanny or freakish. I can't tell you how much sleep I lost around age 11-12 over Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising books--which, incidentally, I LOVED even though they scared the crap out of me.

More to the point, I can't say I gravitated specifically toward or away from violence as a kid. It really depended on the context. I thought Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes (and everything else Dahl) was the funniest thing ever. I thought my dad's favorite Chuck Norris movies were stupid. Put the TV series "V" on (the old one) and I was scared s***less. And, since it was the 1980s, put the news on and I was also scared s***less that we might die in a nuclear war. That was NOT violence I wanted to hear about.

Like you, I think it's impossible to make generalizations about what "all kids" want to read. While I agree that not every classic book is going to appeal to every kid (in fact, I'm often unmoved by classics everybody else loves), I don't think you can jump from that statement to assuming that kids today want to read about sex, drugs and violence.

Thanks for conversing, peeps.
Charlotte:, I agree with the idea of unemotional violence -- the "morals" of the story in the old Folk & Fairy Tales book that I read and reread as a child were what I call Gentled Grimm, so it wasn't until I was older that I read the original -- but I did read Aesop's, and those Moral Tales had all kinds of cause-and-effect types of things happening which ended up with death and being lost forever, etc. etc. And that was ...I don't know, understandable, because it was caused, and was simply the effect. It was far removed from reality for me, because it was a Moral, like a parable, and just a teaching story.

R.J., I think what most bugged me about that statement is the implied idea that children seek out gore. I was like, "Huh. Really?" My students didn't seek it out, and even my older students didn't all care for, say, the Goosebumps books, or to watch Tales from the Crypt reruns. And, some kids are definitely into that. Different strokes, different folks, etc.

A.F., I remember seeing part of Children of the Corn, when I was about five or six -- and I couldn't look at scarecrows, cornfields, or dried corn for a long time without horrific nightmares. Or grain silos, oh my word, the silos. (Can you imagine if I'd lived in Ohio??) For the most part, it was visual stuff that was bad - book covers or illustrations, movie posters or TV shows -- but there were a number of books which were scary. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow -- while merely a bit of Americana for most people was for YEARS to me was a source of terror -- I couldn't stand that story, and even seeing a hunchbacked man freaked me out. And, oddly, Kaa from the Jungle Book was quite scary, because he could hypnotize people -- even his friends.

Weird what gets us, huh? And yet, none of that is truly gory (except for Children of the Corn. ::shudder::) Hmm.

Wow, so many good points here.

I have lost all tolerance for generalizations. In kidlit I think it happens most often with the gender divide, that boys want this kind of book and girls want that kind of book and I'm tired of fighting that battle, since the same points get made over and over. Anyway, that's a tangent here, so--

I'm a pretty peaceful person, in my life and in my artistic tastes. Yet when I was around ten, I developed a taste for some gruesome horror novels, of a kind I could not even stomach now as an adult. Now I think part of it might have been a reaction to the bullying I was undergoing at the time. As a good little girl, I was not allowed to express anger or fight back, and there may have been something very satisfying in the violence I was reading.

I agree that gatekeepers are far more worried about sex than violence. I think the stats kept on book challenges and bans show that very clearly. My personal theory on that: sex makes people feel vulnerable, while violence makes people feel powerful. So most people in society are far more scared of sex.

Which is sad. Sex brings all sorts of consequences that are worth thinking about and talking about; it's not a light subject. But violence is far more damaging to people; it hurts, it kills.

Having said that, do I think books should be censored for violence? I'm not a fan of censorship. Literature may even be a safe place to explore the consequences of violence. I don't choose to read much violent content myself, but I don't know if I should be the arbiter for others (except perhaps my own minor children, if they existed).

I thought that was an excellent piece on The Hunger Games in this weekend's magazine. In my work with children, I have observed a lot of kids and teens who have experience trauma of one kind of another. What some of them really seem to need is an escape. They read The Babysitter's Club and the like because they need to feel like somebody's life is normal and calm somewhere, that maybe something like that might be possible for them someday. Sometimes they just want to laugh. Others need to read about the darkest, worst things in the world and characters who triumph over them because they want to feel like they, too, can overcome their trauma and that they are not alone, that other people see the darkness in the world that they see. That isn't what I'd call a "craving." We send so many messages to kids that say the world is a sunny place where everyone shares and is nice to each other. Kids who experience something else are often left with a disconnect and not many resources to deal with the realities of their existence. Books, particularly fantasy, can fill that gap.

