You know what’s even better than serving on an award committee? Having someone else write about it. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I was on the judging committee for this year’s Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards alongside Chair Joanna Rudge Long and Roxanne Feldman. It was Roxanne who reported on our discussion, and even took photos of where we met (Joanna’s gorgeous Vermont farmhouse), what we ate, and more. There is also a particularly goofy shot of me that is impressive because even without knowing that there was a camera pointed in my direction, I seem to have made a silly face. I am nothing if not talented in that respect.
Speaking of listening in on committees and their discussions, ALA is next week (she said, eyeing her unfinished Newbery/Caldecott Banquet outfit nervously) and that means you have a chance to sit and listen to one particular committee talk the talkety talk. I am referring, of course, to the ALA Notables Committee. This year they’ve released the list of books on their discussion list online for your perusal. A lot of goodies there, as well as room for a lot of books I hope they get to eventually.
I was very sad to hear about the passing of Lois Duncan. Like many of you, she was a staple of my youth. When Jules Danielson, Peter Sieruta, and I were writing our book Wild Things: Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature we initially had a section, written by Peter, on why Lois stopped writing suspense novels for teens. It’s a sad story but one that always made me admire her deeply. She was hugely talented and will be missed.
Speaking of Wild Things, recently I was sent a YA galley by Marcus Sedgwick called Blood Red, Snow White. But lest you believe it to be a YA retelling of the old Snow White / Rose Red fairytale, it ain’t. Instead, it’s about how Arthur Ransome (he of Swallows and Amazons) got mixed up with Trotsky’s secretary and a whole lotta Bolsheviks. What does this have to do with Wild Things? This was yet ANOTHER rejected tale from our book. Read the full story here on our website where we even take care to mention Sedgwick’s book (it originally was published overseas in 2007).
As I’ve mentioned before, my library hosts a pair of falcons each year directly across from the window above my desk. I’ve watched five eggs laid, three hatch, and the babies get named and banded. This week the little not-so-fuzzyheads are learning to fly. It’s terrifying. Far better that I read this older Chicago Tribune article on the banding ceremony. They were so cute when they were fuzzy. *sigh*
In other news, Harriet the Spy’s house is for sale. Apparently.
Sharon Levin on the child_lit listserv had a rather fascinating little announcement up recently. As she told it, she’d always had difficulty finding a really fast way to catalog her personal library. Cause let’s face it – scanning every single barcode takes time. Then she found a new app and . . . well, I’ll let her tell it:
“Shelfie is a free app for iOS and Android (www.shelfie.com) where you can take a picture of your bookshelf and the app will automatically recognize your book spines and generate a catalog of your library. In addition, the team behind the app has made deals with over 1400 publishers (including HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Hachette) to let you download discounted (usually around 80% off) or free ebook or audiobook edition of your paper books (right now these publisher deals cover about 25% of the books on an “average” shelf). The app also lets you browse other readers’ shelves. Shelfie will also give you personalized book recommendations based on how readers with similar taste in books to you organize the books on their shelves. The founder of Shelfie is named Peter Hudson and he’d love to hear any suggestions about how he can make the app better. Peter’s email is [email protected].“
Thanks to Sharon Levin for the heads up.
I leave NYPL and its delightful Winnie-the-Pooh toys and what happens? The world goes goofy for the story of A.A. Milne and Christopher Robin. Now we just found out that Domhnall Gleeson (a.k.a. Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter films) has just been cast as Milne in an upcoming bio-pic. Will wonders never cease?
Are you familiar with the works of Atinuke? An extraordinary storyteller, her Anna Hibiscus books are among my favorite early chapter books of all time. They do, however, occasionally catch flack of saying they take place in “Africa” rather than a specific country. Recently, K.T. Horning explained on Monica Edinger’s recent post Diversity Window, Mirror, or Neither that Atinuke did this on purpose so that kids in Africa could imagine the stories as taking place in their own countries. That makes perfect sense. The ensuing discussion in Monica’s post is respectful, interesting, and with a variety of different viewpoints, all worth reading. In short, the kind of talk a blogger hopes for when he or she writes something. Well done, Monica.
Big time congrats to the nominees for the Neustadt Prize. It’s a whopping $10,000 given to a children’s author given on the basis of literary merit. It may be the only children’s award originating in America that is also international. Fingers crossed for all the people nominated!
Hooray! The Children’s Book Council has released their annual Building a Home Library list. I love these. The choices are always very carefully done and perfect for clueless parents.
In other CBC news, I got this little press release, and it’s worth looking at:
“For the second consecutive year, the Children’s Book Council has partnered with The unPrison Project — a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to empowering and mentoring women in prison — to create brand-new libraries of books for incarcerated mothers to read with their babies at prison nurseries. Fourteen of the CBC’s member publishers answered the call by donating copies of over 35 hand-picked titles for children ages 0-18 months for each library. The books will be hand-delivered and organized in the nurseries by Deborah Jiang-Stein, founder of The unPrison Project and author of Prison Baby. Jiang-Stein was born in prison to a heroin-addicted mother, and has made it her mission to empower and mentor women and girls in prison.”
