One more award

I was a member of the ALSC Distinguished Service Award committee this year, along with Cynthia Richey (chair, and a new friend), Joan Atkinson (an old YASD--yes, that old--buddy with whom it was great fun to work again), Peggy Sullivan (who I've known since library school), and Terry Borzumato-Greenberg (from Holiday House; the youngest person in the room but who I also feel I've known forever), and with great pleasure we selected Margaret (Maggie) Bush, professor emerita at the GSLIS of Simmons College, as the winner. I knew Maggie slightly before I came to the Horn Book in 1996, but once I was in Boston I realized she was the Zena of New England, sending generations of children's librarians out into the world to continue her good work. Congrats, Maggie!

So long, Claire-bear

I'm sorry to have to tell you that our cherished Claire Gross is soon to depart these glamorous environs for the delights of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, home of many Horn Book friends including Betsy Hearne, Christine Jenkins and Deborah Stevenson. So now you will have to subscribe to BCCB. As well. It is a first-rate school for first-rate Claire, and if I've done nothing else in this job I can die content knowing I helped bring Claire into the noblest profession. But our days will be a little poorer and considerably more disorganized in her absence.

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?

Good luck with that

I'm not sure just how sustainable e-lending e-books is going to be for public libraries. Three points made in yesterday's Times article about the practice moved my eyebrows higher and higher until they were indistinguishable from my hair:

“'People still think of libraries as old dusty books on shelves, and it’s a perception we’re always trying to fight,' said Michael Colford, director of information technology at the Boston Public Library. 'If we don’t provide this material for them, they are just going to stop using the library altogether.'”

Okay, so people don't care about books in libraries, but if we can give them something they don't even need to leave their bedrooms to obtain, that's going to keep the lights on?

". . . with few exceptions, e-books in libraries cannot be read on Amazon’s Kindle, the best-selling electronic reader, or on Apple’s iPhone, which has rapidly become a popular device for reading e-books. Most library editions are compatible with the Sony Reader, computers and a handful of other mobile devices."

Who wants to read a novel on a computer?

"Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account."

Who wants to wait in line to read a novel on a computer?

I understand that libraries are doing the best they can, faced with restrictions from publishers (several of whom, big ones, will not license their ebooks to libraries) and the mercurial nature of electronic files. But I wonder if libraries are trying too hard to fit ebooks into a circulation model designed for physical media. While the reasons for borrowing a physical book from the library are several--it's free, you don't have to provide storage for something you'll only read once, browsing the shelves provides serendipitous discoveries--right now, anyway, the only reason to get an ebook from a library website is that it is free, albeit hampered by considerable restrictions. Are there enough people willing to wait in line for a digital copy of The Lost Symbol that they will have to read on their desk- or laptop or Sony Reader, when they can buy it for around ten bucks (digital edition) or fifteen (widely discounted hardcover)? This does not sound like a situation upon which to build a future.

A conspiracy theory of reviewing

Editorial Anonymous has, for writers, some good news and some good news about children's books reviews. The good news, she (?) says, is that good reviews can help sell books. And the other good news is that bad reviews won't hurt selling books.

I have a more nuanced opinion. More and more children's books are review-proof: good or bad, reviews won't make much difference to series franchises, celebrity books, brand-name authors or merchandise. All of those depend on marketing and saturation. Where reviews matter is in public libraries and schools (which themselves serve as a staging post for wider readership).

Good reviews do still matter to this institutional market, and bad reviews (or no reviews) have both a primary and secondary effect. Middling or worse reviews for an author without a built-in audience mean that not only will librarians be more likely to give the book a miss, but its publisher will be less inclined to fork out more money for advertising and promotion. As the legendary Mimi Kayden said, "one or two stars won't do it anymore."

And lets not forget the ALA awards, which consistently provide a bigger boost to sales than any other award out there, save perhaps the Bluebonnet. If The Graveyard Book had been published to indifferent reviews, it would most likely have not won the Newbery Medal. Not because the award committee members are slaves to reviews (although I have seen reviews used to kill a book's chances), but because the members and the reviewers are the same people. Sometimes literally, but more pervasively in the way they imbibe the same historical tradition and, however shifting, "standards." While the Newbery Medal only gilds the success of Gaiman's book, it was essential to the shelf-life of, say, The Higher Power of Lucky (although maybe that's not the best example of my point, as the book got respectful but not overwhelmingly enthusiastic reviews prior to the award).

