Why a Good Book is a Secret Door

Mac Barnett is the author of fifteen books for children. He was the executive director of 826LA, a nonprofit writing center, and founded the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, a convenience store for time travelers. In this talk about creativity and wonder, he explains why kids are the ideal readers of literary fiction -- and what adults can learn from them about imagination and the willing suspension of disbelief.

International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

Women's activists have marked November 25th as a day against violence since 1981. This date came from the brutal assassination in 1960, of the three Mirabal sisters, political activists in the Dominican Republic. Governments, international organizations and NGOs are invited to organize activities designed to raise public awareness of the problem on this day.

 Violence against women continues to be a global pandemic and impacts on, and impedes, progress in many areas, including poverty eradication, combating HIV/AIDS, and peace and security. Violence against women is a consequence of discrimination against women, in law and also in practice, and of persisting inequalities between men and women.

 Physical. Sexual. Psychological. Economic. Violence against women takes many forms and affects women from childhood to old age. The roots of violence against women lie in persistent discrimination against women. Women who experience violence suffer a range of health problems and their ability to participate in society is diminished. This violence does not observe distinctions of culture, religion, race or age. It harms families, communities across generations and reinforces other violence prevalent

So how do we address this in the library?  There are several books available that can help approach these sensitive subjects with our young patrons on both an individual level and as a global issue.

I like that these books use animals as characters rather than people.  I think that it allows young readers to distance themselves from frightening situations without taking away any of the impact and validity of the situations described.

A Terrible Thing Happened by Margaret M. Holmes
Sherman Smith saw the most terrible thing happen. At first he tried to forget about it, but something inside him started to bother him. He felt nervous and had bad dreams. Then he met someone who helped him talk about the terrible thing, and made him feel better.

Holmes has written a book that doesn't pretend that thing will go back to the way they were, but instead lets the reader know that many emotions can result from a tragedy such as anger, sadness, fear and that acting out can result when these emotions are hidden or ignored. Finding someone to talk to can help. There is also some information for caregivers at the end. We never learn what the terrible thing that happened to Sherman is, making this book relatable for all kinds of situations: bullying, divorce, abuse, death, accident, crime, and so on.

On a Dark, Dark Night by Sara B. Pierce
A bear cub sees his father strike his mother. He runs away, and is comforted by his friend Moose, who brings in another friend, Eagle. Eagle, taking on the role of the police officer, goes to the father bear and talks to him. Eagle brings him before the animal council, which Pierce calls “the animals’ version of our judicial system.” The council decides that the father bear can no longer stay in the village. Several seasons pass, the father returns, and he and the mother bear begin to talk about whether he can return home or whether he needs more time alone. The story leaves what happens next unsaid making the book suitable for a variety of situations.

The Drinkable Book

These Books Can Purify Contaminated Drinking Water

The Drinkable Book, the first-ever Manual that teaches safe water tips and serves as a tool to kill deadly waterborne diseases - providing the reader with an opportunity to create clean drinkable water on each page. The book can provide a user with clean water for up to 4 years.

In developing countries millions of people die every year from contaminated water. Scientists at 2 US universities, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia, have developed the first book of it’s kind to attempt to eradicate these numbers, the Drinkable Book for the Water is Life campaign.

This book not only teaches the recipients the important ground rules regarding hygiene and sanitation, for eg. “See a doctor if you experience any of these symptoms of drinking unsafe water…”, printed in both English and the relevant local language of each country, but the book also comes in a water filter box.

Each page of the book are actually 2 separate water filters, which provides 60 days of safe drinking water. Simply slide a page into the filter slot and pour the water through it to purify the water.

The Drinkable Book can help reduce the bacteria in contaminated water by more than 99.9%, making it safe drinking water for millions of people in the developing world.
How very cool! 
source: Article excerpts from original by Niki King from carvecases.com

A good bookstore is hard to title

11 Great Bookstore Names And How They Got Them

Via blogs.constantcontact.com

A century ago, when naming a bookstore, you slapped the owner’s name on the front awning and called it a day. See: Misters William Barnes and Gilbert Clifford Noble when they hooked up in 1917. But today, most bookstore names are cuter, flashier, and funnier than “Boss #1 and Boss #2 Books” — because they have to be. “Smith and Jones Booksellers” just says, “We hold the lease on this establishment which contains books.” A name like “Read Handed” or “Buy the Book” says, “We got books and they live in a fun place tended to by fun people. Perhaps you’d like visiting more than book shopping via your phone between putting on your left and right shoes?”