You know who’s cool? That gal I mentioned earlier. Julie Danielson. She’s something else. For example, while many of us might just say we were interested in James Marshall, she’s actually in the process of researching him. She even received the James Marshall Fellowship from The University of Connecticut’s Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. As a result she spent a week looking through the James Marshall Papers there. Their sole stipulation? Write a blog post about it. So up at the University’s site you’ll find the piece Finding the Artist in His Art: A Week With the James Marshall Papers. Special Bonus: Rare images you won’t find anywhere else.
Daily Image:
I take no credit to this. I only discovered it on Twitter thanks to Christine Hertz of Burlington, VT. It may constitute the greatest summer reading idea I’ve seen in a very long time. Public libraries, please feel free to adopt this:
#58 Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome (1930)
36 points
“Nearly everything about this book is perfect. I love the descriptions of the water, the sailing terminology, the faux rivalry between sailors and pirates, the uncle-turned-enemy, Captain Flint, the sense of adventure coupled with the comfort and security of knowing the world is safe enough to travel alone. The writing is flawless, and the characters so well-crafted they become practically real people, with fully developed personalities and voices. This is the kind of book you don’t outgrow, no matter how old you get. “ – Katie Ahearn
I wanted a boat! I wanted English lakes! I wanted long holidays with very little adult supervision! - Anne Nesbet
Maybe some of you are surprised to see the appearance of Arthur Ransome on this list. Honestly the thing I knew him best for was his marriage to Trotsky’s secretary (and the fact he was almost prosecuted for treason, but that’s neither here nor there). Yet he was considered, according to The Guardian, “the 1930s equivalent of JK Rowling.” Prolific and fun all at once.
The description from (sorry) Wikipedia reads: “The story follows the Walker children (John, Susan, Titty and Roger), who sail a borrowed dinghy named Swallow, and the Blackett children (Nancy and Peggy), who sail a dinghy named Amazon. The Walkers are staying at a farm near a lake during the school holidays and want to camp on an island in the lake; the Blacketts live in a house nearby. The children meet on the island which they call Wild Cat Island, and have a series of adventures, involving sailing, camping, fishing, exploration and piracy.”
In these books (Swallows and Amazons was one of twelve altogether) Ransome took his memories of the English Lake District and used those recollections to conjure up, in Silvey’s words, “endless summer vacation.” Eventually he would settle in that same Lake District, finding time to grumble at tiny tot and future author Diana Wynne Jones (but that is a story for another day, my children).
Fans of this book are found far and wide. In Anita Silvey’s Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Anthony Lewis selected this book as the one that had the greatest impact on his life. Says he, “How I got into Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons books I cannot imagine . . . But the books had a charm and fascination that captured me despite my lack of acquaintance with many of the subjects.”
- Read some of the book here.
The Guardian said of it, “Mr. Ransome has the same magical power that Lewis Carr
I didn’t include Morse code in my list of places our chapter of Winter Holiday took us because it wasn’t mentioned in the passage I quoted. But it was mentioned in the chapter, most enticingly. The book opens with the two children, Dick and Dorothea, beginning to explore the farm they’ve come to visit. There’s a big lake, and they see a boat with six children doing intriguing things around a large island in the middle of the lake. Readers of Swallows and Amazons know at once who these children are…oh, it’s so exciting. Dick and Dorothea long to make contact with them but aren’t sure how, until night falls and they figure out that the light in a distant window belongs to some of those nautical children. They signal with a flashlight, flash flash flash, until oh! The window light flashes three times in response. Contact! (With Mars, thinks astronomer Dick.) It’s terribly exciting.
And then the window light begins flashing in Morse code, but Dick and Dorothea can’t read it. Neither can we. This site is helpful, though we spent considerably more than the “minute” it boasts is necessary, and I can’t say we’re anywhere near mastery. Heh. More useful is the trick Jane remembered from Cheaper by the Dozen: words whose stresses match the dot-dash pattern for each letter of the alphabet, like “a-BOUT” for A (dot dash), “BOIS-ter-ous-ly” for B (dash dot dot dot), “CARE-less CHILD-ren” for C (dash dot dash dot), and “DAN-ger-ous” for D (dash dot dot). We began thinking up words for the rest of the alphabet—GARGOYLish for G, luGUbrious for L, and so on. I can now tap out “bad lad” in Morse code. Or “glad cad.” I’m sure this will come in useful someday.
What we read today (an excerpt; “the astronomer” is a boy named Dick, who is stargazing with his sister, Dorothea):
“Got it,” he said. “Just over the top of the hill. Come and see it.”
