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Kirsty Doole has been part of the OUPblog team since…possibly forever, and yet I don’t know that we’ve ever properly introduced her to all of you. Formerly known as the ‘UK Early Bird,’ she is our UK Contributing Editor and keeps me on my toes at every turn. To my great delight, she’s also joined me on the @OUPblog twitter account! Without further adieu, I present this (fantastic) Q&A.     -Lauren

If you had to reread one book every year for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Jane Eyre. It’s my joint favourite book, alongside Mrs Dalloway. But the thing about Mrs Dalloway is that you (or rather, I) have to be in the mood for it. Jane Eyre works anytime. Also: Matilda by Roald Dahl.

What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?
A love of Victorian literature means I’ve read a few doorstops. I’ve just finished The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope, which is 1,024 pages. It’s brilliant, by the way, you should definitely read it.

What’s your most obscure talent/hobby?
I’m desperately boring and can’t think of anything particularly obscure. How about my favourite obscure historical figure? Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham.

If you lost your voice for a week, and could only communicate by playing portions of a song, what song would you choose?
‘I Am The Walrus’ by The Beatles. Might as well have some fun confusing people.

What’s the funniest thing that ever happened to you?
It wasn’t funny at the time, but it’s funny now. Ten days before my undergraduate English Literature final exams I broke my writing arm. Due to the short notice I had to get friends and family to scribe for my exams because most of the postgrads who would have done had already left for the summer, or were in the middle of their own exams. A friend scribed the first exam, and out of the first three words of the first essay in the first exam, he misspelled two of them. Funny now. Thought I was going to cry then. How did I break my arm? Long story.

Where did you grow up?
A small town called Barrhead , about 8 miles outside of Glasgow, Scotland. The most famous alumnus of my high school is Gregor Fisher, of Rab C. Nesbitt fame. I have no idea if Rab C. Nesbitt made it outside of the UK, so it could be that as far as you’re concerned I’m my high school’s most famous alumnus.

If you had to live outside of the UK, where would you move?
I’m better at dealing with cold weather than I am with hot, so I might go and join my Dad in Oslo. That said, apparently Norwegian is tough to learn. So, how about New York during the Snowpocalypse? (You can tell I’m British by how important weather is to me.)

Cat’s Cradle vs. Rubik’s Cube. Go. (Unless you don’t know about cat’s cradle?)
Neither. When I was a kid I had a Rubik’s *Clock* .

How do you feel about hats?
Given a beanie hat and my husband’s glasses, I look like Meg from ‘Family Guy.’ Seriously.

How do you feel about American versions of British TV shows?
*Obviously* they are inferior. I’ve seen your version of &

The Brontë sisters are three of my all-time, all-star favourite authors. I first read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre when I was at school and was instantly bewitched by them, and have re-read them both often in the years since. Every time I read the Brontë sisters’ novels (not just those two) I find more in them to love. By the time you read this post, I will be in the midst of two long weeks off on holiday, and during that time I’m going to make my very first trip up to Howarth to see the parsonage where the girls lived with their brother and father - I can’t wait - talk about kid in a sweet shop! So, in celebration of this fact, today I bring you an excerpt from Janet Gezari’s 2007 book Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems.

[Elizabeth] Gaskell’s well-known image of the three sisters pacing up and down in the sitting room of the Parsonage while talking over their stories, reminds us that poems were not among the creative achievements shared during those evening sessions. When Charlotte, who knew that her sister wrote poems, came upon her Gondal Poems notebook in the autumn of 1845 and read some, Emily felt violated. Once persuaded to participate in Charlotte’s publication project, she readied only twenty-one of her poems for printing. In the 1846 volume, her poems usually alternate with those of her sisters, so that relations between her poems are subordinated to relations between them and the contiguous poems of Charlotte and Anne. All of the poems Brontë selected for publication in 1846 came from the two books into which she had begun transcribing some of her poems about a year earlier, the Gondal Poems notebook and the so-called Honresfeld manuscript. After transcribing her poems, she almost always discarded earlier drafts. Her single-leaf manuscripts preserve many apparently unfinished or incomplete poems, usually described as fragments, and we cannot know what she intended to do with them. The posthumous publication of seventeen more poems in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey nearly doubled the number of Emily Brontë’s poems available to nineteenth-century readers. What knowledge we have about Charlotte Brontë’s aggressive editing of these poems relies on a comparison of the manuscript versions in Emily Brontë’s hand to the published versions and not on Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence with her publisher about the edition, which says nothing about her editorial judgements. 1850 added one poem to the canon for which no holograph manuscript survives, ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning.’ For generations of Brontë readers, as for T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington, this poem has sounded ‘the keynote to her character’, yet its authorship continues to be disputed. In my last chapter, I argue that Charlotte, not Emily, is the author of ‘Often rebuked, yet always back returning,’ and that the poem promotes Charlotte’s view of Emily, not Emily’s view of herself or her own poetic project.

My title registers my starting place. A concern with endings, and with how we defy, resist, blur, or transcend them, characterizes Brontë’s life, her art, and this book. In Carson’s words, ‘She whached the bars of time, which broke.’ Brontë’s approach to an end is most evident when death or memory is the subject of a poem, as it so frequently is. But there is no poet for whom immortality resolves less, or for whom ordinary temporal elements—night, day, evening, fall and spring—are more miscible. She gives us a vision of life sub specie iterationis. Her poems’ formal resistance to endings can be seen in the recurrence of the word again both at the end of lines and at the end of poems, where it appears more often than any other word, disrupting our feeling that the experience the poem has recorded is over and done. Or in her fondness for circular structures and for outcomes that resemble openings rather than endings. If time is a prison that confines us, then Brontë’s poems return again and again both to the prison site and to the prison break. Although I do not discuss all her poems, the view of Emily Brontë’s poems presented here seeks to be comprehensive. It relates to individual poems, to the progress she made from the beginning of her career as a poet to its end, to her poetical fragments and her writing practice, to her motives for writing poetry, and to the connections between her poems and her famous novel. When Brontë’s ordinary life enters into my account of her poems, it does so to illuminate them, and not vice versa. I do not ignore the presence of Gondal in the poems, but I resist dividing poems that belong to a Gondal narrative from poems that probably do not, either because Brontë transcribed them into her Honresfeld manuscript instead of her Gondal Poems notebook or because they include no references to Gondal characters or places. A specious distinction between ‘Gondal’ and ‘personal’ narrative contexts continues to thrive, especially when biographical interpretations are at stake. Believing that a Gondal poem is less personal than a non-Gondal poem is like believing that The Bell Jar is less personal than ‘Daddy’. Although she separated Gondal poems from non-Gondal poems by transcribing them into separate notebooks, Brontë composed both kinds of poems intermittently for as long as she wrote poems. For me, a Gondal poem is one in which a lyrical impulse converges with an occasion provided by a narrative about invented characters with aristocratic names. One way to look at Gondal is as intentional dreaming, a release like the one we experience in a dream when the self is freed to act various roles, but always under the aegis of an informing self-idiom that organizes and unifies whatever experience is being represented. The chapters that follow endeavour to describe both the range and the distinctiveness of the experience Emily Brontë’s poems offer.

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I was so excited this morning about the ALA awards. I'm truly a book nerd. People roll their eyes at me. It's okay, I'm proud to be a book nerd.

Here of some of the award and honor winners that I have previously reviewed:

Caldecott Honor Books:
Henry's Freedom Box (and I'm very excited--I'll get to see Kadir Nelson at the Virginia State Reading Association Conference in March)

First the Egg (also received a Geisel honor award)

I'm not sure how I managed not to review Knuffle Bunny Too, but I really did like the book. It made the Cybils fiction picture book shortlist.

Caldecott Winner:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Coretta Scott King Illustrator Winner:
Let it Shine

Schneider Family Book Award, Middle Grades Category:
Reaching for the Sun (my review is in The Edge of the Forest)

Pura Bulpre Award, Author Recipient
The Poet Slave of Cuba: A biography of Juan Francisco Manzano

I'm pretty pleased that I had reviews in many categories. While I read a lot of middle grade fiction, I don't always review it (I don't know why...). It was one of my New Year's Resolutions to review more middle grade fiction. I read the Newbery winner and two of the three honor books. I really liked the ones I read, but I didn't review them this year.

And the winners are:

Caldecott Honor books:
Henry's Freedom Box
First the Egg
The Wall
Knuffle Bunny Too

Caldecott Winner:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Newbery Honor:
Elijah of Buxton
Wednesday Wars
Feathers

Newbery Medal:
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!

