Matthew insists on puffed sleeves

and Anne her e. But what's the difference between gray and grey?

Infer this.

Magazine reviewer Jonathan Hunt offers his picks for the five best YA works of fiction this year over at NPR. I will nitpick that one of the choices is not fiction and another not YA but all five are good books. Three of them appear on our Fanfare list, which will be whizzing its way to your inbox in just one week.

To link this morning's post with yesterday's, Jonathan and Debbie Reese are arguing over at Heavy Medal about Albert Marrin.

And apropos of nothing but still burned in my mind is this sentence from Amy Sohn's Prospect Park West, which I heard this morning on my iPod and which caused me to wonder if, when they came, they first came for the copyeditors: "Not once had Rebecca heard a mother infer even obliquely that she was hard up [for sexual gratification]." (I'm listening to this because PW gave it a starred review while over at Audible.com all the Prospect Park parents are leaving bitter comments about how bad it makes them look.)

Think before you write.

"The red liquid was wine, but it shimmered like blood."--from The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. I'm sure Stephenie Meyer could be trusted to rearrange this simile into its proper order.

And can we talk about that title for a minute? In my opinion, "The Lost Symbol" is right up there with "When You Reach Me" for unmemorability, and by that I mean my inability to remember it correctly. The Secret Symbol? The Lost Code? When I Reach You? When You Get Here? Some years ago I had similar trouble with the beautiful picture book Night Driving by Jon Coy and Peter McCarty. In the space of one issue of the Horn Book I think I referred to it as Night Ride, Drive at Night and Night Drive Home (oops, that's Joni Mitchell).

Get Your Factoids Straight

I've got the new Dan Brown (audiobook edition) for our flight this weekend to meet the grandchild. Can't wait for either! Child_lit has been discussing how books perceived as page turners (like The Hunger Games) don't get the respect they should, but I figure there's page-turners and then there's page-browsers--James Patterson, I'm looking at you.

What I think I like most about Dan Brown is the opportunity he gives me to go around correcting everyone's use of the term factoid to mean a small, arcane, interesting fact. But Brown uses factoids in precisely the way coiner Norman Mailer intended: small, interesting, but completely made-up bullshit designed to look as if it were true.

Go west, young man, WEST!

Childlit has been debating historical accuracy in fiction--what's dramatic license and what's a betrayal, basically. It makes me think of the many romances of stage, screen and text where Elizabeth R and Mary, Queen of Scots excitingly rail at each other, when in real life they never met.

It also makes me remember when Elizabeth (L) and I saw When Harry Met Sally and laughed about the improbability of these two chipper coeds actually attending the University of Chicago when they were so clearly Northwestern types. We were outraged, however, when the film sent them on their way from Chicago to New York by heading NORTH on Lake Shore Drive, which would only take you to the East Coast if you went via the Soo Locks.

Yesterday I was reading a (terrific) novel which in one spot took its main character to my neighborhood. I got a little worried for him when he got off the subway and walked five blocks east when in real life there is no there there. The street he was on only heads west. A shame, really--he was an intriguing character and the right direction would have practically brought him to my doorstep!

It of course doesn't matter and few will notice (and fewer care). But maybe it's a lesson about our standards regarding accuracy--we mostly only notice when it hits home.

(Un)block that metaphor!

"We have turned off the spigot, but we have a very robust pipeline"--Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokesman Josef Blumenfeld, explaining the company's rationale for ordering its editors to stop acquiring manuscripts.

No, Joe, what you have turned off is the water supply, rendering both the pipeline AND spigot irrelevant.

I love them

Semicolons, that is. I am less taken with apostrophe-s, but that's what Chicago tells us to do, along with B.C.E., usage of which just makes me feel old if still A.D. (.)

Apropos of nothing, I have drops in my eyes from an opthamology exam this morning and am thinking about an incredibly lame Betty Cavanna novel where the heroine's sweet but plain best friend finally gets a date only because the guy who's askin' has just been to the eye doctor and can't see clearly. Hilarious, right?

You're not the boss of me,

I say. Defining poetry
Is a task best left to those who Do,
Not some Society.

Its they're misson!

But I bet their pretty anooying at at dinner partys.

Getting the Shakes

Child_Lit is currently enjoying one of those pearl-clutching reports about the abysmal state of American education, this one taking on colleges that do not require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare but allow them to study such horrors as queer theory and children's literature.

Let's start with the sheer--and shrill--irrationality of comparing required courses to elective ones. The report doesn't claim that Shakespeare isn't being taught, only that courses devoted to him are elective, signalling a dumbing-down in English education that has occurred since . . . well, since when, exactly? The report states but provides no evidence that required classes in Shakespeare used to be the order of the day. It also specifically excludes from the discussion courses that include Shakespeare among others, so a course devoted to English writing of the Elizabethan era, for example, does not count.

The attack on children's literature, critical theory, etc. is completely predictable: it's the same card the Music Man played when warning the good people of River City of the dangers of "Captain Billy's Whiz-bang Book." But even old-school English majors inclined to go along with the sympathies of the report must be embarrassed that nowhere does it ever say why English majors need a mandatory course called Shakespeare. It wants us to take his authority on their word. That's education?

What the report is really trying to do is to use "Shakespeare" as a word to bully people. The report knows that most people pay Shakespeare the same lip service they do to Mozart, PBS, art museums and public libraries: people know they are supposed to consider these things "cultural" and important even if in real life they wouldn't be caught dead actually giving these institutions any genuine attention. The report isn't worried that Shakespeare isn't been taught (it concedes that he is), just that students aren't being forced to read him. What the American Council of Trustees and Alumni really wants is that students be taught obedience and unquestioning respect for authority. It wants people to do as they're told.

Blow THIS.

While it was nice to see my picture in the pages of School Library Journal this month, I really need to whine about their over-generous application of quotation marks. Hell would freeze over before I would say, as I am quoted as doing in the March SLJ, "If we didn't have a blog and Web site at Horn, I'd feel threatened, too." The sentiment, I'll take full credit for. But Horn? Horn?? The only people I have ever heard call the Horn Book Horn are overambitious young publicity assistants trying desperately to show how intime they are with the whole, you know, biz.