Lions are . . .

The New York Times Best Illustrated Books list is out, along with my review of The Lion & the Mouse. What a great book--I wish they had given me twice the space. When I sat down with it and my two young neighbors, the two year old boy announced, looking uncertainly at the cover, "lions are scary." His more intrepid four-year-old sister took over the narration from there ("Look out for the bird!") until the end, whereupon the two-year-old said, "lions are NOT scary." Now it's his favorite book, so we gave him a copy for his birthday, along with a little plastic lion he can carry around in his hand. What's your talisman?

Here, Kitty

On October 3, the Eric Carle Museum is sponsoring a panel discussion about the legacy of NYT children's book editor Eden Ross Lipson along with a display of books from an exhibition Eden had been planning for the museum, "The Silent Cat." While it is NOT true that the Caldecott Committee awards extra points for unexplained feline wanderings in illustrations, it is definitely one of the more offbeat but persistent tropes of the picture book. Mordicai Gerstein will be on hand to discuss and sign copies of his and Eden's new picture book Applesauce Season (in which a dog performs the cat role en travesti.)

How Others See Us

The New York Times obituary for Eden is a gracious tribute but does that thing I hate: "Eden Ross Lipson . . . was a force in bringing the enchanting but often overlooked world of children’s literature to wide public awareness."

The REASON children's literature is overlooked is because we persist in regarding it as ENCHANTING.

Okay. I'll stop shouting. And, to answer a query on yesterday's note, Eden was terrific at negotiating between the world of the professional children's-book critic and that of the Times children's-book-reviews reader, the educated parent. She knew what I didn't know about what they didn't know.

R.I.P. Eden

Former New York Times children's book editor Eden Ross Lipson died this morning. She was the editor who first hired me to write for the Times, and she taught me a lot in regard to how to write for a general audience about children's books. We became pals over the years and I'll miss her. For our November, 2000 special issue on "the Future of Children's Books," I asked a couple of dozen writers and critics to name one book to put into the time capsule for future child readers, and you can read about Eden's choice here.

[Title of Post]

I review John Green's Paper Towns and Kevin Brooks's Black Rabbit Summer in the Times today. I had originally called the piece "Cherchez la Femme," as both books are mysteries about boys looking for missing girls, but the Times in their wisdom retitled it. I like mine better but titles have to be the editor's prerogative--witness my discussion years ago with the author who did not understand why I wouldn't let him call his article, "The Lead in My Pencil."

Are They Here?

Does anyone else think it's kind of wild that the New York Times published an op-ed warning us to take UFO's more seriously? I mean, I will, I do, just strange to see it there.

The TV debut of the Teletubbies was not at all surprising to those of us who had read John Christopher's When the Tripods Came.

We guys do love our schematics

I'm so happy when a picture book for adults is published as just that. Like this one.

In lieu of a gift

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

Something stinks

Bloggers criticizing perfume--what will those pesky scamps get up to next!

I can't believe the reporter left unchallenged and unexplored the claim that a "prominent blogger" was "threatened with a lawsuit by a perfume company because she had deemed its product 'only O.K.' and 'a little disappointing.'" The juiciest and most provocative statement in the whole article and there's no followup?

I'll be in New York for the next couple of days, hoping to come back to you with a podcast of some of my conversations. Here's hoping I remember which button does what.

For reals?

I'd like to take a moment to thank HarperCollins for putting a nail into the coffin of a word that's long outlived its usefulness. Explaining their plans to publish a series that will provide opportunities for product placement, Harper children's boss Susan Katz explains:

“If you look at Web sites, general media or television, corporate sponsorship or some sort of advertising is totally embedded in the world that tweens live in. It gives us another opportunity for authenticity.”

So that's what we're calling it now.

Taking the Children

It's been a while, but Richard clipped an article for me that speaks to us all. It's NY Times movie critic A. O. Scott writing about taking his kids to movies for which they are putatively too young, and he builds his argument from books:

" . . . something in me rebels against the idea that the books children choose should always be safely within their developmental comfort zone. There is pleasure to be found in bewilderment, in the struggle to make sense of what is just above you head, and there is wisdom as well."