There are other kinds of readers, of course, and lots of other reasons for reading. A lot of children who read dark things still have very specific things they avoid that freak them out. They might be able to read the most frightening ghost stories but be completely undone by a spider, for instance. Some are disturbed more by characters with ill intent than the actual harm they do. I've met several who cannot stand to watch protagonists who make terrible decisions. I have talked to kids and teens who were upset over something sexual they read in a book, but it is always something that is violent and sexual.

These are not easy questions. Whenever I have a parent who asks me if something's going to upset their child, unless I know the child, I tell them I have no idea. And I don't run around recommending A Tale Dark and Grimm (which I LOVED) to every kid I meet, although I've recommended it to several who loved The Graveyard Book and Roald Dahl and A Series of Unfortunate Events--and I've had good reports back. One of my favorite readers, a fifth grader who asks me often for recommendations, dubbed A Tale Dark and Grimm "really funny." And he's the calmest, sweetest child you'd ever want to meet. What a person reads and responds to is just so psychologically complex, and when it comes to kids and teens, I think the most important thing is that they have some adults in their lives who are paying attention to what they're reading (and seeing--whether on TV, in movies, or in their day-to-day lives) and talking to them about it. The world can just be so confusing.

Thanks for making me think this morning, Tanita.

"I agree that gatekeepers are far more worried about sex than violence. I think the stats kept on book challenges and bans show that very clearly. My personal theory on that: sex makes people feel vulnerable, while violence makes people feel powerful. So most people in society are far more scared of sex."

Jen: That. Is. Brilliant. I know I should have thought of that before, but I never have. That opens up a whole 'nother mess of thoughts I'll now be thinking. Thank you.

Adrienne: I agree - I very much see how my reading was, many times during my adolescence, responsive -- Mathilda filled a need to lash out against my parents - but as an adult, seeing it in film form was sort of chilling. As a tween, I hated reading about characters who made bad choices because I knew too much about consequences; now I realize that the poor choices are often necessary. It really is a complex thought - which is why I definitely have no conclusions...

Oh, how I <3 Paolo for saying that. It's like a salve for all those other critics who dismiss YA.

I've got this odd (and probably not entirely accurate; oh well) book genre hierarchy in my head--it seems like many readers and critics hold the view that when you're a kid you read kids' books; when you're a tween/teen you read YA until you're mature enough that you can "graduate" and start reading "adult" books--often genre fiction like mysteries or SFF ends up being the transition point--until you reach some sort of literary enlightenment and do nothing but read literary fiction all day. That seems to be the assumption, anyway. SIGH.

One last thought on this post, which is simply this: So many conferences, so little time or money...

Thanks for the Strange Horizens link, Tanita!

BWAHAHAHA on the John Scalzi thing. Especially the cover.

Yes, and people still INSIST that the book is real. I'm thinking, "Yeah, right."

I love those handcrafted masterpieces! I'll definitely be sending that along to Rob. :)

Ha! Hilarious.

Love this post! We're in the process of moving and yes, I will definitely be moving some boxes I've never unpacked. Now that I've read this post, I just might have to take a look to see what some of them have inside.

I LOVE "quagmire of futility." I really do.

My younger college self wrote some stuff like this, too. Sadly, a lot of it is trapped on 3.5-inch disks. It probably doesn't need to see the light of day anyway...

Tanita,

I thought I'd stop by to say hello!

I haven't come across things from my young adulthood lately. We had to clean out my mother's house before we sold it last fall. I brought home some boxes she had stored in her attack. I went through them a few days ago and found my christening dress and my baby book.

Melissa: I hope you find something amazing. Even a story start...

Aquafortis, I have since then decided to insert "quagmire of futility" into pretty much every conversation I have...

Elaine: Okay, you trump us all. Your christening gown!? I have zero idea where any kind of that sort of thing might have gone -- but how lovely that you still have it, and can pass it along to your daughter, maybe, when the time comes ... good to hear from you, m'dear!

Awesome, I love it! The program for the Doctor Who convention we went to had a very similar cover, actually--the theme was Islands of Mystery, so various islands were represented on the map--Neverland, Fantasy Island, Avalon, etc.