Many thanks to Goddess of YA Literature for her live blogging! You can see all of the winners at her site. I was watching the live webcast with my kids at school and right after Wednesday Wars, it stopped! Stopped I tell you!!!! And I couldn't get it back. I don't know why! I don't know if it was my end or ALA's. I was going crazy! Then I jumped to the Goddess's website and she put me out of my anxiety ridden moment.

What I'm excited about...I've read ALL of these books except for Feathers. This is the first time ever for me that has happened. And you know who I credit? Why the kidlitosphere of course! The kid lit bloggers are out there posting on all of these good books all year.

What else I'm excited about...The Invention of Hugo Cabret!!! All year long I have been bragging about this book to everyone I know. It is one of the best books ever. And all of the naysayers were saying that this book wouldn't get any big awards because what category is it in? Well, yippee ka yay! It won! Congratulations Mr. Selznick!

I’ve been reading a lot of picture books lately. My daughter is a picture book fanatic (she’s three), and I’ve been reading for the Cybils fiction picture book category. I have come across some beautiful pictures from all of my reading.

One of the things I noticed the other day is that some of my favorite illustrations in picture books are books that do not necessarily have original text. In other words, the illustrator has taken a song or poem and illustrated it. In other cases, the text is an adaptation of another work.
I love the illustrations in Angels Watching Over Me adapted by Julia Durango and illustrated by Elisa Kleven (Simon & Schuster, 2007). In this case, Durango has taken the African American spiritual “Angels Watching Over Me” and used it interspersed between original text. The text compliments the beautiful illustrations that make me want to fly. There is watercolor, collage, and more. It’s stunning.

Ashley Bryan’s Let it Shine (Atheneum, 2007) illustrates three African American spirituals, “This Little Light of Mine”, “Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In”, and “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands”. He illustrates using construction paper cut-out. The colors are bright and hopeful. The people in the book are all colors, but the only detail on the people is silhouette. The animals, flowers, and buildings all have more detail done by cut paper. The music and words are all printed in the back of the book along with an author’s note about the songs. Truly a beauty to hold!

Another favorite of mine is an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood (Little, Brown, 2007) retold and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, which I reviewed here. The illustrations are done in pencil, watercolor, gouache, and ink. Every picture is so painstakingly detailed that I could spend an enormous of amount of time taking in all of the details on each and every page. The entire story is told in a winter setting, so Pinkney’s beautiful snow scenes add to my amazement of his illustrations.

Another book which I reviewed recently is Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal (Henry Holt, 2007) by Paul Fleischman, illustrated by Julie Paschkis. This one is a retelling of several versions of Cinderella, but Fleischman really made all of those versions come together and "sing". Paschkis' illustrations are phenomenal, and just as beautifully as Fleischman weaved the stories together, Paschkis was able to seamlessly illustrate the same story, with many different versions. GORGEOUS!

Last, but certainly not least, is Christopher Myers reimagined and illustrated version of Jabberwocky (Hyperion, 2007). I have always been a big fan of the poem Jabberwocky, and I read it to my 4th graders every year. I have a version illustrated by Graeme Base that I usually show them, then I read the “meaning” of the words out of Through the Looking Glass. This year, I’m adding Myers’ version to my repertoire. This is a basketball “version” of Jabberwocky. But what I find so fascinating is that Myers just didn’t decide to do a basketball illustration on his own. During his research for the book he thought he was writing, he was reading Carroll’s (Dodgson’s) journals. Carroll had written a word that referred to an ancient game that was very similar to basketball. All of this is explained in detail in the author’s note. So, the basketball “version” is rather symbolic of Carroll’s studies and original meanings of some of the words used in the poem. Even more interesting are Myers’ larger-than-life illustrations that go with one of my favorite poems.

When I noticed the pattern of my favorite illustrations of 2007 all being pictures for adapted or previously written text, I wondered how much chance they had of winning the Caldecott Medal or Honor. It is given to the artist of “the most distinguished American picture book for children” (according to the ALSC website). So I looked at previous winners in the last few years to see if any book was ever honored that had an older text (such as a song or poem) that was illustrated.

In 2003, The Spider and the Fly, illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi was given a Caldecott Honor.

In 2001, Casey at the Bat, illustrated by Christopher Bing also won a Caldecott Honor.

There are numerous retellings of fairy tales that have won, including Jerry Pinkney, who won a Caldecott Honor for his retelling and illustration of The Ugly Duckling in 2000.

All of this to say, I hope my faves have a shot at the big-time. Since I’m not the judge, I wish them all the best of luck.