Right on. This weekend, we saw three of the movies Scott discusses: Charlie Wilson's War, Persepolis and Juno. The first was great (although I think it would have bored the young me witless); the second, a cartoon, seemed to run out of graphic ideas before it was over; and the third reminded me of why writers should avoid slang in YA novels: it sounds dated already. Juno seems to be the Little Movie That Could, though; what a nice clutch of Oscar noms, yes?

What are the odds?

The New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books have been announced; as commenter Ruth notes on a previous post, the gender score is eight to two. Elsewhere in the Times's special section on children's books I review Jaclyn Moriarty's The Spell Book of Listen Taylor (Levine/Scholastic).

I note with only fortuitous smugness that the last time I judged this list, in 2005, we selected five male and five female illustrators. But I didn't know this until now, as Henrike Wilson (winning for Brave Charlotte) and Alexis Deacon (for Jitterbug Jam) didn't come to the party.

A small correction

I have a short piece about Harry Potter up on the New York Times site, and it has a small but glaring (to me, anyway) mistake. The passage that reads

Nonreaders found in Rowling a benignly authoritarian guide: she told you what to look at and how to feel about what you saw. Those already accustomed to the pleasures of action learned early on to skip the adverbs, rejoicing instead in the wholly imagined world.

should read

Nonreaders found in Rowling a benignly authoritarian guide: she told you what to look at and how to feel about what you saw. Those already accustomed to the pleasures of fiction learned early on to skip the adverbs, rejoicing instead in the wholly imagined world.

The Times editor is on vacation so I don't think it will be fixed there anytime soon, and I hate sounding even more clueless than I am. At least I don't sound as churlishly brain-dead as Orson Scott Card does on the same page; there's a comfort.

When good kids show bad judgment

Today's NYT article about the popular Junie B. Jones books brings up a number of reasons adults don't like the series, mostly citing its demonstrations of bullying and other bad behavior. But my heart belong to a Mr. Lewis Bartell, a man mindful of the future:

“My dad doesn’t like the grammar,” said the Bartells’s youngest, Mollie, 9. “And I guess that’s important, because maybe when you grow up and you’re at work and you say, ‘I runned,’ people will get annoyed at you.”

Mollie, that is so true. In fact, I'm already kind of annoyed at you at nine.

The Owl Has Landed

And the UPS lady told me they had two trucks in my neighborhood this morning, packed with copies. Our reviewer is on her way over now.

While you're waiting, take a look at this op-ed from a man after my own heart: "Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies."

And here I thought Monday would be timely.

But the New York Times and Baltimore Sun got the jump on us, with reviews today of the new Harry Potter. And bravo to them: while Scholastic is entitled to try and stoke the flames of publicity--I mean, "preserve the magic moment"--by insisting on all kinds of secrecy, it's equally the job of the press to get the scoop. More than equally: by loudly embargoing review copies, swearing booksellers to hide the boxes, and going after bloggers who might or might not have reproduced pages from the book, Scholastic made their own blockade news, practically obliging journalists to get their hands on a copy. (You wouldn't know this from the deeply embarrassing Huffington Post story, though, which, in its stomping around like a little girl, reminds me that we are talking about a book for ten-year-olds.)

Our review, if the owls or whatever get the book to my house on time Saturday, will appear online Monday. Given that Scholastic seems to be insisting that the entire world should and will read the book this weekend, I guess we don't have to worry about spoilers. Except I do think we need to worry about spoilers, or at least be concerned about a willfully infantilized culture of suspense junkies so insistent on "not knowing the ending" that the future is probably going to kick our whiny, self-obsessed ass into oblivion. But that's a topic for another day.

He says . . she says

A student seeking resources for a paper dragged Sylvia E. Kamerman's Book Reviewing: A Guide to Writing Book Reviews--by leading Book Editors, Critics, and Reviewers (The Writer, 1978) from my dusty shelves to my desk the other day, and it's quite an interesting volume viewed in the light of the current drama about the slow death of book reviewing in newspapers. I mean, this book would lead you to think that venues and opportunities abound for the would-be critic, with most of the essays written by newspaper book editors and critics including Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and George A. Woods of the New York Times, William McPherson of the Washington Post and P. Albert Duhamel (whose wife was my high school librarian) of the Boston Herald. Lots of good advice from all.