Great bookstore names can be sassy, cute, inscrutable, or groan-inducing. When they work, they remind us of the creativity and moxie that makes us love bookstores a whole crazy lot. Click HERE for the rest of the article by Kevin Smokler.

via http://www.buzzfeed.com/kevinsmokler/great-bookstore-names

Are we Running out of Intellectual Bandwidth?

Online Newspapers.  E-Books. Streaming Movies. E-mail. Social Media. Skype. List-Servs. Blogs.  
With all the information we seek out electronically, are we exhausting our ability to keep up with it?  Are we at the tipping point? And, will this new direction of how books could be delivered to us help or exhaust us.  Check out the following article by Ryan Tate re-posted from Wired.com

The Future of Books Looks a Lot Like Netflix

Image courtesy Apple

Struggling against plunging prices and a shrinking audience, book publishers think they’ve found a compelling vision for the future: magazines.

Today, the San Francisco-based literary startup Plympton launched an online fiction service calledRooster. It’s sold by subscription. It’s priced by the month. And it automatically delivers regular content to your iPhone or iPad. In other words, it’s a book service that looks a lot like a magazine service. And it’s just the latest example of how books are being packaged like magazines.

With Rooster, readers pay $5 per month in exchange for a stream of bite-sized chunks of fiction. Each chunk takes just 15 minutes or so to read, and over the course of a month, they add up to two books. The service builds on the success of Plympton’s Daily Lit, which emails you classic literature in five-minute installments.

Originally, as part of a partnership with Amazon, Plympton focused on selling its serials one volume at a time. In other words, you’d sign up for a series like “Hacker Mom” for $3.99, receive each episode on your Kindle, and then be done. The company then moved to subscriptions after co-founders Yael Goldstein Love and Jennifer 8. Lee realized Plympton knew far more about its readers than any traditional publisher.

Whereas an old-line book maker sells to bookstores, Plympton deals directly with customers. It knows their email addresses and could at least theoretically use their reading and purchase history to tailor the content of subscription streams (though with only one subscription channel, the company has no immediate plans to do so). Meanwhile, production costs are significantly lower with ebooks, and distribution is essentially free. That means more money can be plowed into online marketing for subscription channels. So, whereas the idea of mailing a monthly batch of books was ungainly in the old physical book market, it has become feasible in the ebook world, feasible not just because digital distribution is easy but because online publishers know and build audiences better.

Rooster follows in the footsteps of the whole-book literary subscriptions offered by indie Brooklyn outfit Emily Books, the all-you-can-eat genre subscriptions offered by F + W Media, and more general subscriptions offered by the likes of Oyster and Scribd. Tim Waterstone, owner of the UK bookstore Waterstones, has also announced Read Petite, a forthcoming short-fiction streaming service.

So now that we know that it’s possible to deliver books like magazines, to sell them like magazines, and to target them at clusters of readers like magazines, the big question looms: Do book enthusiasts actually want to engage with literature the way they engage with magazines? And can they afford to? After shelling out every month for Spotify and Netflix subscriptions, for New York Times digital, for electronic tablet magazines, for immersive online videogames, for online file storage, and, oh right, for high-speed internet, will people sign up for yet another monthly charge? Will they have the intellectual bandwidth to consume what they bought? And will they come to trust or despise the online studios pushing books onto their phones and iPads?

Those are difficult questions to answer. But such is the world of modern book publishing.

Top 10 Most Read Books

I have (suprisingly) read 4 of these titles. And half of another 4 of them.

How many have you read?

True!

Books Don't Sleep

The Joy of Books Video posted on YouTube.
I always said we should shelve the books by colour

9. Agnes and the Hitman

What a fun ride!!!! The dialogue flies as fast as the bullets in this offering from one of my go-to authors, Jennifer Crusie. In this novel she pairs up with Bob Mayer to deliver a fast paced, sharp tongued mystery-adventure-romance with great characters and a lot of bodies.

Agness Crandall has wagered everything she owns, literally, on being able to pull off the wedding for one of the Keys royalty. With her fiance-caterer, she will get to keep her newly purchased house if she can successfully plan and execute the perfect wedding for the former owner. Enter into her kitchen a gunman who ignores her tasty creations and heads straight for her dog Rhett. As she fights him off, a stranger - one incredibly hot and dangerous, and did I mention HOT stranger, climbs in through her window to save her. Soon Agnes is up to her blender in more dognappers, bodies, mobsters, cancellations, a nervous bride, a meddling grandmother and a couple of flamingos. Yes, flamingos. And why is her fiance/caterer avoiding her? Luckily she has Shane and his deadly aim to protect and comfort her. She also has her frying pan which may prove deadlier than the hitman.

I would love to see this as a movie: hitmen, wedding mayhem, fiances, frying pans and meat forks flying, cooking columns, retired mobsters, secret rooms, ex-fiances,hot baddies, crazy best friends, a heroine who isn't a size two and can cook the way I wish I could, humour - har, a wonderdog named Rhett and the Venus de Milo. What more could a gal need to pass a rainy night with?

It's action, drama, crime, romance, mystery, humor and full of characters that feel like the lovable, insane, trigger-happy family you always wanted. Thoroughly entertaining, Crusie and Mayer combine to give, my fav, author Evanovich some competition with attitude.

Book # 9 of my 50 book challenge

No more room on your shelf? How about your walls?

Spineless Classics offers favorite books...on your wall.

Available as a poster, you can have the whole book laid out before you - right from the very first words to...The End.

8. THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

by Mark HaddonFifteen year-old Christopher Boone is found clutching the body of a neighbour’s dog who has been stabbed to death with a garden fork. The dead dog’s owner calls the police and Christopher is questioned and the situation escalates. Insisting that he found the dog already dead, Christopher decides to investigate the murder of his neighbour’s dog Wellington on his own. Logically working around his father’s protests, he begins interviewing a list of possible suspects. His investigation creates a division between him and his father who is now forbidding further investigation and discovers secrets that will change everything. Encourages by his teacher to write a book, he writes about what has happened to Wellington the dog and in the process reveals how he sees the world and in turn, how the world sees him.

Original and captivating from the first few pages, this novel was a surprise and delight. The unique narrative offers an invitation to see the inner world of Christopher. His own condition is never identified but the reader quickly realises that Christopher has a singular way of seeing the world and moderating his behaviour.
"My memory is like a film….And when people ask me to remember something I can simply press Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause like on a video recorder….If someone says to me, 'Christopher, tell me what your mother was like,' I can rewind to lots of different scenes and say what she was like in those scenes."Innocent and literal, he sees the world in linear terms. Truth and order are how he organizes his world and he does not understand when others speak in euphemisms or emotionally. He is a fan of Sherlock Holmes because he sees what is and what is not and does not concern himself with what might be or could be. This perspective is quickly addictive. Both humerous and heartbreaking at times, I couldn't put this book down.

Book # 8 of my 50 book challenge

Mo Williems asks: "Why Books?

(From an article adapted on hbook.com from the 2011 Zena Sutherland Lecture by Mo Williems-May 6, 2011, at the Chicago Public Library.)

In the past it was enough to say that if you get a book into a kid’s hands, you’re creating a “lifelong reader.” But why does that matter? Do we really want “lifelong readers”? Shouldn’t they at least get to take occasional bathroom breaks? Why is this extraneous question here in the middle of these other ones? And, what does reading do that makes it so special?

To be honest, books as we know them are looking pretty vulnerable right now. They can’t talk back to you. If you shake them, they don’t do things. You can’t turn them on. They don’t make sounds. They don’t have word jumbles or other not-terribly-fun games. What do they do? With all the new technological possibilities, why not file Books between Betamax and Eight-Track Tapes?