Will try to scan it when I get a chance.

I would so buy that as a poster.

Can this map please be real life?! Ahhhhh.

Thanks for pointing out the Dia Reeves link. I am so on the same page!

I liked Behemoth rather more--because the world was already built, and the characters extant, Westerfeld could jump right into Story and move things along swimmingly.

I've read Six

I agree with Charlotte I thought Leviathan was okay with potential.

Now Behemoth was some serious WOW loved it.

I loved Hereville and not just any girl but an Orthodox Jewish Girl

Can't wait to read more of these! I've only read four.

I agree with Doret--I thought Leviathan was good, with a lot of potential, but I'd expected more. Still, I'm looking forward to reading Behemoth. I liked the premise and how the world was set up, and the characters have a lot of potential for growth.

Two of these titles are totally new to me! I'm excited.

OOH! Orthodox Jewish Girl With Sword?
I am SO there.

And, okay, because you people were lovely about it, I will try Behemoth... after trying to read the first one again. If you PROMISE it gets better...

Always a matter of taste, though...and readers can latch onto completely different aspects of the same book and not have the same experience AT ALL, so there's only so much I can promise! :D

Perhaps this makes me sound like a jerk, but I love it when authors make their characters suffer. That was my problem with the Twilight books - did any one of those characters really have to give something up? Ever? Characters suffering is what keeps me turning pages. =)

The NYT article is great, too!

Dear Puppetmaster,
Please don't hurt us.
Signed, your frightened characters

Heh, heh.

Yeah, I think that this is going to be something I write on the backs of my hands during this ongoing revision: BE MEAN! BE MEAN! BE MEAN! Hard to believe, but it's an EFFORT. I mean, I have to TRY.

(Yeah, I know. You thought it came naturally. I exude that effortlessness.)

Hard-hearted, bloodthirsty wench! LOL

Loved this post. And your epiphany. And your helpful tips.

What a cool idea! We have lamp posts outside the library windows and I have taken some shots that are very Narnia. One of the things I will miss from this job. I love Gaiman's post. Thanks for sharing your dream!

After reading your post and then Neil Gaiman's, I truly hope you get a lamp post. It looks like such fun to have one, cold but fun.

I wanted to live in a tree house a la The Swiss Family Robinson. Unfortunately, I live in a 2-story condo instead, but perhaps one day! Keep the dream alive!

I love this post. It has inspired me to start reclaiming some of the things I always wanted and seeing if I might make them real. It is, unfortunately, too late to install a secret passageway or hidden chamber in my house, but were it not, I would do it. I always wanted one.

And, like Carin S., I wanted to live in a Swiss Family Robinson tree house. An elegant one, of course.

OOH! Swiss Family Robinson!!

I also wanted to ride the ostrich they had in the movie.

...it's probably too late for that, too.

Definitely, guys. Keep dreaming. Thanks for sharing your whimsy with me.

Speaking of Swiss Family Robinson (and other stuff), did you see that crazy hotel that Leila posted about? They have Swiss Family rooms and Twilight-themed rooms.

Not sure what I think of that. I DO remember being sad when they took out the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse at Disneyland, even if it was ancient and cruddy by the time I was a kid. :)

Oh, I remember the Swiss Family Treehouse in Disney World! I loved it (and I'm so old that it was new when I walked in it!!).

As soon as I saw that post at Neil Gaiman's I knew I had to have a lamp post. It will happen - it's totally in my 5 year plan.

I would love to have a lamp-post, too, a proper one. The house does have a door into another universe, though. It's on the back of our house in the attic space (such as it is) in lieu of a window. No one has ever traveled through it.... no one that we know.

P.S. By "a proper one," I mean not the one in our alley.

Wow, you've been busy! What a great set of links. I especially love the cartoon (and, in fact, I have cartoon envy!) and will be passing that one along.

I'll have to look for those reads from the Brown Bookshelf, too--all sound intriguing.

Yes, yes, yes, I am reading something interesting: a novel called Agaat, set in South Africa. Translated from Afrikaans. It's for adults, and although I am SO unfamiliar with the many place names mentioned, I'm finding it pretty good.

Gotta get that Bubba/bowling book! Sounds like our kind of reading.

Thanks for all the love! Crystal Allen