Dorothea joined him. He pointed out the bright Aldebaran and the other stars of Taurus, and offered her the telescope.
“I can see a lot better without,” said Dorothea.
“How many of the Pleiades can you see?”
“Six,” said Dorothea.
“There are lots more than that,” said Dick. “But it’s awfully hard to see them when the telescope won’t keep still. How far away does it say the Pleiades are?”
Dorothea went back to the fire and found the place in the book.
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades (referred to by Tennyson in ‘Locksley Hall’)…”
“Oh, hang Tennyson!”
“The light from the group known as the Pleiades reaches our planet in rather more than three hundred years after it leaves them.”
“Light goes at one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second,” said the voice of the astronomer in the darkness.
But Dorothea was also doing some calculations.
“Shakespeare died 1616.”
“What?”
“Well, if the light takes more than three hundred years to get here, it may have started while Shakespeare was alive, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, perhaps. Sir Walter Raleigh may have seen it start…”
“But of course he didn’t,” said the astronomer indignantly. “the light of the stars he saw had started three hundred years before that…”
“Battle of Bannockburn, 1314. Bows and arrows.” Dorothea was off again.
But Dick was no longer listening. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. Sixty times as far as that in a minute. Sixty times sixty times as far as that in an hour. Twenty-four hours in a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Not counting leap years. And then three hundred years of it. Those little stars that seemed to speckles a not too dreadfully distant blue ceiling were farther away than he could make himself think, try as he might. Those little stars must be enormous. The whole earth must be a tiny pebble in comparison. A spinning pebble, and he, on it, the astronomer, looking at flaming gigantic worlds so far away that they seemed no more than sparkling grains of dust. He felt for a moment less than nothing, and then, suddenly, size did not seem to matter. Distant and huge the stars might be, but he, standing here with chattering teeth on the dark hill-side, could see them and name them and even foretell what next they were going to do. “The January Sky.” And there they were, Taurus, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, obedient as slaves…He felt an odd wish to shout at them in triumph, but remembered in time that this would not be scientific.
—from Winter Holiday by Arthur Ransome,
one of the Swallows & Amazons books
Where it took us:
* We read the opening of “Locksley Hall,” a long and complex poem which I enjoyed thinking my way through later in the day. With the kids, I read and discussed the first several stanzas, all of us lingering especially over:
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
* Of course after that we had to see the Pleiades. Discovered Google Sky. Oh. My. Goodness. Truly, we live in an amazing age.
* Spent a long time playing with Google Sky, looking up many constellations including all those mentioned in the Winter Holiday chapter. Rose told me the story of Orion being chased by the serpent, and we read the legend of the Pleiades, those seven sisters, daughters of Atlas. Beanie fetched D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths because both she and Rose wanted to read me several relevant passages.
* Hunted up our copy of Rey’s Find the Constellations and read about the different magnitudes of stars, among other things.
* Rose found Sirius, the Dog Star, her favorite star, says she, because she loves Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel, Dogsbody, so.
“Here about the beach I wandered,” Tennyson’s poem continues, “nourishing a youth sublime / With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time…”
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
You know what’s even better than serving on an award committee? Having someone else write about it. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I was on the judging committee for this year’s Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards alongside Chair Joanna Rudge Long and Roxanne Feldman. It was Roxanne who reported on our discussion, and even took photos of where we met (Joanna’s gorgeous Vermont farmhouse), what we ate, and more. There is also a particularly goofy shot of me that is impressive because even without knowing that there was a camera pointed in my direction, I seem to have made a silly face. I am nothing if not talented in that respect.
Speaking of Wild Things, recently I was sent a YA galley by Marcus Sedgwick called Blood Red, Snow White. But lest you believe it to be a YA retelling of the old Snow White / Rose Red fairytale, it ain’t. Instead, it’s about how Arthur Ransome (he of Swallows and Amazons) got mixed up with Trotsky’s secretary and a whole lotta Bolsheviks. What does this have to do with Wild Things? This was yet ANOTHER rejected tale from our book. Read the full story here on our website where we even take care to mention Sedgwick’s book (it originally was published overseas in 2007).
Are you familiar with the works of Atinuke? An extraordinary storyteller, her Anna Hibiscus books are among my favorite early chapter books of all time. They do, however, occasionally catch flack of saying they take place in “Africa” rather than a specific country. Recently, K.T. Horning explained on Monica Edinger’s recent post Diversity Window, Mirror, or Neither that Atinuke did this on purpose so that kids in Africa could imagine the stories as taking place in their own countries. That makes perfect sense. The ensuing discussion in Monica’s post is respectful, interesting, and with a variety of different viewpoints, all worth reading. In short, the kind of talk a blogger hopes for when he or she writes something. Well done, Monica.