There are four chapters on reviewing children's books (including one from our own Ethel Heins, and another from my friend Barbara Elleman) but I was most intrigued to find out from George Woods's piece that he once ran dueling reviews on the same page of the New York Times Book Review. The book was Wild in the World (Harper, 1971) by the late John Donovan, longtime director of the Children's Book Council. Donovan is most remembered for I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, generally credited as the first children's book to allow the love that dare not speak its name to, well, not speak its name exactly, but at least roll around on the floor. But Wild in the World, a folklorically spare story about a boy who sees his entire family die one or two at a time, then befriends a wild wolf (or dog), only to die himself in the end. Barbara Wersba's review topped the Times's page, headlined "One of the most moving books ever written for children . . ." and below followed June Jordan's: " . . . . or just another horror story told in monotone?"

Woods explained this gambit in his essay "Reviewing Books for Children":

There is no objective yardstick that one can place against a book and say, "The good stick says this does not measure up." Good or bad, success or failure is measured largely in the reviewer's responses and mind. I think of John Donovan's Wild in the World, which was reviewed intentionally in The Times by two eminent critics in two separate reviews running on the same page on the same Sunday. One said it was the worst book ever written for young people; the other said it was the finest book ever written for young people. Who was right? Who was wrong?

While granting Woods's point about informed subjectivity, I would in fact turn the question over to him: was it right or wrong for the Times to refuse to take an editorial stance on a book? It's true that the Times's daily book critics are often at odds with the Sunday reviews, but that's a long-standing distinction, and no one thinks of Maslin's or Kakutani's weekday reviews as being "what the Times thinks" the way the Sunday reviews stand alone, apart from their reviewers. If anything, Woods's experiment demonstrates the need for dueling publications, and an audience that knows it can't find everything in one place.

We regularly battle within the office about which books are going to get reviewed and how. But one side always wins, if with a victory tempered and informed by the debate. We work out the stars, and the annual Fanfare list the same way. Certainly, a book that doesn't do a thing for me can still get starred, because its proponents had the better argument than my "if I have to read one more intricately chess-game-like fantasy novel I'm going to scream" point of view. I'm less concerned with readers knowing what I think than I am with them having a grip on “what the Horn Book thinks." I definitely don’t want them to feel like we couldn't make up our mind.

My view exactly; if only we could convince the rest of the world.

"Nothing satisfies the appetite for allegory quite like a movie about flesh-eating zombies"-- The NY Times's A.O. Scott on 28 Weeks Later.

Late to the Party,

but the New York Times today sums up some of the issues that were bouncing around here a couple of weeks ago. What is perhaps most salient is that their news about blogs-and-books reaches a potential audience, in print and online, of far greater number than any blogosphere dustup does, while here it's mostly insider baseball. I find it odd, though, that Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus sets himself up as the defender of newspaper book reviews as providers of regional coverage ("While I’m all for the literary bloggers, and I think the more people that write about books the better, they’re not necessarily as regionally focused as knowledgeable, experienced long-term editors in the South or Midwest or anywhere where the most important writers come from") as if, one, that's true, or two, that's important. And is he saying that "the most important writers" are more likely to be found in one region than another? His assumption of regional origin as such a defining characteristic of writers that it needs to be nurtured by regional newspaper coverage seems evidence of someone who is ignoring the Internet, and what it's doing to social geography, at his peril. (Or maybe it's just smugness that he lives in New York.)

I'm with him on the "knowledgeable, experienced long-term editors" part (he says, anxiously patting his paycheck). This is what newspapers and the traditional review journals have, but it's not the fact that those media are disseminated on paper that gives them their value. It is simply that their authority was built in an era when book news came on paper. That is becoming less and less true. But the real distinction is not between paper and bloggers; it's between editorial authority and unsifted opinion. That's where the fight will be.

