To "see like a child": all it's cracked up to be?

Back on the discussion of long book reviews, Maluose commented that "those of you who think kids are naturally great reviewers have never had to endure any of their blow-by-blow plot summaries. They make most bloggers sound positively terse." Too true. The "book reviews" kids would deliver when I ran a summer reading club a hundred years ago were painful. And those "a kid's review" posts on Amazon might be shorter but they are not very illuminating. (Does anyone know how that tag gets there? I can't imagine a child using it of his or her own volition.)

I was thinking about children's taste on Saturday when I met a friend and his little kids at a local tot lot. The place is incredibly popular because there are lots of toys--scooters, trikes, a play stove, a little house--all made out of that child-safe but phenomenally ugly molded plastic that, my friend tells me, is very expensive. The colors on this stuff manage to be both flat and garish, and the plastic picks up dirt like a magnet. Whoever thought kids had a natural instinct for beauty probably didn't get out much.

Of course, kids with style are a nightmare all their own.

I hope it isn't ALL Ben & Jerry's

Going to Vermont for a few days; hoping to see Katherine Paterson and HB reviewer Joanna Rudge Long (who lives not near but ON the Appalachian Trail) but otherwise just r&r, Roger and Richard, and Buster, who at twenty is too old for any trailwalking but we hope will enjoy the fireplace. Lots of reading planned--Richard gave me the latest Arthur Phillips for my birthday and I've got the second book about the tattooed lady (as well as the new Vanity Fair which promises a hatchet job on same by Christopher Hitchens) and the new Isabel Dalhousie "mystery" on audio. All that and a hot tub!

And look for the new Notes from the Horn Book later today, where I interview Jim Murphy about his new book about the Christmas Truce--appropriate for Veterans' Day, yes?

More Meta

In Betsy Bird's SLJ article "This Blog's for You" (and I thank her for including Read Roger in the list of "Ten Blogs You Can't Live Without"), she asks a bunch of swell questions:

Do kids' lit bloggers influence publishing decisions? Are library systems basing their purchasing decisions on our recommendations? Should they? And to what extent is a blog about literature for youth a reliable source of information?

My short answers to the first three are not a lot, ditto, and no. As to reliability: while I don't see a lot of misinformation on children's lit blogs and am in fact impressed by the care which with bloggers source their facts, we first need to ask what we mean by information--and it's the answer to this question that tells us why blogs are not, generally, as useful to librarians as Betsy's first three questions would have them be. The glory and the bane of book blogging is its variety. Glory because lots of talented people are saying lots of different things about different topics in different ways to different audiences. Bane because this same riotous abandon confounds any but the most limited usefulness. While an individual can pick up the odd book-buying tip from reading the blogs, a library can't--it needs more systematic information than the blogosphere provides. A library collection based upon blog recommendations would be a mess.

If somebody needs a master's thesis, I wish he or she would take a look at whether or not there is such a thing as a blog-friendly book. We've had lots of discussions about bloggers all pushing the same books at the same time (a phenomenon exacerbated by blog tours) but I wonder if this is less a result of publishers pushing certain titles than it is that some books more than others will appeal to people who like to blog about children's books. Many bloggers are emphatic about their desire to write about books they personally love (and again, if a youth services librarian built a collection on the basis of what he or she loved, the library would be useless to the actual kids allegedly being served). There's a whole sub-genre of children's literature that has found its best audience among the adults who serve children (The Wednesday Wars, for example); does the same thing go on among bloggers?

The Magic School Bus Visits the Bowels of the Unconscious

The Horn Book offices will be closed this afternoon as the staff is making a field trip to see Where the Wild Things Are.

See Baby Miles. See Baby Miles Read.

(I take it as a mark of long-delayed maturity that I now find holding a baby more rewarding than playing with a puppy.)

From Cape Cod to Christmas

My mini-break at the Cape was lovely for all kinds of reasons, most notably the best ice cream I've had in a long time, at Four Seas in Centerville. I tried the chocolate, peppermint, peach and butter crunch--all sublime. Closes September 13th for the winter so hurry on down. Richard and I stayed just a block away at the Long Dell Inn, which went a long way in alleviating my suspicions of the term bed and breakfast. Nice bed, great breakfast, friendly innkeepers. Kept myself occupied each morning at the beach with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo while Richard one-upped me with Midnight's Children.

Oh yes, work: the writers' conference afforded me (and the attendees, I hope) a great six-hour discussion with Mary Lee Donovan, Debbie Kovacs, Alison Morris, Nancy Werlin and Martin Sandler about contemporary children's publishing, from the nitty-gritty of getting an agent to larger questions about the future of the market. Everybody seemed to think that we were not seeing enough picture books (the form, Mary Lee suggested, most likely to survive as printed book) and perhaps too much YA. Nancy wisely advised the audience to cover its ears when we moaned about the current depressing economic situation--since you need to write the book you need to write anyway, she said, discouraging words can only harm.

And I finally got to meet Mitali Perkins. Yup, she's tall.

