Chicken Spaghetti

Blogs to Visit, May 8th

Household repairs around here are so loud that the cat has squeezed his big self behind the bread box in an attempt to hide. I hate to tell him how visible he is. At any rate, here are some blogs to check out while I, too, am going to hide from the noise by running around town this morning.

Here in Franklin. That's Franklin, Tennessee, y'all. Observations on life, in the form of short essays like "Gas Is the New Lunch." The blog is written by my cousin-in-law, a fellow cut-up at family reunions. One day you'll have to ask us about the bus to the cemetery. (It wasn't a funeral.)

Read. Imagine. Talk. "Ideas about raising thoughtful readers, children's literature, education, and whatever else comes to mind..." by a Bank-Street-educated teacher and mom.

What Do We Do All Day? This blog about the sweet adventures of a Brooklyn mother and her preschool-aged son reminds me of days with Junior when he was a little guy. The blogger reviews "urban picture books," too, like Adèle and Simon and At Night.

Elsie and Joe Deluxe. A thoughtful blog "in which [they] tell you about [their] many works in progress: homeschooling, teaching, writing, recorder playing, knitting, spinning, home renovation, gardening, anything else that comes up."

Let's Talk Blogging at NCTE

If you are headed to New York this week to the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) annual convention, I hope you'll mark your date book for Saturday, Nov. 17th at 1:15 p.m. That's the time and date for a panel on blogging, with Mary Lee Hahn from A Year of Reading, Elizabeth Burns of A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy, Jen Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page, and yours truly. The details:

Session: I.12 - 1:15 pm to 2:30 pm 11/17/2007

Format: Panel

Room: Javits Convention Center

Topic: Multi-modal Literacy

Level(s): Elementary (K-5)

Title: WELCOME TO THE KIDLITOSPHERE: READING, REVIEWING, AND BLOGGING ABOUT CHILDREN'S LITERATURE Children's literature blogs are a fabulous digital resource for all who are interested in children's books. In this session, four bloggers will share how blogs and blogging enhance their work with children and their knowledge of children's literature. There will be time for questions, and handouts with web links and booklists will be provided.

Won't you join us?

Photograph by Boschman. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.

Some Thoughts About Book Reviewing

Of interest to bloggers looking to improve their reviews is Anne Boles Levy's post on book-review forms, which is adapted from a talk that she gave to children's literature bloggers. (Her blog is Book Buds.) Coming from a background in journalism, Levy offers food for thought, including the following:

I spent only a brief time asking bloggers to consider not just readers who routinely visit their blogs, since writing for this immediate circle eventually becomes limiting and self-referential.

You unwittingly erect your own gates, admitting only those who "get" you and your stylistic quirks. To reach a broader audience, you have to imagine who they should be.

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, by Gail Pool, fits right in with what Anne Levy is saying. According to the jacket flap, "Faint Praise takes a hard and long-overdue look at the institution of book reviewing. Gail Pool, herself an accomplished reviewer and review editor, analyzes the inner workings of the troubled trade to show how it works—and why it so often fails to work well."

Faint Praise puts book reviews in context better than anything else I've read. Although it concerns reviews of books for adults, children's literature bloggers can take away plenty of useful information.  Among the topics Pool covers are writing, editing, the effect of publishers' advertising (or lack of it), the effect of book reviews on sales, the reader-reviews at Amazon, editors' choice of books for review, sloppy language, and more.

Negative reviews come up in Faint Praise. Pool sees a real need for honest criticism, not just empty praise. In finding and writing about only what's good in a book or just describing its contents, a reviewer ends up "giving the impression that books are far better" than the critic actually thinks they are.

There are no shoulds or shouldn'ts in the blogosphere, of course. We can choose to write a full-fledged review or not. If I am reading Anne Levy's intent correctly, she is urging us bloggers to step it up a notch, and if we follow some of the ethical constructs set forth in Faint Praise, we ought to excuse ourselves from reviewing the books of our friends. Following copyright laws is a given.

As more and more arts criticism moves to the Web, we should keep thinking and talking about how book reviewing in general and blog reviewing in particular contribute to the cultural conversation.

Edited to add: Read Roger, the blog of The Horn Book editor-in-chief, briefly addresses which books get reviewed in that venerable publication;  many libraries use the magazine in deciding which children's books to buy.

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America
by Gail Pool
University of Missouri Press, 2007
ISBN-13: 9780826217271 

Blogging the Blog Fest

Children's literature bloggers, authors, and others convened in Chicago over the weekend for the first annual kidlitosphere conference. "Kidlitosphere" is the term coined by Melissa Wiley (of the blog Here in the Bonny Glen) for the children's literature corner of cyberspace. A Technorati search for posts about the gathering yields lots of information, so start there. Those of us who couldn't attend missed a good time, but plans are already in the works for a meeting in Portland, Oregon, next year.

Extra! Extra! Hot Off the, Er, Blog

Several major newspapers recently reduced their book-review sections, and book critics are upset. Okay, so are a lot of other people, too, like the writers whose books the book critics criticize.

There has been anti-blog sentiment expressed by, among others, people who don't read blogs. 

(How do the advertisers figure in this? Where are advertisers choosing to spend their money? They have always chased after the demographic.)

Monica Edinger, who blogs at Educating Alice, says that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift. I agree.

I like book-review sections. I would never argue for their demise. But some could use some livening up.

Motoko Rich sums up the issues at hand in today's New York Times, and GalleyCat's coverage is thorough, too. (Check the site's May 2 entries, and look for A. Fortis's awesome cartoon.)

Children's Literature Blogs at The Horn Book

Elizabeth Bird, the NYC librarian behind the Fuse # 8 blog, has written a swell article, "Blogging the Kidlitosphere," for the May/June issue of The Horn Book. She talks about how she started blogging, describes why she likes comments, and explains some of the conflict her blogging caused when she served as a Newbery judge recently. Betsy asks some tough questions, too, continuing a conversation that's been going on at the lit blogs this year:

... insofar as a blog doesn’t make money, it isn’t  beholden to anyone. The minute cash comes into play, all that will  change. Some book bloggers already place advertising banners on their sites. How will readers take this into account when weighing a blog’s credibility?

Go, read!

Eeny Meeny Miny __?

Guess who has a blog! Hint: some of this person's books are #9 on the New York Times list of bestselling children's series books.

Welcome!

News via A Fuse #8 Production

Going Digital: Video Kids Lit

In addition to podcasts (example, Just One More Book!), the kidlitosphere now includes at least one vlog. I first learned of Bookwink, a children's literature video blog, through a two-part interview on School Library Journal's blog. Founded by former librarian Sonja Cole, Bookwink features many book suggestions for middle-grade readers and older. Welcome, Sonja!

Latter Day Pooters, Unite!

For a snide summary of a literary dust-up in Great Britian, I send you to Rachel Cooke's essay "Deliver us from these latter-day Pooters," in the Guardian. The snark factor makes it highly entertaining, with Cooke heaving insults at book blogs right and left. Rachel Cooke, a non-Pooter* herself, writes, "...so much of the stuff you read in the so-called blogosphere is so awful: untrustworthy, banal and, worst of all, badly written."

* In need of a Pooter tutorial, I turned to Wikipedia and its entry for the comic novel Diary of a Nobody, by George Grossmith.

With thanks to Mental Multivitamin for the link to the Guardian piece.

Speak of the Blog

Pooja Makhijani, guest columnist extraordinaire, writes about children's literature blogs at Paper Tigers, so head over there and read up. Merci beau coups for the shout-out, Pooja.

Pooja's terrific essays for Chicken Spaghetti can be found at the following links:

South Asian Stories to Tell
India Ink
Happy Diwali