Semi-regular link round up: bookish things of many flavours

My poor, overburdened laptop Alice usually has at least two or three Firefox windows open, with at least half a dozen tabs per window. The session saver add-on is my best friend. (A couple weeks ago, I realized that maybe the reason Alice was running so sluggishly was that she had eight windows and close to a hundred and twenty open tabs. Oops.) I keep thinking that oh, that looks interesting, I’ll email/bookmark/blog/tag that on delicious later.

I am happy to say that I don’t have a hundred plus tabs open today, but I do have a gradual accumulation. Here are some of the bits and pieces I’ve come across lately:

I am intrigued by this: Penguin to release last Green Gables book in its entirety “Penguin Canada says it will publish the final volume of the Anne of Green Gables series in its entirety for the first time ever. The Blythes Are Quoted was slated to be the ninth title in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s popular series about head-strong orphan Anne Shirley, but it was never published during the author’s lifetime.”

If I was not insanely busy packing and moving this summer, I would be signing up for the One Shot Southeast Asia blog challenge over at Chasing Ray! (Funny how moving five blocks is just aslabour-intensive as moving across town…)

Booklights has a great list of ways to keep your kids reading over the summer. It’s geared towards kids in the early reading stages. (My unsolicited non-parent-or-teacher librarianly suggestion is for the love of all that’s holy, put down the curriculum lists for the upcoming grade and let them read all the fun stuff they want to. Bring on the Garfield comics, Star Wars novelizations, Rainbow Fairies, Geronimo Stilton and Draw 50 everything books! What else is summer for?)

On a slightly related slant, this article from Parents’ Choice, What-Kids-Who-Don’t-Like-To-Read-Like-To-Read has some good insights, types of books that appeal to reluctant readers, and a booklist of suggestions. (Though it’s a pretty American-centric list, there are some good picks!)

From Fuse 8,Help! My Ten-Year-Old Wants to Read Twilight has some great suggestions for Twilight alternatives, based on what appeals about the book to the reader in the first place.

And if none of the above appeal to you, try Seven Tips for Quitting a Book.

If you want to read through some thoughtful discussion, head to Mitali Perkins’ blog:

Should publishers edit beloved children’s books like LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE or THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA to eliminate racial or ethnic stereotyping? When (if ever) is it okay?

The First Nations Communities Read project is awesome in its own right, and its existence makes me happy. This year’s book is Which Way Should I Go by Sylvia Olsen, Ron Martin, and Kasia Charko.

On the useful link side of things, this author name pronunciation guide from Teaching Books has the authors themselves pronouncing their names for you, with all the style, verve and additional commentary that you would expect. (I’m particularily fond of Jane Yolen and Mo Willems’s entires.)

Here is an interview with Neil Gaiman at Shelf Awareness, immediately post-Newbery. The best bit:

Q: So what do you think about children’s books?

A: They’re terrible; they should be banned. What kind of question is that? I think they’re wonderful. When I was a kid, I was a kid with a book. As far as I was concerned, had you asked me at the age of seven what the most important things in the world are, I’d probably say the first six Narnia books, the first three Mary Poppins books. . . . Had I discovered The Hobbit yet? Not yet. The books that took pride of place on my shelves were Stig of the Dump by Clive King, Tales of Ancient Egypt by Roger Lancelyn Green. I was the kind of kid who, during my summer holidays, would persuade my parents to drop me off at the library in the morning, and I’d spend my day there. Sometimes I’d pack a lunch. At 6:30 when they closed, I’d walk home.

Children’s fiction, for me back then, was the most important thing there is. It has a holy place and position that adult fiction doesn’t have. Adult fiction is a wonderful thing and enriching to the soul and mind, and it takes you to great places. But children’s fiction can change the world and give you a refuge from the intolerable. It can give you a place of safety and show you the world is not bounded by the world you live in–there’s more than that.

I would love to have that last bit condensed into a t-shirt-sized quote…

 

New Canadian GLBT YA books

I have been remiss in updating! I have not one, not two, but SEVEN more titles added to my list of Canadian YA GLBT books! (I know, it’s a bit of a specific niche, but one near and dear to me all the same.) I haven’t had a chance to read everything on this list yet, so the blurbs are all the back of the book publishers’ copy. But I can tell you that I’m looking forward to trying to read them all.

Evil? by Timothy Carter. “Stuart Bradley knows there are a lot of reasons people in his small, conservative hometown might not approve of him. He’s openly gay, he’s mouthy in church, and he conjures demons in his spare time—the usual. So Stuart knows something is odd when his little brother catches him ’self-pleasuring’ in the shower and, before he knows it, an angry mob is chasing down every teen who ever had an ‘impure’ thought. Stuart soon discovers that the new preacher in town is more than he seems. He’s a fallen angel-fallen because he became too obsessed with a certain harmless adolescent activity. If Stuart and his demon sidekick don’t stop him, blindness is going to be the least of anyone’s worries.”

Out by Sandra Diersch “No one in Alex’s world is who they seemed to be. Alex struggles with his faith when he witnesses a church member cheating on his wife and learns that his brother is gay. When his brother is brutally attacked, Alex is forced to decide where is loyalties lie and what he really believes in.”

 

 

 

The Uninvited by Tim Wynne Jones . “Mimi Shapiro had a disturbing freshman year at NYU, thanks to a foolish affair with a professor who still haunts her caller ID. So when her artist father, Marc, offers the use of his remote Canadian cottage, she’s glad to hop in her Mini Cooper and drive up north. The house is fairy-tale quaint, and the key is hidden right where her dad said it would be, so she’s shocked to find someone already living there — Jay, a young musician, who is equally startled to meet Mimi and immediately accuses her of leaving strange and threatening tokens inside: a dead bird, a snakeskin, a cricket sound track embedded in his latest composition. But Mimi has just arrived, so who is responsible? And more alarmingly, what does the intruder want? Part gripping thriller, part family drama, this fast-paced novel plays out in alternating viewpoints, in a pastoral setting that is evocative and eerie — a mysterious character in its own right.” Secondary GLBT characters: Jay has two moms.

Will’s Garden by Lee Maracle “As Will prepares for his Becoming Man Ceremony, relatives fill the house, bringing with them memories, tradition and customs. As they work together beading, carving and cooking, Will reflects on their stories of working on railroad construction or surviving Residential Schools. The Ceremony takes on new importance for Will. After the Ceremony Will is inspired to take action to make changes in his own life. An outcast at his high school, where racism is commonplace, he befriends the ‘nerds,’ comes to terms with his new friend’s homosexuality and commits himself to a future of change. He is transformed into the man that he promised to become in his Becoming Man Ceremony. Maracle, of Salish and Cree ancestry, is an award-winning author.”

Inferno by Robin Stevenson. “Dante thinks high school is an earthly version of hell. She hates her new home in the suburbs, her best friend has moved away, her homeroom teacher mocks her and her mother is making her attend a social skills group for teenage girls. When a stranger shows up at school and hands Dante a flyer that reads: Woof, woof. You are not a dog. Why are you going to obedience school?, Dante thinks she’s found a soul mate. Someone who understands. Someone else who wants to make real changes in the world. But there are all kinds of ways of bringing about change…and some are more dangerous than others.”

Skim by Mariko Tamaki, illustrated by Jillian Tamaki. “It’s the early nineties and “Skim” is Kimberly Keiko Cameron, a not-slim, would-be Wiccan goth stuck in a private girls’ school in Toronto. When a classmate’s boyfriend kills himself because he was rumoured to be gay, the school goes into mourning overdrive, each clique trying to find something to hold on to and something to believe in. It’s a weird time to fall in love, but that’s high school, and that’s what happens to Skim when she starts to meet in secret with her neo-hippie English teacher, Ms. Archer. But when Ms. Archer abruptly leaves, Skim struggles to cope with her confusion and isolation, armed with her trusty journal and a desire to shed old friendships while cautiously approaching new ones.”

Bonus international title from a Canadian publisher:

Girl from Mars by Tamara Bach, translated by Shelley Tanaka. “Miriam is fifteen and she has lived in the same little town her whole life, going to school with the same kids who know everything about her. But now she’s in high school and wishing she lived in a big city where she could meet new people and see new things. In other words, like fifteen-year-olds everywhere, Miriam is desperately waiting for her life to start happening. Something, anything — a first love, perhaps. And then love comes, in a completely unexpected way, when Miriam meets a new classmate, Laura. Suddenly, life is very complicated and unsettling, as Miriam finds herself lying to her girlfriends, avoiding her brother’s probing questions, and second guessing every move she makes. At the same time she’s constantly on edge trying to figure out Laura’s moods and exactly how her arrogant friend Philip fits into her life. Then Philip, Miriam and Laura take a weekend trip to the big city — a trip that makes everything clear, and more confusing than ever.”

 

Bloggish housekeeping and a new addiction

Well, I still have five books from last weekend waiting to be blogged (and anything else I’ve read lately that catches my interest–probable picks are The Entertainer and the Dybbuk by Sid Fleischman, Half World by Hiromi Goto, and recent additions to two great middle-school mystery series–Enola Holmes and Gilda Joyce.)

In the meantime, I’ve started updating my blogroll on this site to include a lot of the cool blogs found in the vast, sprawling folders of my RSS feed reader. (Got to the book blogs, but not the author blogs, which will have to wait for another night.)

Meanwhile, if you ever want to get anything done again, I suggest you avoid the horribly addictive Plants vs Zombies game. Okay, click if you must, but don’t say I didn’t warn you…

 

48 Hour Book Challenge: The End Results!

I am now done the Forty-Eight Hour Book Challenge! I have accomplished:

• 860 minutes reading
• 355 minutes blogging
• 90 minutes networking

Sum total: 21 hours, 45 minutes, 3334 pages, and 14 books! I read,:

• Castration Celebration by Jake Wizner
• Sea Change by Aimee Friedman
• Death in the Air by Shane Peacock
• The War of Jenkins’ Ear by Michael Morpurgo
• Frost by Nicole Luiken
• Yesterday’s Magic by Pamela F. Service
• Girl from Mars by Tamara Bach
• Inferno by Robin Stevenson
• Wart by Anna Myers
• The Blue Helmet by William Bell
• Sister Wife by Shelley Hrdlitschka
• Daughter of the Flames by Zoe Marriott
• Five Minutes More by Darlene Ryan
• The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

And here’s a visual or two:

This is my first year, and I think I’ll definitely try it again next year! I hope to be organized enough to donate to a charity per either hours or books read, too. I decided to sign up at the last minute Friday night, and to use just the books I already had at home.

It’s an eclectic mix of books, and only about a third of it is things that I’ve deliberately chosen. All of the library books I have out right now are adult, not kids or YA (which is very unusual for me, considering which department I run!) but I’ve just come off the heavy duty reading of being part of a local book award committee. After six months of a near-steady diet of new Canadian middle school fiction and nonfiction, the lack of restriction is a giddy thing (but don’t get me wrong, there were some fantastic books!). Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to read books that have been waiting for me at home, and library books I’ve had out for a while before bringing home everything else that’s been piling up on my mental to-read list, so that factored into what I had on hand. I also had a pile of YA ARCs that are going to end up in the teen prize bag at my library this summer, so those also got added to the mix, and were a big chunk of what I read. Next year, I think I’ll try to assemble a stack of books I’ve been dying to read but haven’t go to yet, and see what that does to my numbers.

I’ve known for a long time that I read ridiculously fast. *shrug* It’s not speed-reading, just my natural pace. I think it’s some fluke of genetics, because I always have. And it used to annoy me as a kid, because I couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t believe that I’d finished that book already. I don’t think my retention is quite as high as some people who read slower, but I have a pretty lousy head for straight memorization and recall on random facts in general. It does mean I re-read books I love multiple times, which a lot of people don’t quite get.

And apparently, comparing my blogging time to my reading time, I write slow. It’s not my typing speed, either. This challenge has been good for me in forcing me to sit down and blog. I find it’s really (really) easy to slide into a habit of thinking, oh, I’ll write about that later, because the reading is the easy part. Now to just make sure I blog about those last five books… but not tonight!

 

48HBC: The Home Stretch…. and we’re done!

I got a late start this morning, but was aiming for another four or five book dent in my pile! I slept in–I have no illusions about winning, since I am not giving up sleep. (I needed catch-up time this weeekend if I’m going to make it through next week.) I do admit to standing in the middle of the kitchen, making coffee and waiting for toast with a book in my hand, however.

11:45 -1:00 Blogging (15 min) and networking (60 min). I needed to spend some time wandering about online and checking out everyone else’s blogs, and let my brain digest the books I read last night.

1:00 – 1:35 The Blue Helmet by William Bell (oh so good! nuanced look at the inherent concept of violence)

2:00 – 3:15 Blogging (some breaks for food and fiddling with my itunes playlist beforehand).

3:15 – 4:10 Sister Wife (also amazing! child brides, fictional story loosely based on Bountiful, BC)

4:25 – 4:45, 5:45 – 6:50 Daughter of Flames by Zoe Marriott (solid fantasy with a kick-ass girl leader to save the day)

7:00 – 7:15 Networking break!

7:15 – 7:45 Five Minutes More by Darlene Ryan (relentlessly painful look at a girl whose father has just died.)

7:45 – 8:15, 8:45-10:15, The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan (Totally targeted at the Supernatural crowd, but a surprisingly good brothers-who-fight-demons story)

Annnnd I’m done! Summary post to follow when I have caught my breathe.

 

48HBC: And we’re into the second half…

11:00 pm, after food and a hot shower, and I think I can make it through at least one more book tonight. If not two.

11:15 pm-12:10 am, Inferno by Robin Stevenson

12:10 am -1:10 am, Wart by Anna Myers

1:10 am – 1:15 am, blogging

Total thus far: nine books, 13 hours and twenty minutes. How many books and hours can I cram into tomorrow? We shall see!

 

48HBC: The Almost Half-way Update

Official Start Time: 10:15 pm, Friday, June 5, 2009.

Friday

10:15-11:15 pm: Castration Celebration by Jake Wizner

11:15-11:30 Blogging time

11:30-12:30 Sea Change by Aimee Friedman

10:00 -11:30, Death in the Air by Shane Peacock

11:30 – 12:15, The War of Jenkins’ Ear by Michael Morpurgo

12:15 – 1:00, 1:30-2:10, Frost by Nicole Luiken

2:10 – 4:30, Massive blogging catch-up time

4:30 – 5:15, Networking break!

5:15 – 6:05, Yesterday’s Magic by Pamela F. Service

6:40 – 7:15, Girl from Mars by Tamara Bach

7:15 – 8:45, Massive blogging catch-up time

8:45-9:00, Networking break!

(9:00: break to bring in the plants because of the FROST WARNING. Gah.)

Books so far: Seven. Not as great as I’d hoped, BUT THE NIGHT IS STILL YOUNG!
Pages so far: 1579
Reading time: 420 min.
Blogging time: 225 min.
Total words blogged: Approximately 3,500. Because I am a crazy person. Also, I should switch to the desktop instead of the laptop because my wrists and mousing hand are sore.
Total time: 11 hours, 5 min.

