Chicken Spaghetti

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, everyone! And happy 2010, too.

I hope your holidays are filled with books and reading. One present in Junior's stocking tomorrow morning is going to be Brian Floca's Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11. If Santa gets her his act together and stops eating Zapp's barbecue potato chips and catching up on hometown news with his mom, Junior may also find Theodore Gray's book The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe under the tree. It's for grown-ups, but I think there's enough there for children interested in science. With a little help, Junior picked out Julia Child's My Life in France for his grandma.

Here, via the Guardian and my new pals at EA300 Children's literature: a tutor's blog, is a slide show from Walker Books of new illustrations of some children's classics.

Poetry Friday: Altered Talk #1

After reading about Austin Kleon's "newspaper blackout" poetry, due out in a Harper Perennial book next spring, I was inspired to create this poem by using a New Yorker Talk of the Town article (Lila Byock's "Speak, Bellevue," from the 12.07.09 issue). Of course, that's cheating a little bit since the magazine's language is so literary anyway; newspapers would provide much more of a challenge. Still, I enjoyed finding the right words—as well as the surprise of what popped up. The height and width of the column of print reminded me of tall buildings, like apartment houses, in the city. I imagined the one here could be the home of a frustrated writer. The blue sky at the top comes from the construction paper that I used as a background for the scan.

The poem is an aside from my usual talk of children's books, but you'll likely find more poetry for kids in the roundup tomorrow. I'll add a link for the host blog then. Update: author Susan Taylor Brown is collecting links for all the Poetry Friday posts at her blog.

Link (and an explanation of Poetry Friday)

"Thank Goodness It's (Poetry) Friday," at the Poetry Foundation

New York Times' Best Illustrated, Carnegie Long List, and More

In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, look for the Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2009. If you can't wait until then, check them out online now!

News from the UK: the Kate Greenaway Medal and Carnegie Medal long lists. The Greenaway is the equivalent of the US's Caldecott and the Carnegie the same of the Newbery.

A new lineup of the year's best science books for children was announced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books collected a large number of titles for its 2009 holiday gift guide.

All of these and more have been added to Chicken Spaghetti's "Best Children's Books 2009: The Big List of Lists," which is growing every day.

More present-spotting at Wired magazine's GeekDad blog, where John Baichtal presents "Holiday Gift Guide #1: Books." On his list is The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive. (I've gotta get it.) You'll find some children's books here, too.

Dr. Seuss, according to Paul Chowder

Paul Chowder, a poet and the hero of Nicholson Baker's new novel, The Anthologist, is having a heck of a time writing the introduction to an anthology of poems which he put together. In fact, he's not writing it. He's talking. About iambic pentameter, love, badminton, dogs, and more. "God, I wish I was a canoe," he says at one point.

I was tickled by a mention of  children's literature, which comes early in the story. Paul recalls some of his early influences, like Edward Lear, Ludwig Bemelmans, A.A. Milne, "[a]nd Dr. Seuss, of course, the great Ted Geisel. Who probably was, if I really want to be truthful and honest—and I do, of course—the poet most important to me until I was about twelve."

I highly recommend this funny, moving book, which is a must-read for poetry fans especially. 

For a considerably more in-depth review, see Janet Maslin's take on The Anthologist, in the New York Times.

People Are Talking About...

The end of the PBS show "Reading Rainbow." (via NPR) I hate hate hate this news. Hate it. But I like this post by The Millions' mom, a.k.a. Dr. Christine Morano Magee, of Educating for the Unknown.

Motoko Rich's New York Times article on reading workshops, in which students choose their own books. See also the Educating Alice blog for a 4th grade teacher's approach to teaching reading (and a response to the Times article).

Oprah's next Book Club pick, to be announced September 18th. (My guess? Like GalleyCat, I think it's Uwen Akpam's Say You're One of Them.)

Susan Straight's essay at the New York Times Book Review about Accelerated Reader, a school-based reading-incentive program

Lorrie Moore's new novel, A Gate at the Stairs (due from Knopf on September 1st). Excerpted in The New Yorker's 7.06.09 issue.

Entertainment Weekly's grade of "C" to Suzanne Collins' young adult novel Catching Fire, a sequel to The Hunger Games

The Boston Globe's look at high-pressure kindergarten and test prep (via Jen Robinson on Twitter)

"Where's Ramona Quimby, Black and Pretty?," a post at Publishers Weekly's ShelfTalker blog

Nearly fifty years after its initial publication, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking makes the bestseller list. (via The Village Voice's Fork in the Road blog)

The Kidlitosphere Conference for bloggers, October 17th

Book Blogger Appreciation Week, September 14th-18th. Voting for favorites takes place September 7th-12th.

For Poetry & Nature Admirers: Mary Oliver's "Evidence"

Evidence: Poems by Mary Oliver
Beacon Press, 2009
Age range: Adults

If you're a poetry fan and a nature lover, I've got a new book for you: Mary Oliver's Evidence. It's full of many wonderful lines, like these from the title work: "I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in/singing, especially when singing is not necessarily/prescribed."

The poem that affected me the most, though, was "At the Pond," which ran originally at Orion Magazine and can be read online here. Oliver writes, "Nature has many mysteries,/some of them severe." A beautiful poem about "a huddle of just-hatched geese," it surely evokes sighs at readings.

Evidence is written for grown-ups, and aging is one of its themes. ("How did it come to be/that I am no longer young?") But it's very accessible work, and poetry-inclined teenagers ought to like it, too.

On July 5th, the New York Times' travel section ran this piece: "The Land and Words of Mary Oliver, the Bard of Provincetown," which includes a slide show and recordings of Oliver reading "At Blackwater Pond" and "The Sun." Mary Duenwald, who wrote the article, advises, 

Follow Ms. Oliver’s lead to the edges of Blackwater Pond and you can have something approaching a primal experience of Cape Cod. You won’t be alone, especially in summer, when crowds gather to see the locally beloved water lilies that blanket the ponds. But that’s why it pays to go at dawn, as the poet prefers to do.

The Holds Rush In

This always happens to me. Every book I've put on hold at the library arrives at once, just when I have a teetering stack back home to start with. I'll have to speed-read to work in all of these titles in the next three weeks, after I finish Laura Lippman's new mystery, Life Sentences. Not that I'm complaining.

The new stack:

Evidence: Poems by Mary Oliver

The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana, by Rick Bass

Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, by Kitty Burns Florey

Time and Tide in Acadia: Seasons on Mount Desert Island, by Christopher Camuto

A Mathematical Nature Walk, by John A. Adam

Summer World: A Season of Bounty, by Bernd Heinrich

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, by Maria Tatar

Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, by Lisa M. Hamilton

Book cover image borrowed from W.W. Norton

Up in the Air (with a book)

I've been on the move the last couple of weeks ever since school let out. First stop was sunny Florida with the boy (a rising fifth grader!) and his dad, and now I'm seeped in the humidity of a Mississippi June, awaiting a friend's 80th birthday party tomorrow. Everywhere I've been I've seen people reading, and am thinking of recording all the books that travellers have their noses in. Maybe on the way home to New England.

The June 28th New York Times Book Review contains a review of Christopher R. Beha's The Whole Shelf: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else, which I just finished on the earlier part of my vacation. Beha spent a year reading the Harvard Classics, and, writes critic Alexander Nazaryan," he makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion no less valuable than the iPod." Isn't that a great way of putting it? The Whole Shelf is one of the best My Year of [Insert Project Here] books that I've read, and has me eying my parents' copy of Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which Beha mentions as particularly accessible.

I photographed a couple of great-looking children's books on display at the Sanibel Public Library, and hope to get those posted soon. By the way, that's a really nice library if you're ever down in southwest Florida, with aquariums, a shell collection, and a light-filled, friendly atmosphere.

Urban Farmer

I'm so glad that I actually read the paper on Friday; otherwise, I would have missed Dwight Garner's terrific review of a terrific new book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter. Garner, one of the New York Times' book critics, writes,

I had a feeling I might like this memoir when I came upon on its first sentence, a gentle twist on the opening of Isak Dinesen’s “Out of Africa.” Here is Novella Carpenter: “I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto.”

But I didn’t truly fall in love with “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer” until I hit Page 38. That’s when the bees that Ms. Carpenter has purchased from a mail order company arrive at her post office in Oakland, Calif. A panicked postal employee calls, begging her to pick them up because they’re attracting other bees and “freaking everyone out.”

I knew I had to have this one, and sure enough, I bought it yesterday afternoon and barely stopped reading until I finished. Very good, and funny.  The author, Carpenter, also blogs at GhostTown Farm.

The Week in Books, or Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading!

Egypt is in, amoebas are out. Junior's library haul this week included David Macaulay's Pyramid, from 1975. He's also poring over Make It Work! Ancient Egypt, by Andrew Haslam and Alexandra Parsons. Every once and a while he drops a few random facts about biomes, which they're studying at school. "Ah, savannas," he said with a sigh the other night, "the grassy plains." 

I've been doing some reading about reading, and delved into Maureen Corrigan's Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading! and Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree. Corrigan, the book reviewer for NPR's "Fresh Air," combines literary scholarship (very readable, don't worry) and autobiography in a series of essays. Inveterate readers will relate to how much Corrigan, a Sunnyside, Queens, girl with a Ph.D in English, filters her experiences through books.

I made a long list of recommendations from Leave Me Alone, and have already finished  Anna Quindlen's novel Black and Blue, which I avoided when it first came out. I don't remember why. It's a suspenseful tale of a Brooklyn police officer's wife fleeing domestic abuse and starting over. Quindlen, who once wrote the "About New York" column in the New York Times, nails the milieu—the Brooklynese, the cops' wives' talk, the love and fear in the family affected by domestic violence, and especially the repercussions.

The Polysyllabic Spree, Hornby's short, funny book about reading, gave me even more titles I wanted to track down, like  Charlotte Moore's George and Sam, written by a mother of two sons with autism. Melissa Wiley mentioned this one, too, on her blog Here in the Bonny Glen, where I first heard of Hornby's book.

Finally, Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life, by Jenna Woginrich, has me wanting to learn the fiddle. Hey, why not! Only in her mid-twenties, Woginrich wrote the book to help people get started on living a more self-sufficient life. Chapters cover raising chickens, beekeeping, canning, and more. The author blogs at Cold Antler Farm.