Certainly, reviews mattered more when most juvenile hardcover was destined for the institutional markets. But certain books still need success there (if only there, often) to allow the author the go-ahead to publish the next one.

More weeding wisdom

From Work with Children in Public Libraries by Effie L. Power (ALA, 1943):

"Nationality and race influence mode and type of reading and therefore library selection. Jewish boys and girls are inclined to read serious books on mature subjects, and Italian children who live most naturally out-of-doors under sunny skies read reluctantly but enjoy picture books, poetry, and fairy tales. German American children make wide use of books on handicrafts which Jewish children largely ignore and from which Italian children choose few except those related to arts, such as wood carving, metal designing, and painting. The Czech children read history and biography. Probably the greatest readers of fiction are found among native American children."

I do like this:

"Girls, like boys, are seeking life, but in a different way. They need some so-called boys' books with moving plots and an adventurous hero to take them out of themselves and to keep them from becoming too introspective; for the opposite reason boys need some of the so-called girls' books, for their suggestions of self-analysis and wholesome sentiment."

The most arcane thing I've found thus far is a small LP from 1963 called "A Message from Lois Lenski: The Making of a Picture Book." Who's got a record player?

Houston, you have a problem.

I will be in Houston for the Texas Library Association meeting this week. Unless you are a demonic rabbit or a cranky illustrator, come find me at the Horn Book booth all day Wednesday and on Thursday morning.

Put It Where You Want It

Debra Lau Whelan's SLJ article on where librarians are shelving The Graveyard Book is classic shit-stirring. The article's lead asks a question ("Where does the book belong—in the children’s area or in the teen section?") and then goes on to give selective anecdotal evidence to conclude that any decision to put the book in YA consists of internal censorship. "And that's against professional ethics."

Nonsense. If you're classifying a book that you think appeals primarily to fifth-through-eighth graders (SLJ's estimation; Horn Book coded it as sixth-grade up), you are going to shelve it where you think most likely readers will most likely find it. Putting it in the YA section is not necessarily (or even probably) an act of censorship, if that's where you put all your other middle-schoolish books. (Hell, putting it in adult because that's where your Gaiman fans are is all right, too.) The fact that a book wins a Newbery Medal does not give it some kind of free pass into the children's room; remember, the Newbery goes through age fourteen, which, by the ALA definition, includes the first two years of the young adult age range. (The ALA turf war over the twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds is ever with us.) Different libraries serve different populations and make different decisions. I like Pat Scales' suggestion--multiple copies--but if you're only buying one, don't let SLJ's admonitory finger force you into putting the book where it doesn't belong.

I agree with Whelan that if you put The Graveyard Book in YA because you're trying to keep it out of younger readers' hands, then, sure, that's censorship. But the article--like her piece with Rick Margolis about the "controversy" inspired by Gaiman's fuck-filled Twittering--doesn't give us the whole picture, instead only citing evidence that supports a sensationalized angle. That ain't reporting.

Into the West

Not with the hobbits but with the intrepid lady librarians who left the library school founded in Illinois by Katharine Sharp in 1897 to pioneer library services in the wild wild west. No slouch in the lady-librarian pantheon herself, my former boss and perpetual role model Betsy Hearne narrates a brief film about their adventures.

Which would YOU rather have?

Forthcoming from the Spring 09 Horn Book Guide, we've posted our review of NBA winner What I Saw and How I Lied.

I've noticed that the recent panels of judges for the award have been composed exclusively of writers. When I judged it back in 1999 (When Zachary Beaver Came to Town was the winner), the panel was three critic-librarians (Hazel Rochman, Zena Sutherland, me) and two writers (Veronica Chambers and Mary Ann McGuigan). I wonder what difference it makes? There is rarely overlap between the ALA awards and the National Book Awards, and I wonder if it is a difference between expert readers and expert writers. Not to say that one cannot be both.

I'm reminded, though, of those winners of the Screen Actors Guild awards who gush that the SAG award is way more gratifying to receive than an Oscar because it's given by "the actors." In the words of the immortal James Marshall, "oh, sure."

