Category: Books

Dear Ms. Cleary

Leave a comment

From an interview with children’s book legend Beverly Cleary:

Your website says that you are still writing–is there anything ahead that we should be looking for? A third volume of your memoirs, perhaps?

No, I don’t plan to publish any more. After all, I’m 95. I hope children will be happy with the books I’ve written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

I think that’s such a lovely sentiment, and I’m sure many fans of Cleary’s work have gone on to be lifelong readers. That’s one of the reasons I love children’s literature and YA. These books touch you at such a special time in your life and can propel you on the path to reading for decades to come.

Public Works

Leave a comment

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law has an interesting article about why there are no authors/books entering the public domain this year in the United States. In short:

“Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year, or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019….When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture.”

The idea isn’t to destroy copyright entirely; that would be detrimental to working authors. But why shouldn’t Virginia Woolf’s works be available this year, or Rebel Without a Cause? If artistic works such as these could be more easily used in schools and libraries and in other works of art, isn’t that a good thing? I’d be okay with waiting until an artist/author/copyright owner is dead, but 70 years after? There needs to be some compromise.

The Need to Read

Leave a comment

Reading isn’t just a fun pastime or a way for high school teachers to torture their students. According to one study, t’s a neurologically transformative experience:

“They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative”. The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways.“

When you read, your brain is creating the world and people about which you’re reading. You develop new ways of thinking about the real world. With that, we can be more empathetic and creative people. Gail Rebuck sees this as a very necessary part of our past and future as humans:

“If reading were to decline significantly, it would change the very nature of our species. If we, in the future, are no longer wired for solitary reflection and creative thought, we will be diminished. But as a reader and a publisher, I am optimistic. Technology throws up as many solutions as it does challenges: for every door it closes, another opens. So the ability, offered by devices like e-readers, smartphones and tablets, to carry an entire library in your hand is an amazing opportunity.”

This is another reason I think the e-reader isn’t the destruction of books. It gives people the opportunity to have more books more readily accessible. But a paperback or library copy will expand your brain just as well, too. All you have to do is pick up a novel or autobiography or travel book and get your brain working. It’s all part of our evolution.

The Best of ’11, via Book Bloggers

Leave a comment

Happy 2012 everyone! Want to start the year off with some good reading? You’re in luck–the 2011 Cybils Finalists were just announced. Their categories are some of my favorites, from the standard Young Adult Fiction to Poetry and Graphic Novels to Book Apps and Fantasy & Science Fiction (Middle Grade). I’ve already added a few books to my “to read” list. Excited to see who the winners will be!

The Young and Young at Heart

Leave a comment

I love the idea of pairing classic children’s book heroes and their literary adult counterparts, but this list from Flavorwire feels so wrong to me. How in the world can you think Lyra from The Golden Compass could grow up to be Jane Eyre? These are two of my favorite characters in literature, but they’re vastly different people. And Huck Finn growing up to be Dean Moriarty? There’s no evil in Huck the way there is in Moriarty. (Currently watching Sherlock, which only underscores my reaction.)

There are a few good connections (like Eloise and Holly Golightly) but at least half of the pairings don’t add up to me. Granted, it’s a hard concept to work from, but I was hoping for more.

No, But I’ve Seen the Movie

Leave a comment

With Tin Tin in theaters, famous writers were asked about the best and worst children’s book-to-movie adaptations, and which they’d like to see. A few favorite thoughts:

Lois Lowry: “I think [movie adaptations of books] are pretty uniformly disappointing, with some (“Tuck Everlasting”) spectacularly worse than others. My only real favorite is the obvious “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was not published as a YA book (though if it had been written today, it would have been).”

Sherman Alexie: “I think “Howl’s Moving Castle” has to be the best film adaptation of a young-adult book. The book is terrific but the movie is better. I know that’s blasphemy for a writer to say, but the imagination of the filmmakers — the images they create — are better than anything that I created as I read the novel. The filmmakers became my imagination. My two sons also think this is the best adaptation ever.

Jane Yolen: “Three that I would like to see made are Shannon Hale’s “Goose Girl” and the books that follow it, Patricia C. Wrede’s “Enchanted Forest” books, and Bruce Coville’s “Magic Shop” books. I know that’s cheating because I would be getting multiple movies out of a choice of three, but nobody says these kind of choices are fair.“

Love all these choices. There are a lot of other fantastic suggestions* (click through to see!) After seconding most choices in the famous author list, I’d add:

The Good: The 2010 version of True Grit, which was very true to the book and a YA novel at heart.

The Bad: Any Madeleine L’Engle related movie. A Ring of Endless Light is not about saving dolphins from an evil corporation!

The Hopeful: I’d love to see a miniseries based on Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness. (Hell, any of Pierce’s books, but the Alanna series are near and dear to my heart.)

What children’s book movie adaptations are on your best/worst/wish lists?

*On the other hand, R.L. Stine liked the Golden Compass movie, which I thought was a very watered-down version of an amazing book. (Granted, the polar bear scenes were awesome.) A friend of mine has suggested that only Miyazaki could do a worthwhile version of His Dark Materials and I’m inclined to agree.

Best in (YA) Show

Leave a comment

We’re almost at the end of the year, which means we’re almost at awards season. No, not just the Oscars. The Awards for Awesomeness in YA. (YALSA, can you make that the official title of your collection of awards? The Hub has a roundup of what these awards are and which books can be nominated.

One I need to check out more is the Alex, which honors books technically for adults but which will appeal to teens as well. Sometimes I get caught up in the YA world and forget that there are good books out there for adults, too.

Also, I would like to hang out with everyone who has ever won the Margaret A. Edwards Award. Seriously. Guys, I will bake for you.

You Are What You Write

Leave a comment

Fictional books are awesome. Reading about a character reading a novel that doesn’t exist is like literary inception. (Minus Leonardo DiCaprio.)

So of course I dig Warren Lehrer’s visual novel, A Life in Books: the Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley. Lehrer has created the covers/some content of 101 fake novels by character Mobley–quite a task. The books develop the life story of Mobley and allow for an engaging look at book design. About the project, Lehrer says:

“I decided I wanted to get at this kind of panoramic view of the world in a different, more evocative and fun way, by writing a novel about one man’s use of books and storytelling as a means of understanding himself, the people around him, and a half century of American/global culture.”

It’s kind like “you are what you read,” except in Lehrer’s novel “you are what you write.” I’ve included an image of one of Mobley’s books here, but there are a ton of others in the original article. Make sure to click through and see the rest.