 

Death in the Air by Shane Peacock

Book three of the 48-hour Book Challenge binge. You will notice a distinct lack of proof-reading in my blogging today… I am not forgoing sleep or food.But can I just say? Love is when your spouse says, while making a necessary trip to pick up coffee and other essentials, “I’ll drive so you can read.”

When we left the young Sherlock Holmes at the end of the first book in this series, he had solved the Whitechapel murders (though Inspector LeStrange had claimed all the credit) at a devastating personal cost. The son of a Jewish merchant and an upper class woman cast out by her family, he’s inherited a keen intelligence and love of leaning from both his parents, and as the reader knows, is destined for greatness. At the age of thirteen, he’s not there yet, and is desperately craving acknowledgement and adoration.

His next big case lands at his feet, quite literally. When a trapeze artist plummets to his death at Sherlock’s feet and gasps out “Silence… me…” Sherlock immediately suspects foul play. He’s also in a perfect position, attending the death-defying performance at the Crystal Gardens, to observe the suspiscious marks on the ill-fated trapeze before the evidence is trampled by the circus-going crowds. But the police are ill-inclined to listen to him, and he’s proudly determined to catch the killer and demand a reward. Since the tragic events of the first book, he’s taken on a job and lodgings with an eccentric apothecary, and set his sights on the lofty goal of college.

The trapeze artist survived the fall and is lingering unconscious on the brink of death. His young apprentice seems remarkably unaffected by his master’s accident. There’s a lover’s triangle at work inside the circus, and everyone involved seems to have a mysterious past. Meanwhile, a series of robberies are sweeping London, a large sum of money has vanished from the safe at the Crystal Palace, and the apothecary is on the verge of being evicted.

Now the reward money is crucial. It’s going to take all of Sherlock’s wits and wiles, some skill at interrogation and deception, and information grudgingly extracted from Malefactor, the young gang leader of the Trafalager Street Irregulars, to put together the pieces.

Peacock’s got a lofty style that suits young Sherlock perfectly, and there’s a wealth of tangible detail here about the underbelly of Victorian London, from show business to deadly back alleys and warehouses. The plot’s suitably convoluted, darkly twisted, and full of betrayal. You can already see the pieces fitting together that will make him into the adult Sherlock Holmes we all know. If anything, this one’s even better than the first book. I, for one, am looking forward to book three.

 

48HBC: Friday

I’m going to make individual book posts in the morning, because I need about ten hours of sleep before I am going to be able to say anything coherent. (I’m also tracking everything I’m reading tagged as 48HBC09 on my Good Reads account here.)

Official Start Time: 10:15 pm, Friday, June 5, 2009.

10:15-11:15 pm: Castration Celebration by Jake Wizner (Unabashedly uncensored, entertaining and enough real substance to hold it all together.)

11:15-11:30 Blogging time

11:30-12:30 Sea Change by Aimee Friedman (a good summer beach-y book, but I wanted more fantasy than romance, and got the reverse. Still, engaging and a surprisingly quick read.)

So far, so good… two books down, thirty-eight to go… I am so not going to make it through all of by to-read pile this weekend. But! That just means I have almost forty books to choose from!

 

In which I am ambitious, and aim to read. A lot.

I have no social commitments this weekend. I am not working, and have no plans to go anywhere. We’ve finished reading and set the shortlist for the Rocky Mountain Book Award Committee, so I can read whatever I want again! This is a good thing. This is a very good thing.

This weekend is The Fourth Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge.

(Sunday is also International Read What’s On Your Shelf Day, so I am totally counting it as two-for-one.)

My to-read pile, let me show it to you:

The right-hand side is kids’ and YA books (a handful of library books, things I own I haven’t got to yet, and a pile of ARCS I picked up at the Alberta Library Conference that are ultimately destined for the teen program prize bag at my library), the left hand side is adult books (library books, owned books, and a couple books my mom lent me at Christmas.)

Okay. Let the challenge begin!