I’ve thought about this very seriously of late and I’m not out of the rabbit hole yet, so first let me just go through my own personal journey with the nitty-gritty of making books to see if there is value to be found there.

In the past eight years or so, I’ve written and illustrated numerous books, yet I really never know what I’m doing when I create a book. That is why I love it. It’s an adventure with no guarantee that it will work out in the end. I am alone in a sea of ideas, hoping to catch a current that will lead to an undiscovered land. Well, I’m not completely alone. I have the structure of my past work, and I am guided through the storms by this simple mantra: always think of your audience; never think for your audience.

This is done by putting as little as possible into the final work so as to leave room for my audience to enhance the story. As a simple test, if I re-read one of my manuscripts and I understand exactly what is happening, then the manuscript has too many words. And if I look at the images without the words and I can fully understand the story, there are too many drawings. It is only right when both words and image need each other to make any sense. They need to be as close to incomprehensible, separately, as possible.

Yes, I make incomprehensible books for illiterates.

Incomprehensible also because I never know what the book I’ve made “means.” That’s my audience’s job. You, the reader, create meaning out of the story; I just set the table. The fundamental truth of this was driven home when I read two early reviews for my first picture book, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The first one said, “I love this book because it teaches perseverance. It teaches kids never to give up. To fight on.” The second review said, “I love this book because it teaches kids to value the word ‘no,’ to know when to stop.”

Here’s the thing: both reviews were right. Their authors each brought their own selves to the story and in their minds created meanings that had never occurred to me. They became the co-authors of the book, implanting the meaning that was purposefully omitted, or perhaps obscured. Because, truth be told, I don’t have any answers. I’m not interested in them.

Why would I want to write about things I know? I already know them. I prefer to write about things I don’t know, about things that perplex me, create a sense of wonder in me, or are simply weird. So I write about things like: What is a friend? How do you keep a friend? How does what you do by accident change your environment and how do you come to grips with that? Wouldn’t it be cool to drive a bus? You know, the sort of fundamental, deep emotional questions that we all have. (All rules have exceptions and my second book, Time to Pee! is one. Personally, I’ve been urinating with great success for years, so I did know what I was writing about that time. But I wasn’t sure why my kid was reluctant to do it in a particular room.)

Writing is, like any athletics, a learned skill refined only by consistent and strenuous workouts over time. I learned how to write from years and years of writing and performing sketch comedy, making short animated films, and writing cartoon strips, all of which stemmed from a deep abiding love of sketch comedy. Bill Cosby’s albums, the Monty Python television series, Peanuts comic strips—they are all perfect sketches. Clean, pure, but structured with a deep understanding of the world and how it works.

I learned how to write for children, however, with great reluctance. As fate would have it, in my strivings to be a sketch comedy writer I found myself being hired to write sketch comedy for a show that targeted children, called Sesame Street. At first I didn’t care that I was working on a kiddie show; I was writing sketch! Just like my pals on MTV or in the hipster clubs. If I squinted just right, the “kids” part of my work disappeared.

Then, over a season or two, something unexpected happened. I realized that writing for Sesame Street wasn’t easier, or even equally as difficult, as the sketch material I’d been doing previously. It was harder. I couldn’t use cultural modifiers: the entire world of pop culture references, that lazy backbone of sketch, was lost to me. Arc de Triomphe, Super Bowl, Cadillac. Those are just silly sounds to kids; they have no emotional meaning. Not because kids are stupid, but because they’re new. They just got here. All they have is jealousy, anger, love, joy, fear. Writing for a kid means you can’t exploit genres and fads and fashions. The only weapon left in your arsenal is truth.

It was revelatory and life changing (and frankly liberating: I didn’t have to keep up on pop culture, freeing up lots of time for adventures). My path was set; now I wanted—no, I was compelled—to write for people who were just starting out in life.

This began a period of great introspection. I thought long and hard about my childhood and slowly realized a fundamental truth that is the complete opposite of what everyone tells you about childhood: namely, it sucks to be a kid.

Certainly, in contrast to the life of a grownup, kids have it hard. Every piece of furniture is built to the wrong scale for you. You have to ask permission to urinate. And some adult might say no. Try this as a test: next time you’re at a dinner party, say, “May I go to the bathroom?” Then imagine your hostess saying, “No, I don’t think so. You’re staying right there. And finish those smelly vegetables. I know you want to retch. I don’t care. Eat them.”

And kids don’t have years of experience to fall back on. Every disappointment, every failure, is a world-stopping first. How do they survive? How did we all survive that? I’m not sure. But recently I’ve realized they have one shield in their lives that most of us adults have lost: they haven’t yet learned to be embarrassed.

And that’s what embarrassment is: a learned behavior.

So TV got me to want to write for unembarrassed kids. But television wasn’t done teaching me an essential key to writing.

At some point in my career I found myself being asked to create a TV show. Foolishly, I was told I could do anything I wanted; more foolishly, I did. I created a show called Sheep in the Big City. Has anybody heard of the show? Raise your hands. Okay. You six guys. Great. You made up sixty percent of my audience.

For the rest of you, the show was about a sheep. And a big city. The sheep, named Sheep, is being chased by General Specific and his henchman Private Public, members of a top-secret military organization named The Top-Secret Military Organization trying to capture this urban sheep to put it in a sheep-powered ray gun. Now why not use another sheep, you ask? Well, because they had already built the ray gun to his specifications. Mixed in with the episodes are lots of spoof commercials for products—the Oxymoron Brand of useless products.

And every episode ended with thirty seconds of a ranting Swede.

Almost as quickly as it hit the air this show was canceled. Can you believe it?

I couldn’t.

I’d worked so long and so hard, ensuring that every joke was as funny, or as weird, as possible. Still, very, very few people enjoyed it. I was flummoxed.

The real reason why the show was canceled came not from the network but from a ten-year-old on some message board who wrote, “I don’t like this show because the writer is trying too hard.” Trying too hard? That shocked me to my core.

I could not think of another industry where this would be a problem. “Oh, man. Y’know that plumber, Joe? What is up with that guy? He shows up early. He comes in, he plumbs the hell out of the house, doesn’t take a single cigarette break, I don’t see butt once. He’s working soooo hard…I don’t trust him.”

But in writing it’s different. The people watching Sheep in the Big City or reading my stories are not interested in me or the work I do. It shouldn’t look like work to them. It’s just a story. A magical thing that suddenly, effortlessly, appears and entertains and provokes. Certainly such a thing can’t be made. The lesson is, if you’re not invisible, you’re not doing your job. So, work harder until no one sees you.

I should have known that. I should have known better.

You know, I started out doing stand-up comedy when I was in high school. And the reason I did was because the comedy club was the only place I could go and be guaranteed that no one would laugh at me. But over time you develop those muscles. You write joke after joke after joke after joke, and, ever so slowly, you learn what doesn’t work. What you learn is not “what is funny” but “what is not funny.” So when you’re writing, you write to get rid of all the not-funny stuff until what’s left, hopefully, works. I want to have as few words as possible. I want the whole story to just be hanging by a thread. So my audience will become invested in it and save it.

It’s the same with my images. Everything I do is reductive. I make my drawings as simple as possible to the point of abstraction. Put as little in as possible. Because kids can “make” books, I consciously design my characters so that they can be easily copied by a five-year-old.

Every month, I get a box of fan mail—it’s just awesome. Kids send me their books. Their actual books. Don’t Let the Pigeon Operate the Catapult. Don’t Let the Pigeon Audit Your Neighbor. The Pigeon Gets a Cell Phone. All kinds of just amazing stuff, and that’s the highest possible compliment; that’s the ultimate goal.

It’s how I got started. I started out drawing Charlie Brown pictures. I loved it so much I wrote to Charles Schulz once when I was five and said, “Dear Mr. Schulz, may I have your job when you die?” Man, I loved Charlie Brown. I grew up in the early seventies, and every other pop cultural character was blissfully happy. Remember? The landscape was filled with gleeful rodents on lithium running across the screen. I felt bad that I wasn’t as happy as those mice. But there was always “Chuck.” A kid whose life was worse than mine. Awesome.