State Birds and Foods of Many Lands

In the most recent Booklist, Michael Cart wonders why "curriculum-related nonfiction" hasn't "migrated more or less completely to the Internet by now." Me, too: hardcover series books about countries of the world, mammals of Asia, rocks and minerals of the fifty states, etc. still proliferate like crazy, even though the information they contain is available all over the digital place. And with list prices averaging over twenty dollars per volume, they aren't cheap. And, for the many series entries that devote themselves to "current events," the information is often out of date before the book is published.

Why do schools and libraries keep buying them? Is it because book-based assignments are more manageable, or because a book feels more authoritative than the Internet? Lack of imagination? Fear? Laziness? To me, it feels like it all comes down to control, a favored emotion found in grownups dealing with the young. Series books promote the idea that they have things covered, you don't need to look anywhere else, that the things that are essential about, say, Nebraska, are the same things essential to Delaware. India, like Denmark, is "a land of contrasts." Everything you need to know is here, in a collection of books that look and sound the same on purpose. It's all under control.

Luckily, kids don't read this way!

There's a thousand library trustees just like her.

I wouldn't elect Sarah Palin to anything, but this old censorship charge is really reaching. As far as we know, as mayor of Wasilla she asked the public library director three times about the possibility of removing "objectionable" books from the collection. Three times the director said no. (Positively biblical!) Then Palin tried to fire the director but changed her mind. Unless that former director (who is not talking) tells us otherwise, we have no reason to believe that Palin's request went beyond the hypothetical.

This is actually pretty typical of people who get power--and three-year-olds, come to think of it. They want to see how far they can push it. Mayors, school superintendents and library trustees alike are often surprised to discover that they don't get to personally decide on library purchases or discards. It's the librarian's job to explain to them why this is a bad idea and arguably illegal.

I'm reminded of the time when Chicago aldermen removed--at gunpoint--a satiric portrait of the late Harold Washington from an exhibition at the School of the Art Institute. THAT was censorship. But just asking? Nope.

Listen to the Children When They Are Holding Sharp Sticks!

The listservs are ablaze this morning with talk about a children's knitting club being banned from the library. I'm guessing the ban will be lifted by the end of the day; meanwhile, I sure wish I could knit--it would be great to make myself useful while watching the synchronized diving, and, since we're currently reviewing Christmas and other winter holiday books, I'm lusting for a nice black cashmere scarf. (Um, is cashmere knit?)

"Moore being Moore"

I wish I had thought of this earlier, but we published a far more perceptive account of ACM and her little ways than did that upstart New Yorker. Read Barbara Bader's take here.

Yikes

Liz B. pointed me toward this PW essay on the thin line between reader's advisory work and putting limitations on library access for kids. It gives me the willies.

Is it right for me to discourage a kid’s reading choice? No. But is it right for me to give a kid a book that I think is probably not appropriate? At the risk of sounding censorship alarms, or being seen as an “uncool” librarian, my answer is again, No. I just don’t feel comfortable giving a sixth-grader one of these books—all popular titles that, in my library, are shelved “over there” in the teen area, through the door and around the corner from the children’s room.

I don't see how these positions (not discouraging a reading choice and not giving a kid an inappropriate book) are reconcilable. I recognize that the author recognizes that the question is a difficult one, and I agree that some books are too mature for some kids. But I think she errs on the side of caution where I would rather give the kid what she asks for (an eleven-year-old wanting Twilight is an example she cites), hold my breath, and hope for the best. What we don't know from the essay is how easily kids are allowed to dodge the librarian's best intentions entirely and simply go to the YA or adult books by themselves. That would have been my own strategy as a sixth-grader, particularly if I had had a previous encounter with a librarian that made me feel snooped upon or deflected. While I hate librarians who don't move out from behind the desk, there's a little too much leading patrons by the hand going on here.

What the essay does not take up--and what so few arguments for restricting access do--is what she thinks is going to happen if a child reads a book he or she "is not ready for." Really, what? Sexual thoughts, anxiety, nightmares? Maybe, but by no means necessarily--and, while I hate to quote Dick Cheney, so what? Kids have sexual thoughts, anxieties and nightmares anyway. Normal, healthy kids. And as Liz points out, what's more likely is that a kid simply will breeze past what she doesn't understand: "Deenie had masturbation? As a kid, I had no idea."

