Remember how I was going to participate in Book Blogger Appreciation Week?  That was before I got all caught up in board meetings, readings, projects, and papers.  But I still want to, and I wanted to address Monday’s topic, so here we are.

Monday’s topic was to post your own shortlist of blogs that didn’t get recognized for the BBAW awards.  Colleen and Liz both made excellent posts on the topic, so please read those.

My personal shortlist is really short.  It consists of two blogs that defy categorization.  I picked them because I wanted to introduce to you a couple of people who were my friends before any of us entered the kidlitosphere.  So here we go:

Bildungsroman is the blog of Little Willow, a rock star in the kidlitosphere if ever there was one. She is incredibly sweet and one of my best friends, both online and off. I love her booklists most of all. I pretty much know that if she liked something, I’ll like it too. So if you are one of the three people on earth not already familiar with her blog, go check it out.

BriMeetsBooks.com is Bri’s blog, which is appropriate. Bri is another sweetheart of the kidlitosphere. She’s started a new Tuesday meme where she posts totally random Top 5 lists. Her latest one is Top Five Kidlit Characters Who Were Infinitely Cooler Than Me When I Was Younger. (Where she has Dawn Schafer on her list, I’d put Claudia Kishi, who I think still influences my fashion choices and I know definitely is responsible for my tendency to keep secret stashes of candy everywhere. Which is much less intriguing when your parents don’t care if you eat candy.) Bri reads a lot of books and posts a lot of reviews. Go take a look!

These two ladies are friends I made at The Bronze (that’s a Wikipedia link), the Buffy posting board which along with its successor, The Bronze: Beta, has had the greatest effect on my life of any internet thing ever. Buffy has been over for six years, and the official Bronze posting board has been gone for eight, but they are still my friends and I’m so happy to have them here in the kidlitosphere.

Hi there! We’re about to enter into a busy busy week - a board meeting, evening class, a paper due, and meetings with a project group - but it’s also Book Blogger Appreciation Week, for which I have registered.  I will be focusing on the activities part of things and not so much on the awards or the giveaways.

Stay tuned!

Hello there!

I started my school library media coordinator program on August 25th and life has been a whirlwind ever since. I’ll soon have reviews of The Chocolate War, Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, The Contender, and The Outsiders for you.

I was dropping in mainly to remind you that NaNoWriMo is just a couple of months away and to tell you that I will be participating. One of my classmates was an English teacher and assigned NaNo to her students last year and participated herself as well. She’s planning to get a group together in our program. I don’t know how successful she’ll be, but at least I’ll have one on campus writing buddy!

How are you? What have you been reading? What are you looking forward to reading?

My next assigned text is Wintergirls and I’m very excited.

So I’ll be using this space to chronicle my journey through library school over the next couple of years, because that’s pretty much what my life is going to be.  We had orientation today, where I learned some new things and had old learnings reinforced.  I’m looking forward to the first day of class tomorrow, though I suspect I’ll have a terrible time getting to sleep tonight because I’ll be so excited.

My course schedule this semester includes:

• Human Information Interactions
• Information Tools
• The School Library Media Center
• Young Adult Literature and Related Materials

I'm also working as a Graduate Assistant for LEARN NC.

I plan to talk here about my experiences and the issues we deal with in class.  My reactions to the readings for the YA Lit class will be recorded at lectitans, my reading blog.  I don’t plan to talk about any issues I might have in my personal relationships at school, so please don’t expect that.

After Princess Alexandra’s mother is killed, her father marries a woman who charms the kingdom. Alexandra and her brothers, however, believe that this woman is a shape-shifter, the beast who killed their mother in human form. After an ill-fated attempt to prove this goes awry, Alexandra is banished and her brothers disappear. As she lives with her aunt, Alexandra begins to understand the nature of her own magical power.

I can’t say much more without giving away details of the plot that I think readers will enjoy discovering for themselves. It is my policy to give a book fifty pages before I abandon it. This book, while well-written, just wasn’t for me, all the way up to page forty-nine. But on page fifty, everything changed, and I found myself eager to know what happened next. The Swan Kingdom is a fantasy, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Wild Swans. In this story, Zoe Marriott has created a rich world. Alexandra is a strong female protagonist, but she draws her strength from emotion and magic rather than physical power. While she does spend more time than many of us would probably like waiting for her brothers to find her, she does take action and work to change the fate of her nation’s people. The Swan Kingdom’s greatest strengths lie in its world-building and unique magic system.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in adaptations of traditional fairy tales or looking for a female protagonist who has strength but doesn’t fight, who is able to use that strength without giving up her femininity.