That comic strip was printed on cheap newsprint. It was meant to be thrown away, unlike a piece of art. But it was useful. It was useful to me. That corner of the newspaper that showed up every day gave me more consolation in my lonely childhood world than anyone or anything.

That’s what I want my books to be: utilitarian. You don’t drink coffee out of a mug because it’s a work of art. You drink out of a mug because it works, then you worry if it is pretty or not. In the same way, whatever ideas you’re going to pour into my book, I need to make sure it can hold them first. Because that’s all a book can do. It can hold just two ideas: the author’s and the audience’s.

But the book doesn’t work, it can’t work, unread.

So back to my question of “Why books?” What if books are better because they don’t do things, because they can’t do things? What if the thing that makes books great, that makes them essential, is that books need us? They’re simple. You invest in them and become part of them. You contribute. They can be read, but they can also be played. I’m not really interested in you guys reading my books a hundred times; read it twenty times and then make your own story. Go from consuming a story to creating your own. This is a magical thing to me.

I have a running machine in my house, and if I set that machine for twenty minutes of fast running and leave the room to get some tea and fried eggs, it doesn’t know the difference! Nor, I might add, does it care.

And I think that’s what most enhanced digital books are at this point. With all their bells and whistles and word jumbles and assorted narrative killers, after we turn them on, they don’t need us. Turn it on and leave the room, and the book will read itself.

But a real book is helpless. It needs us desperately. We have to pull it off the shelf. We have to open it up. We have to turn the pages, one by one. We even have to use our imagination to make it work. What does Elephant Gerald sound like? Is the Pigeon a boy or a girl? Does Leonardo the Terrible Monster live in the city or in the country?

We have to do all of that, we have to do the work with our little minds and our flapping flights of fancy. So, suddenly, that book is not just a book; it’s our book. We’re the ones making it work. We’re the ones making it sing. Right there in our chairs as we gently flip the pages, we are, at our own pace, creating a living story just by reading.

And you don’t have to turn off a book during takeoff and landing.

So, maybe books work because they make us work. Maybe we need them for needing us, just like we need real friends, not the digital imitations on Facebook.

Thank you for bearing with me.

Book #2 Soulless by Gail Carriger

Soulless is set in an alternate history version of Victorian England where werewolves and vampires are accepted as functioning members of society. Alexia Tarabotti is a woman with several critical problems: at the scandalous age of 26 she is still searching for a husband, that her late father was Italian complicates her social standing in a rigid class system, and she has no soul. The fact that she is "soulless" leaves her unaffected by the powers of supernatural beings which only further complicates her life when she accidentally kills a vampire that had attacked her. Queen Victoria sends an investigator,the brash Lord Maccon, who is himself the alpha werewolf. As disappearances in the vampire population of London's high society increase, Alexia and Lord Maccon work to solve the mystery. Alexa detests him upon meeting and struggles to maintain proper decorum and a delicate social balance while attempting to understand some new and aggrivating stirrings that appear whenever a certain Lord is present.

Publishers Weekly called this debut novel brilliant “with a blend of Victorian romance, screwball comedy of manners and alternate history.” It was the combination of the words screwball and Victorian that captured my interest. This was my first steampunk novel, paranormal or otherwise.

Alexia Tarabotti is an independent, stubborn 26-year-old who is considered to be unmarriable, and socially hindered due her late father’s Italian heritage and her large nose and darker Italian complexion. While the Victorian era characters may not appreciate her, I thoroughly enjoyed Alexia’s ability and insistence at embracing her non-conformist status. She is different from her superficial social status-addicted sisters and while made to feel the outsider in most social situations, thrives in being a learned, inquisitive, strong-minded woman.

Carringer describes this version of Victorian England and its players quite well. I was able to easily fall into this world where fasionista vampires and werewolves who fight to be comfortable in their civilized personas co-exist with normals. The world of steampunk was well introduced to me in the pages of Soulless and the sheer delight of the verbal sparring between the main characters has me looking for the sequels.