When It's Time to Keep Quiet

In yesterday's Huffington Post, author Leslie Bennetts complains about a New York Times piece, which, using Bennetts' new book The Feminine Mistake as an example, speculated that the sales of hot-button books have been compromised by their authors' endless talk show rounds: readers figure they already have enough of a gist for their purposes. This is a valuable argument, but Bennetts says that the article's real point was to attack her; she also works in a rather impressive amount of self-congratulation and glowing quotes from reviews, which I suspect is her real point.

From my own one skirmish with trade book publication (Hearing Us Out, Little, Brown, 1994) but also from conversation with writer-friends, I'd have to say that Bennetts is exhibiting the classic signs of an author with a new book. It's the best high in the world. But: no amount of attention is enough, no criticism can be taken lightly, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who have Read My Book and Loved It, and ignorant pigs. Anne Lamott writes funnily about this phenomenon in Bird by Bird: when publication date arrives she expects flowers and candy and congratulations; she practices modestly digging her toe into the dirt in expectation of all the compliments and attention she's about to receive. Nothing happens.

I think it's a completely understandable and forgivable attitude. For so long, your whole world has necessarily been that book and it becomes natural that you believe others will feel the same. It passes, thank God, or we would all be insufferable, but I wish somebody had told Bennetts that no matter how valid her point is (not, in my opinion), now is not the time to complain about being attacked. When the only response you will find truly acceptable is "you are wonderful," you can't win. Don't play.

A role model in better clothes

When I got an email from Robin Smith with the subject line "Someone we both love," I thought, oh God, I really cannot handle another death right now. But I perked right up when I opened it and saw that rather than an obituary, it was a link to a New York Times article about My Secret Boyfriend.

But I've decided to promote Tim Gunn from Secret Boyfriend to Middle-Aged Role Model because he's an example of how someone can make a big career shift in the autumn of one's life, moving from the academic slog of deaning to the high-stakes glamor of brand management. Of course, he had a television show to help him do it, whereas I only have you, dear readers. On the other hand, I have a boyfriend, so ha ha ha ha ha ha Mr.-I'm-So-Alone-Gunn.

Wouldn't that be a great job, though? I mean in publishing? Gunn's new job at Liz Claiborne is to "to bring a sense of excitement about fashion to a corporate culture known for blandness and to effect a change in the perception of its brands, from outdated to fashionable." The difference in publishing--a considerable one, I think--is that it's a business where fashionable has become what it's all about, so my job would be instead to get them to straighten up and fly right. To paraphrase Paul Hazard, give them books, give them wings. Let Tim Gunn be the fashion spinmeister; I'll go out and prove you don't have to stick fleurchons all over a book to make kids like it.

Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves

There's been some discussion recently about blogging and inclusivity that came to mind when I read this article Martha showed me about kids and their cliques. Marion Hawthorne lives.

As Monica Edinger pointed out in the post linked above, it's not just kids. As Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote of her adolescence among the Greenwich Village Beats, "when I came of age in the 1950s, everyone one knew was an Outsider, and proud of it; and every Outsider belonged to a privileged Inner Circle of Outsiders, and then we grew up." But not really: when, decades later, Harrison reviewed Beat poet Diane Di Prima's memoir for the NYTBR, she devoted her entire review to proving that Di Prima hadn't been one of the cool kids, really. It never ends. I'm not sure it can, heck, I'm not sure it should. As I once pointed out in a different context, this is how we got Protestants.

And today I read that kids are compiling hit lists of their enemies. Should we worry or be relieved that the Times chose to run this as a "Fashion & Styles" story?

I just sent back one like this, marked RE DO

I know it's trendy to knock Michiko Kakutani, but, honestly, her column today about two new biographies of Leni Riefenstahl was just the laziest kind of reviewing. In a favorite Times technique, she spends most of her space restating the scoop on Riefenstahl she read in the books she was reviewing, in a tone that implied she already knew this stuff. She devotes one very brief paragraph to comparing a single difference between the two authors' points of view. She makes no evaluative judgment of either book, let alone vis a vis each other. I have no idea what one book does differently from the other; I have no idea which one I would rather read. Why review a book if you're not prepared to give an opinion? Why review two together on the same subject if you're not going to compare them?

Oh, those sneaky sneaks!

The New York Times weighs in with what is quite possibly the most inane comment yet on Lucky's scrotum:

"Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase."