1. Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, Karen Kingston
2. Craft, Inc., Meg Mateo Ilasco
3. Indigara, Tanith Lee
4. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
5. Jessie’s Mountain, Kerry Madden
6. Finding Serenity, Jane Espenson and Glenn Yeffeth, ed.
7. Valiant, Holly Black [Audio CD]
8. The Twelve Kingdoms - Volume 1: Sea of Shadow, Fuyumi Ono
9. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
10. Fearless, Tim Lott
11. Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye, Kaza Kingsley
12. Bronx Masquerade, Nikki Grimes
13. Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
14. It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, Peter Walsh
15. The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Two: Ghost Roads, Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

I'm not sure where I came across this link - probably in the Publisher's Weekly newsletter.

Slate.com asks "...do you really want the Hulk teaching your kid to read?"

There's more text in the accompanying slide show than in the page itself; the page sounds rather alarmist but the slideshow is far more reasonable.

What is your answer to their question?

I do want the Hulk teaching my kid to read, though I'd rather have a child with great affection for Spiderman or the X-Men, as those are my heroes of choice.  (In fact, considering my choice of a lifemate, I'd say the kid will be genetically predisposed to like Spiderman and the X-Men.)  I want anyone my kid will enjoy reading about to teach my kid to read.  A kid who is reading anything is, in my opinion, better than a kid who is reading nothing.  Bring on the reductio ad absurdum, three year olds learning to read from bodice-rippers or somesuch.  I'll stand by my feelings.

The slideshow raises a good point though: the easy readers based on some of the films aren't actually very friendly to early readers, lacking in clear visual cues in the illustrations, and containing obscure vocabulary (gamma radiation, anyone?) that kids might not recognize right away.  The solution, in my mind, isn't to banish comic book and movie characters from our children's books.  It's for concerned parties to find a way to coach the writers of these movie tie-ins in the things a good easy reader requires.  Familiar vocabulary.  Words that can be sounded out.  Simple illustrations that clearly indicate what's going on, while at the same time provide a jumping-off point for readers to create their own stories.

Is all literature created equal?  I know that in terms of quality, some writing is stronger than others.  But does it have any inherent moral value, wherein a child reading comic books is somehow less good than a child reading classics?  I don't think so.  

What do you think?

by Betty Comden and Adolph Green

I have a place where dreams are born,
And time is never planned.
It's not on any chart,
You must find it with your heart.
Never Never Land.

It might be miles beyond the moon,
Or right there where you stand.
Just keep an open mind,
And then suddenly you'll find
Never Never Land.

So apparently on my birthday, a little over a week ago, the Kidlitosphere exploded with people having identity crises and struggling to keep up with their blogs.  Jen Robinson summed it up nicely in this post, and then added her own thoughts on the matter here. 

It’s heavy stuff.  I have a personal, friends only LiveJournal, a craft/design blog, this blog, and I recently added a new blog to chronicle my own personal Happiness Project.  I have tried in the past to give myself schedules, so that I will post more regularly, because I’d like to really develop an audience.  I want to keep people coming back to my blogs, and when I have a month-long hiatus like I just did, that doesn’t really happen.  At the same time, there’s almost always a lot going on in my life.  I have a very demanding job in terms of energy if not always time.  (I work rather efficiently, so I often leave school before other teachers do.  I feel guilty, leaving only half an hour after our official off-the-clock time.)  Writing is a creative task.  Other blogs are updated frequently, and I like to read them, but I get overwhelmed.  And so with each of the blogs I write, I have to keep my mission for that particular blog in mind.

Here, the mission is to record my reactions to books, and book-related things.  When I started the blog, I reviewed every book I read, and focused on YA.  Now, I’m realizing that no one is asking me to do that except myself.  So I will post reviews here only of particularly noteworthy books, or publish reviews over at The Edge of the Forest when I’ve agreed to do that.  I’ll keep any commitments I make to things like the blog tours, and I’ll post responses to interesting things I see in my reading.  And anything else book-related that comes to my attention.

And that’s it.  That will be all.  And that way, this will stay fun for me.

Here’s the thing that keeps me from worrying I’ll lose readers: aggregators.  Things like Google Reader, or the LJ friends page with a feed on it.  If people want to read me, they can subscribe.  Then, when I have a month-long gap, they won’t miss a thing.

So, it's been almost a month.  Most of which I've spent unpacking, preparing for a play, doing the play, then recovering from the play with more unpacking.

And, I'm back.

I've got three or four books on the go right now.  I'm reading Erec Rex 2 (can't recall the proper title) to review for Edge of the Forest, Ghost Roads from the Gatekeeper Trilogy (yay Buffy!), and Soon I Will Be Invincible.

One of the things I've discovered while unpacking is that I have too many books to fit them in my house attractively.  So I'm going to create a to-read box, I think, and take all the books from my shelves that I might want to release once I'm done with them, put them in that box, and move on through them.  After that, I will ask myself the questions posed in this post at Unclutterer.  If after asking those questions I decide to keep the book, it will go back on the shelf.  If not, I will use one of the ways in this post at Zen Habits to get it out of my house.

How do you deal with your book habit?

1. Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, Karen Kingston
   2. Craft, Inc., Meg Mateo Ilasco
   3. Indigara, Tanith Lee
   4. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
   5. Jessie’s Mountain, Kerry Madden
   6. Finding Serenity, Jane Espenson and Glenn Yeffeth, ed.
   7. Valiant, Holly Black [Audio CD] 
   8. The Twelve Kingdoms - Volume 1: Sea of Shadow, Fuyumi Ono
   9. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
   10. Fearless, Tim Lott
   11. Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye, Kaza Kingsley 

I'm plugging it everywhere today: my friend Joanna's new blog, Library Pendragon.  Joanna is a media specialist (which always reads to my mind as "school librarian" but I know they do much more than just deal with books) and is going to write about organizing your home and/or library.  She has already revolutionized my life with her spice storage tips, and I'm delighted to say as well that she has put up a summer reading post and recommended to many adults who probably wouldn't see them otherwise a list of notable children's and YA novels.  (You've probably read them all, but I think it's exciting that she's posting about them anyway.)

Before we get to the poetry, first:
1. I have a review in the new issue of The Edge of the Forest.
2. This quiz result makes me very happy:
Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% Supergirl 75% Superman 70% Wonder Woman 70% Green Lantern 65% Robin 55% Batman 45% Hulk 45% Iron Man 45% Catwoman 40% The Flash 35%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

 
Click here to take the “Which Superhero am I?” quiz… 
 
And now, poetry.  This week I am in Baltimore, which was the home of Edgar Allan Poe for many years.  I love Edgar Allan Poe.  Unfortunately, I will be visiting neither his grave nor his house here, because of other plans and my brother’s distaste for visiting graves.

I’m here with my sister, whose name is Mary Elisabeth.  This poem by Poe, dedicated to his cousin Elizabeth and presumed to  be written in the Baltimore Poe House, reminds me of her:


Would’st thou be loved? then let thy heart
From its present pathway part not —
Be every thing which now thou art
And nothing which thou art not:

So with the world thy gentle ways,
And unassuming beauty
Shall be a constant theme of praise,
And love — a duty.

The associations our brain makes are funny things.  I went looking for a poem about sisters, because I love mine.  Instead I found The Mermaid in the Hospital which did make me think of my sister, because it's 2 years tomorrow since I went to the hospital to have my gall bladder removed and she was with me for a long time there, and while there I found some shell-shaped hair clips and some glittery lip stuff in my purse, and I put them all on and insisted that I was a mermaid.  So you see, I myself was The Mermaid in the Hospital.

The Mermaid in the Hospital

It occurred to me just now that reading and writing are so very intertwined, that you can’t really tease out just one from the other, if you do both. So I’m probably just going to let

 lie fallow, and post here about writing when I have thoughts about it.

Kerry Madden (  ) wrote a beautiful post about all the different places she’s paid the rent. Each place had stories to go with it, and each of them made me think of my own stories. As a reader of primarily fantasy and science fiction, I tend to forget that even the wildest of stories have to come from a place within ourselves, and that the things that happen to us in real life, whether or not they seem extraordinary, are what our stories are made of. I remember this every once in a while, and use it to write something with some emotional truth. I feel like most recently (i. e. in the past 5 years) this has been in my Firefly fanfiction, where I use the sibling relationship of Simon and River to explore the emotional truth behind what I think has been and hope always will be the most important relationship in my life: my relationship with my sister. Sibling stories speak to me more than any other stories, more even than love stories. Not because romantic love isn’t an important part of my life, but because my sister has been with me since she was born and I was 4 years 6 months 4 days and 30 minutes old. So those stories will always be older and I think the things that happen to you as a kid shape more of the stories that speak to you.

Kerry Madden is one of my writing heroes. She loves the classic Southern authors like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, both of whom touched me the most of any American authors I read in school. Her stories are about home and family and little things that don’t necessarily seem like stories when they happen to you, but later you realize that is what stories are. 

I hope when I write, I will write things that are as real and right to other people as Kerry’s stories are to me.