Listen to Grandma

In reading Jill Lepore's New Yorker account of the battle between E. B. White and Anne Carroll Moore, I couldn't help finding my sympathies more with the old lady. Lepore seems to favor E. B. and Katharine White because they're more sophisticated, the cool kids. Moore's the earnest, humorless battle-axe, given to such pronouncements as "reading is an end in itself; its object is lifelong pleasure and profit," "reading should be more commonly treated as a sport of continuous interest in all schools," and "both literature and children stoutly resist grade limitation." What a bore.

Of course she had her limitations and of course she went down fighting, but children's literature and librarianship owe her plenty.

In lieu of a gift

I'm guessing they're too busy to read this but maybe you're not.

Bye, Bear

Betsy Bird says goodbye to the bear who has been her daily companion for lo these many years. I was glad to be able to pay my respects myself last week. Betsy was out sick when Richard and I were there, but we did get to have a nice chat with John Peters, taking a break from packing up all the stuff that is the Donnell Central Children's Room. He even showed us his collection of "wishing candles," an NYPL storytelling staple introduced (if I have this right) by Mary Gould Davis in the 1920s. I was taught in library school by Ellin Greene that one would give, say, a birthday child the privilege of snuffing the candle at the close of story hour, but John tells me that in these more egalitarian times, everybody gets to make a wish and blow the candle out.

Hard books and awards

Australian Sonya Harnett has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, an honor that speaks to the discussion we're having about Nina Lindsay's comments about "shelf-sitters." Completely deserving of the many awards her writing has won, Hartnett is, however, no crowd-pleaser. While as a culture we are used to the fact that adult fiction with a small audience routinely beats out bestsellers at awards time, we don't seem to like it so much when something similarly "literary" for children competes for shelf space, attention and awards alongside books that have wider appeal. "No kid is going to read this" is something we have all said. That can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, if the person who says it therefore decides not to review it or buy it for a library.

This is a situation as old as libraries but has become more prominent as a) libraries have become less elitist and more responsive to popular taste and b) book budgets have shrunk, making it more attractive to purchase something that will circulate twenty times rather than twice. It's hard to imagine it now, but there was a time when juvenile hardcover fiction was only found in libraries. Expectations were smaller, so were print runs, and thus smaller books had a chance. Is this still true? Could Sonya Hartnett thrive in America?

More on the Love That Won't Shut Up

I'm very interested in a comment Nina Lindsay made on the "oh, grow up" thread. Nina said, in part:

To take this in another direction...I'm someone who reads both adult and children's literature recreationally, but I do find often that my recreational response to children's literature gets in the way of my professional response. On a daily basis I have to actively separate my appreciation of a children's book from my critical brain. At the same time I find that my public library colleagues who don't read children's literature recreationally also tend not to choose to review it professionally...just because they don't really like to read it. This then puts a whole new layer on how I read reviews of children's literature; if I suspect that most reviewers are actually "fans," I have to suspect their evaluation of the audience for the book, and look actively for evidence in the review that they considered a REAL child audience. The evidence isn't always there. I'm probably guilty of neglecting it myself.

Nina is bringing up another part of the question I hadn't thought of: what's the difference between an adult reading a children's book recreationally and reading it professionally, and, crucially, what difference does that difference make? It's tricky, because children's librarians (and reviewers) are frequently reading recreationally and professionally at the same time--I'm reading Catherine Murdock's Princess Ben right now, for example, because I'm editing our review of it, but I'm also enjoying it enormously. But my enjoyment isn't really what Horn Book subscribers are invested in: they want to know if we think it is any good (we do) and if we think the young people they serve will like it. While I don't suspect that Princess Ben is going to be one of them, books beloved by librarians, reviewers and prize committees but disdained by kids are enough of a phenomenon to have earned their own name: shelf-sitters. Is this a danger of Loving Too Much? That while the reviewers are lovers of children's books, they are still reading as adults, and their enthusiasms are grown-up ones. Nina, is this at all what you were getting at?

I'd also like someday to see an exploration of the difference between "fans" of children's literature and "readers" of children's literature but I'll leave that for someone else's purgatory.

Yet another G-word

I received an email yesterday from a librarian who hated our reviews because she thought they had too much plot summary, but she was really pissed that we "almost always give away the ending."

Her first point is debatable--how much is too much?--but her second is demonstrably false while containing a truth: sometimes, we do give away the ending. As I explained in my response to her, Horn Book reviews are not written for the same people for whom the books we review are intended. The reviews are for grownups; the books are for kids. Sometimes the grownup wants to know if the dog dies.

There's a bigger, probably incendiary, question raised by this particular exchange. How do we feel about grownups who read children's books as if they weren't? That is, people who peruse the Horn Book like another person reads the Times Book Review, looking for a new book to read? As annoying as adults who dismiss children's books as unworthy of attention can be, I also feel my jaw clench when a fellow adult tells me that he or she prefers children's books to adult books because they have better writing or values or stories. This is just sentimental ignorance.

I'm reminded of the ruckus in SLJ some years back when a library school professor wrote that l.s. students like to take children's literature classes because the reading is so easy, "like eating popcorn." You can imagine the heated response, but I think she had a point. While noting the exceptions of James Patterson on the one hand and William Mayne on the other, children's books tend to be easier and thus potentially "fun" for adults in a way they tend not to be for children, an incongruence librarians need to remember, not dissolve. Whatever whoever chooses to read is their business, of course, but adults whose taste in recreational reading ends with the YA novel need to grow up.

Merry Christmas Darlings

Hey, I finally made it.

I hope everyone gets some nice uninterrupted recreational reading time over the holidays. I've started my own off with The Exception by Christian Jungersen (Talese/Doubleday), a hugely engrossing mystery/thriller/black comedy (I think) about the employees of a Danish genocide documentation center. The women who work there have been receiving threatening emails and they're all a little bit crazy already, especially Anne-Lise, the center's librarian who thinks the others are Out to Get Her. And they May Be.

To follow up I have some Sarah Waters, Denise Mina, James Lee Burke . . . it's going to be good times in P-town this week.

You can't run a library without Tomie dePaola

as I told the Boston Globe.

Hitting Them over the Head

Child_Lit has been unusually lively the last couple of weeks, with discussions of The Dark is Rising, Love You Forever (again), gypsies, and gay-seeming children all perking along nicely, but what has intrigued me most is a thread inspired by a post from GraceAnne DeCandido, who has given me permission to reproduce it here:

Dear colleagues,
it is one of those teaching days that make one want to scream and
throw things (the Yankees loss last night did not help, but I
digress).

Several of my students (graduate students all) think that if they
buy a book or give a booktalk or promote a book to a teacher or a
class it means somehow that they condone and approve everything
that takes place in a book. They cannot, for example, buy or
promote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist because that means
they approve of the language (which is salty and true to life). One
student objected to the grammar and usage in Walter Dean
Myers' books because she felt it didn't model good and
appropriate speech.

This is of course all connected to the teaching book/didacticism
thread we have had. I am teaching a literature course to adult
people studying for the MLIS degree. I need to find ways of
addressing this issue, although I am puzzled so much by their
attitudes that I scarce know where to begin.

Well my dear GA, I think three things are going on here. First, either these students aren't readers or they've forgotten that kids read the same way grownups do: just as reading a Donna Leon mystery does not overwhelm me with the urge to push someone into the Grand Canal, reading Nick and Norah . . . isn't going to introduce the word fuck into a spoken vocabulary from which it was previously absent. So, I think we're talking about library school students who don't love reading, which makes me want to jump into the Grand Canal.

But here's the second thing, which is worse: humans over time have demonstrated an inordinate fondness for the ability to push around those of their kind who are smaller and weaker. And some people, especially people who don't like to read, use books as weapons in service to this objective. This goes for books that are either suppressed or required when the point of either action is to control what another person thinks or does.

The third thing, though, can give us all hope; namely, that these grad students are laughably deluded if they think any child really cares what the librarian thinks.

But I wonder if these students really are the grammatically correct Polly Puremouths they're presenting themselves as. Are they truly worried about modeling bad behavior, or are they just afraid to get in trouble with other adults? That fondness for picking on the vulnerable doesn't look so good when the vulnerable is you.

Throw the book at her?

Librarian Kristin Peto of Maine sent me the story about the woman, JoAnn Karkos, who checked out two copies of It's Perfectly Normal (a 1995 Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor awardee, so you know where we stand) from Maine libraries and is declining to return them, sending checks for $20.95 (I'm guessing the price on the jacket) to the libraries instead.

This instance of civil disobedience doesn't seem to have been all that well thought out. Both libraries involved have already ordered replacement copies (one bought two, citing the demand engendered by the theft), so access to the book has been at most temporarily impeded. Neither library will accept her check (which would make them parties to the crime), so some other books will now go unbought at the same time It's Perfectly Normal sells three more copies.

Here's the most eccentric detail: the woman who says It's Perfectly Normal is "a predator's dream" now has two copies. Mind your children . . . .

A typical office conversation

. . . is the subject of our latest podcast. Yes. Kitty and I while away the precious minutes between editing philosophizing about the big picture. We never talk about TV, for example, or our coworkers' sartorial choices. So have a listen to what passes for gossip in the Horn Book offices.

Kitty has also uploaded a brief clip from an interview with our beloved Mr. Todd that was recorded some years ago. His office conversations were always lively!

Why Do I Review Books?

So someone asked amidst the great blog wars of Tuesday. It's a fair question but has a long answer.

Let's first get out of the way me v. The Horn Book, because, obviously, I review books because it's part of my job, and my job is to "blow the horn for fine books for boys and girls," as the first Horn Book editorial had it. The Horn Book, in its two print publications and their subsequent replication on such databases as the hornbookguideonline.com, reviews books because that is a great way to blow that horn. We tell people what new books are out there looking for readers. I often tell students that a review is more than a gussied-up opinion and less than literary criticism: it's service journalism, giving people news about something they can use.

So the Horn Book reviews books because it's part of our mission. I started reviewing because Zena Sutherland told me I was good at it. She arrived at that opinion the same way Sally Fenwick (Zena's teacher at the University of Chicago's Graduate Library School, just as Zena was mine) discovered Zena herself was good at it: from the "book cards" each of us had to write for our children's literature class. I enjoyed the challenge of getting the essence of a book onto one side of a 3 by 5 card.

I had always liked writing about books--but then, I was the kind of kid who played "library" by drawing date-due slips inside my parents' books. Book reports were always a complete piece of cake for me--I still remember this long one I wrote about Love Story and the impressive effect it was having on the girls in my ninth grade class. I was never much of a creative writer, but I could expend reams on what any given book made me think about.

School Library Journal was the first place to publish my reviews--I've been thinking again about my review there of Annie on My Mind (my first "starred" review), because I'm writing "A Second Look" column for its, God help me, 25th anniversary. After I had been reviewing for a year or so, SLJ editor Lillian Gerhardt asked me to become their YA columnist, I got on the Best Books committee, the New York Times came calling--I got a lot of attention. So there I was, getting attention (and a little extra income) for doing something I liked and felt I was good at. So why I reviewed books then seems pretty clear.

That would change once I began reviewing books for a living, which happened when Betsy Hearne hired me as an associate editor at the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. Zena taught me a lot about style and brevity in reviewing, but Betsy made me work harder, digging deeper into the books I was writing about. She also made me more efficient and more respectful of deadlines: I had to write ten reviews a week, along with the work of preparing the Bulletin for publication. As I began managing the thousands of books the Bulletin received (as opposed to the few brought to my attention by the SLJ editors), I started having a more global interest in, and perspective on, the whole biz. It certainly tempered my reviews, because I was working from a larger context.

I don't review nearly so much now--maybe half a dozen books, tops, in an issue of the Magazine, a couple of dozen more for each Guide. (I also edit, in concert with my HB fellows, every review we publish.) As many of the blog reviewers have been saying for the last couple of days, I review, mostly, books about which I have something to say. For the Magazine, this will include books I like or authors or characters I keep up on, and also topics I know, or books that deserve a public paddling (yes, Jamie Lee, I'm looking at you) I can't talk someone else into administering. For the Guide, I'm often doing cleanup on books whose reviews were not received or which were unusable. That's another thing about professional reviewing: you spend a lot of time reviewing books in which you have no personal interest one way or another.