Book: The Swan Kingdom Author: Zoe Marriott Publisher: Candlewick Original Publication Date: March 2008 Pages: 272 Age Range: Young Adult Source of Book: ARC requested from publisher Buy it: IndieBound - Powell’s [Affiliate Links]

Over at Chasing Ray, Colleen has a round-up of all of today’s Southeast Asia posts. From the original OSWT:SEA announcement:

For those of you not familiar with the One Shot idea, a group of bloggers (and its open to everybody with a blog) all agree to read a book by an author from a certain region or a book set in that region and then blog about it on a specified day. You can also interview an author from there if you prefer. To make it easy for readers to follow the project, everyone emails their exact url to me and I post a master list with links and quotes on the One Shot day. In the end we manage to hopefully discover new authors, new books, and a little bit different perspective then we receive from reading primarily American works.

I don’t have my own post to contribute to the event, but I wanted to direct your attention to it.

One of my recurring obsessions (that is to say, I get crazy about it for a few weeks and then forget it for a while only to come back to it later) is fashion. I recently decided that I would start a blog to chronicle my attempts to express myself through my appearance. One thing I wanted to address was the librarian stereotype; so I thought I’d explore the place where fashion and librarianship intersect, if it exists. Any time I decide on a new project, research is the first (and often only) phase. So I set out to find information about stereotypes about librarians, and happened upon Ruth Kneale’s You Don’t Look Like a Librarian.

In this book, Kneale chronicles librarians’ own obsession with their image and makes suggestions for how to deal with people who say “But you don’t look like a librarian!” (Why don’t you look like a librarian? My problem is my lack of glasses.) She also provides a vast survey of the resources available for exploring this topic further.

This is a fun little book (and Liz B. of Tea Cozy wrote the forward!) but its companion website is even better than the book itself, because it offers links to all the different resources mentioned in the book.

I recommend this for anybody who wants an overview of stereotypes of librarians and how actual librarians respond to them.

My favorite part, of course, was when the book addressed the topic of Rupert Giles, who is my librarian role model. (I like to imagine if Giles and Jenny Calendar traveled back in time to 1981 and had a kid together, she’d be me.)

Book: You Don’t Look Like a Librarian Author: Ruth Kneale Publisher: Information Today, Inc. Original Publication Date: March 2009 Pages: 216 Source of Book: Borrowed from library Buy it (affiliate links): IndieBound - Powell’s

Photograph by L. Marie

Harper needs to get away from home for a while, to escape her heartbreak over her father's divorce from her stepmother and her confusion about her relationship with Gabriel, who is not her boyfriend but is definitely more than her friend.  She signs up for the Homes from the Heart Summer Program for Teens and leaves her native California behind to help build a home for a Tennessee family who lost theirs in a tornado.

Dana Reinhardt does so many things right in this book that it would take a very long time to list them all, so I’ll just hit the highlights.  As always, her teen voice is spot-on: Harper sounds like a real teen, not a grown-up’s idea of how a teen sounds.  Her characterizations, as always, are excellent, too; the family for whom Harper is building a house, all of the other kids who work with her to build the house, and Harper’s own family are fully realized.  This is a remarkable feat, especially considering that the book comes in at only 227 pages.  The most unique thing about How to Build a House, however, is its structure.

Reinhardt has named each chapter after one of the steps in building a house, and within each chapter we get glimpses of how Harper’s life was at “Home” and how things are different “Here."  Throughout the story, the step in home-building correlates with Harper’s experiences and memories.  It could come across as contrived, but it doesn’t.  It is, instead, just right.

I would recommend this book to just about anyone.  Dana Reinhardt is one of my favorite authors for young adults today, and How to Build a House follows in the tradition of excellence she began with A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life and continued with Harmless.

Book: How to Build a House Author: Dana Reinhardt Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books Original Publication Date: May 2008 Pages: 227 Age Range: Young Adult Source of Book: ARC sent by author Related Posts: My Interview with Dana Reinhardt, My Review of A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life, My Review of Harmless Buy it: IndieBound - Powell’s

Color Online is hosting the Color Me Brown Book Challenge. The goal is to read and review books about people of color throughout the month of August. I will not be participating as given - I have a long list of books to read for my YA Lit class and am working hard not to add any new books to my TBR pile until I have a sense that I’m going to be able to get through all of those - but I will be making it a point to diversify my reading over the next year or so, and then maintain that going ahead.