Now the Christmas books are calling--I have to go write a review of Jim Murphy's forthcoming Truce, about the sadly ephemeral Christmas peace on the Western Front in 1914, for our Holiday Books feature. Ho-ho-ho.

Some enchanted evening . . .

"Once you have found him, never let him go. Once you have found him . . . "

Who would YOU like to meet?

Thanks to the Horn Book, Lisa Yee finally got to meet her favorite author.

Happy New Year

With our best girls Charlene and Lori at Lorraine's in Provincetown last night. Ptown was hit by a blizzard yesterday so it was something of a haul getting to the restaurant but the streets sure looked pretty with the Christmas lights twinkling against the snow. I've discovered a problem with bringing lots of books on vacation--it's hard to settle on one. Currently I'm dividing my time between an audiobook of My Cousin Rachel, an ebook of an old Lisa Scottoline favorite (on my new iPod Touch--thank you honey) and Tana French's The Likeness. Hope you all are having an equally relaxing week.

Practicing for grandchildren

Mads seemed content and Julia politely waiting until we got to something with princesses in it.

The happy couple

Aren't they bee-yoo-ti-ful?

Yeah, I only have the one suit

The fathers-of-the-groom walking up the aisle at Ethan and Becca's wedding in Sedona last Saturday. The monsoon took down the chuppah but we all soldiered on, and there was nary a drop during the ceremony. The officiant said that there was an ancient Sedona tradition (uh-huh) that rain on a wedding day was good luck, but come on--what else are they going to say?

You Haven't Read Children of the New Forest?

Fuse 8 has a good game going.

ALA: the Long and Short of It

The long pants: with Linda Sue Park at the N/C banquet; photo by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer













The short pants: with Elizabeth Law and Doug Pocock at Disneyland; photo by lassoed stranger.

The wedding . . .

the cake . . .



our visit to my friend Jo . . .



and her dog Whipper . . .


and running across the Golden Gate Bridge . . .



and dinner with old college friends Gary and Georgie (and Gary's fiance Matt).



I WON'T be sharing the pictures Richard took of me in the motel pool, and I promise to be on-topic tomorrow.

Teaching Little Fingers to Play

Despite my memories of the very tense Sr. Irene Marie (who, probably to everyone's lasting relief, "jumped the wall," as we used to call leaving the convent in the 1960s), I'm immensely enjoying Tricia Tunstall's Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson (S&S). Noting that "there are very few occasions when a child spends an extended period alone with an unrelated adult," Tunstall's observations flicker between her own childhood piano lessons and those she now gives as an adult. There are plenty of parallels for those of us who go mano a mano with child readers, so check it out.

And, fellow survivors--what can you still play? I still have "Lightly Row," "Spinning Wheel" and "The Juggler" in my fingers.

Mind Games

Gawker has a story up about games the D.C. Metro has dreamed up to entertain commuters and/or distract them from suicidal thoughts. My longstanding subway game is less complicated: I pretend I'm an extra in a movie scene, and I have to pick out the one other person on the platform or in the car or who is the star of the film, and decide what the movie is about. It's quite diverting.

I also have a new game inspired by my allergic reaction to the title of Jerry Spinelli's latest book, Smiles to Go. It got me wondering why children's book titles seem to tolerate more sugar than do books for adults, and that got me thinking about what adult books with children's-book titles would be like. For example, Tuck Everlasting is surely a Jan Karon novel, last in a series, about the picturesque town of Tuck, itself tucked away in the timeless foothills of the Piedmont. And The Chocolate War is by John Le Carre and involves Colombian narco-terrorism. Charlotte's Web? Linda Fairstein thriller about an internet-adept serial killer in stilettos. If you're as easily amused as I, add yours in the comments.

More overheard passersby

On my way to the subway this morning, I pass a man and a woman walking, smiling, hand in hand. Man to woman: "I just think you're playing with fire, this close to the wedding."

And we don't care about the young folks

Angel-Juan Diego Florez (wow, is he good-looking) did not repeat his repeat of "Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fête!" in the Met's "HD Live" transmission yesterday afternoon. Good for him, although he perhaps needn't have implied, in an intermission interview, that he decided against the encore because the audience didn't clap hard enough.

It was fun, opera with popcorn (Richard) and ice cream (me). But talk about blue-hair city, I swear I was the youngest person in the (sold-out) theater, and I ain't no spring chicken. But my fears for the future of the art form are comforted by the fact that almost everybody up on the stage/screen was younger than I, and that my fellow audience members probably listened to Elvis and the Beatles in earlier days. At least Joan Baez. The Met does transmit these performances to a few NYC public schools for free viewing (and has other educational outreach to youth as well) so they're demonstrably concerned with the graying of their audience, but maybe some art appreciation takes time. There was an old (even then) storybook of opera plots I took out over and over again from the public library when I was nine or so, but I didn't get into opera itself until college, and I was spending a semester abroad in London, where students could see the English National Opera for a couple of pounds. My first was Salome, with Josephine Barstow as the crazy (and, ultimately, naked) lady. I was hooked.