While reviewing is no longer the core responsibility of my job I still do it. I do it because sometimes, among our review staff, I'm the best person to do a particular book, and I do it because, once I spend the requisite amount of time in the approach-avoidance technique I have about all required writing, I like it. I like the way book reviewing uses my mind. I like the way it changes my mind--even when I've read a book and am pretty sure of what I'm going to say, the actual writing of the review often reveals something about the book I hadn't seen before. Have you ever been surprised by what you wrote? It's a great feeling. And the word-puzzle aspect of reviewing is fun: you think, okay, I want to get this in, and this, and this and I hope I can use that quote . . . and you have fewer than two hundred words to do it.

Plus, I'm a complete sucker for instant gratification. (Thus this blog, I suppose.) I like having a task that I can start and finish within half an hour. (This doesn't include reading the book, of course, but speedy readers and writers definitely have an edge in this profession.) And seeing your work in print does not get old.

The recent discussion of blog v. print reviews made me see a couple of distinct differences between the two. First, I'm reviewing on behalf of an institution, not just to express my own opinions. As our assistant editor Claire Gross pointed out in a comment on the discussion, Horn Book (and BCCB, Booklist, SLJ, etc.) reviews get edited by several people in several stages. Yes, the reviewer whose name or initials appear at the end of the review is definitely the author of that review, but in the eyes of the world, it's the Horn Book's review, and we (the corporate we) stand behind it. Second, I'm reviewing with a particular audience in mind. The core of our readers are public and school librarians working with children, so we give them the information we know they need. When you see the phrase "an index is appended" in a review, it's not because the reviewer had a burning need to make that point; it's that we know that indexes matter in library collection development. And that's another thing I like about reviewing books. It makes me feel useful.

Where the world was as blue as an orange

If not the world, then the University of Illinois, where even the damned goldfish gracing the tank in the Illini Union come in the school colors. (As does this blog, I suddenly notice. It has to be the ugliest color combo I've ever seen, and now I know I'm going to see it everywhere.)

But last Friday the colors were accented with green, as the students celebrated Unofficial Saint Patrick's Day, wearing green hats and t-shirts and Mardi-Gras beads and getting drunk beginning at 7:30 AM when the bars opened. And this wasn't like skipping school and getting drunk; the whole idea was to get drunk and stay drunk during the whole day of classes. I saw one young woman getting arrested; a faculty member at the library school stumbled onto a passed-out student in the parking garage. And my speech entailed a bouncer at the door. My goodness--why couldn't they just get quietly stoned off their asses the way we did? (One of my college lit. professors, the late lamented Ellin Ringler, told us that was the best state in which to read The Waste Land.)

The speech went well, I thought, and you'll be able to decide for yourselves when it's published in the May issue of the Horn Book. I spoke (er, yammered) about the last forty years of YA literature and librarianship, starting with my own teen reading and ending with the Printz Award. I lunched with the youth services doctoral students and faculty from associated universities, spoke to a YA class, and got to spend a lot of time with my most esteemed friends and colleagues Betsy Hearne, Christine Jenkins, Deborah Stevenson and Boyd Rayward. (The first three you probably know from their publications in the Horn Book and elsewhere, the last is the world's leading expert on this guy.)

Blue and orange and green and vomit not withstanding, Illinois has one first-class library school. You should all go--and can, thanks to their LEEP program. I don't think there is any other school that has such an amazing confluence of faculty and resources, and such an array of interests and talents among its students.

Bagging our principles

Fuse 8 led me to Susan Patron's defense of The Higher Power of Lucky's Scrotum at PW online, and while it is admirably articulate and refreshingly undefensive, I am bothered by one line: "If I were a parent of a middle-grade child, I would want to make decisions about my child's reading myself."

So would I, because the world would run far more pleasantly if everyone just did things my way. I do dislike it when librarians and ALA place the censorship debate into the hands of parents like it's a gift: "we encourage you to come to the library with your child and select books that both of you blah blah blah." We don't really mean it--at least I hope we don't. Libraries should be a place where children can run happily afoul of their parents fears, aspirations, protection and authority. What better place to learn to think for yourself? I was pleased as punch when the Conservative Christian Resource Center years ago lifted from one of my editorials for their "Quote of the Week," labelling it a really scary viewpoint: "Just because parents have the legal right to control their children’s reading does not mean that we should encourage them to do so."