I heard on the radio this morning that today begins the National Black Theatre Festival which is held in Winston-Salem, NC. If you are a reader of plays, I have some recommendations for you of plays that feature people of color. Some I’ve seen and read, some I’ve only seen or only read. Some I love, and some I don’t. I’ll list the ones that come to mind and add any more I think of later or if any of you add some in the comments. I’ll link the Wikipedia page or another resource for each play; several of them have been made into films you may wish to watch.

Plays I Love
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry - Audio Link - This centers on a family that receives a $10,000 life insurance check and the plans of each member of the family for the check. It also explores racially motivated land convenants when the family buys a house in an entirely white neighborhood and the neighbors attempt to bribe the family to leave.

Having Our Say by Emily Mann - This play, based on a biography of the same title, is about the Delany sisters. Sadie and Bessie both lived past the age of 100, and this play introduces us to them as they are 103 and 101. It takes us through their memories. They’re local girls to me - from Raleigh, NC, less than an hour’s drive from my home and the city where I taught for three years. My sister and I loved this play and the dynamic between the two sisters that, in 1999, we parodied it with a skit called "Getting Our Way." I was 17 and she was 13 at the time. Here’s my favorite exchange from the skit - I can’t remember which of us said what, so I’m just having me speak first.
KIMBERLY: People often ask us how we’ve stayed so young. I tell them it’s because we never married.
MARY ELISABETH: And I tell them it’s because we’re only seventeen and thirteen!
(Hmmm. I guess we’re old now; my sister’s getting married on October 17 and I just did.)
The film version of Having Our Say stars Audra MacDonald, one of my favorite Broadway stars.

The Colored Museum by George C. Wolfe - In this play, the audience witnesses different museum exhibits which satirize both stereotypes and actual elements of African-American culture.

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori-Parks - This play is AMAZING, especially if you see it performed by an excellent cast. Two brothers, Lincoln and Booth, live together and struggle with work, love, and their relationship with each other. Incredibly moving and so well-written. An excellent blend of comedy and drama.

Fires in the Mirror by Anna Deavere-Smith - A series of monologues that chronicles the Crown Heights riots in 1991. (I can’t even begin to explain the riots so I’m just linking info about them.) I stage-managed this play my freshman year of college. It was by far one of the best experiences I had during that time. Anna Deavere-Smith is coming to speak at the North Carolina Literary Festival and I’m very excited.

Other Plays
Fences by August Wilson - A play about Troy Maxson, a garbage man, and his experiences and challenges in life.
Contant Star by Tazewell Thompson - The life story of Ida B. Wells, a journalist and leader of both the civil rights and women’s rights movements.
The America Play by Suzan Lori-Parks - A play about an Abraham Lincoln impersonator who decides to dig a replica of the Great Hole of History.

Further Notes
Most of the playwrights cited here have written more than one play, so I recommend checking out the full catalog for each of them. I didn’t want to list plays with which I wasn’t familiar, which is why I’ve only listed these eight. Taken against the vast number of plays with which I’m familiar, this small number exposes my own ignorance of theatre about people of color. Another thing for me to improve upon.

In this column at School Library Journal, school librarian Diantha McBride says:

I’m afraid this won’t be popular, but I need more books for boys—as do most librarians who work with young people. I’ve noticed that lots of books with female characters aren’t really about being female. In fact, in many cases, the main characters could just as easily have been males—and that would make my job a lot easier.

The part of McBride’s statement rankles me most is this:

I’ve noticed that lots of books with female characters aren’t really about being female.

I feel that her conclusion that since the books aren’t about being female, they should have boy main characters, suggests that books with female main characters should be about uniquely female experiences.  Certainly there are many experiences unique to females, and those need addressing.  But can you imagine if every book with a female main character was about that?  I would get so bored so quickly.  I would probably refuse to read books with female main characters then, too.

Books about members of marginalized groups should not have to be about experiences unique to only those groups.  I’m reading David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy right now, and I love how even though Paul is gay and the book is about his romantic relationship with another young man, the exploration of that relationship is by no means limited to aspects that are unique only to individuals in same-sex/gender relationships.  It is an exploration of universal experiences that could happen to anyone at the beginning of a new relationship, regardless of any specific characteristics of the people in that relationship.

Does that mean I think that no books should be about experiences unique to a marginalized group?  Of course not.  It’s important to acknowledge experiences and challenges unique to members of certain groups; to ignore those would be to act as if we live in a world where everyone is always treated equally and lives the same life.  But to insist that being a member of a group means you must be defined only by membership in that group is absurd.

Photo by Foxtongue.