Top 100 Children’s Novels (#85-81)—A Fuse #8 Production—Betsy Bird has begun posting the results of her Top 100 Children’s Novels poll. Loads of fun. Massive reading binge to be sparked here. Can’t *I* get snowed in for a while?
BLDGBLOG: A bulge in the floor now 100 feet high—”It was thus amazingly interesting to read that no less than 1,799 earthquakes have occurred beneath Yellowstone since January 17, 2010—a so-called earthquake swarm.”
Ha, Tuesday morning. The title’s as far as I got before the howling hordes awoke. Tuesday night now, after an afternoon of pounding rain. Rilla kept asking me to be her blanket. I was happy to oblige, because this meant snuggling on the couch while the baby napped and I finished a book I picked up yesterday and could not put down. I’ll write a proper review later. For now I am still too caught up in it to be articulate. It was a review copy of Kathryn Erskine’s remarkable middle-grade novel, Mockingbird. This is one we’re going to be hearing lots about, I predict. Wow. It’s about a ten-year-old girl with Asperger’s Syndrome. Her older brother has just been killed in a school shooting. It’s told in first person, through Caitlin’s eyes. Told incredibly well, in a way that makes you see how bewildering people’s emotional reactions can be. Caitlin’s flat honesty, her bluntness and literalness, keep sort of smacking people (her father, teachers, classmates) with truth, in a way that gradually helps them climb out of their terrible pain toward healing. Shoot. I’m talking about it clumsily because I’m not ready to talk about it yet. I will, though. It will be published in April, and I hope lots of you will read it and come back here to talk about it.
Jane just finished a book she really loved—my friend Sarah recommended it last week and our library fortuitously had a copy. Sarah, you nailed it; it was totally up Jane’s alley. The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors, and Conservationists by Peter Laufer. And my fellow iPod Touch enthusiasts will be amused to hear that Jane found it useful to look up various butterfly species on the Touch as she read.
A book Scott enjoyed recently—enough to suggest I add it to my pile, too—was Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield. Sheffield revisits the mix tapes of his past—what songs he included, and what their significance was in his life at the time, and who the tapes were for, and what these old compilations evoke for him now. Makes me want to dig up the tapes of the radio show Scott DJ’d in college. Left of the Dial, it was called, after the Replacements song. And now I’ve got “Skyway” in my head. So here, it can be in yours too.
The home page of this website (the “My Website” tab above) seems to have gone temporarily bananas—instead of my usual welcome message, it’s channeling the text of the Carney’s House Party post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Anyone happen to notice when this started? I can’t remember when I last clicked on the home page. Hmm.
I have no idea what the problem is, but I’ve written my Swank web genius and I am sure she’ll fix me up in no time. UPDATE: Yup, problem solved. Thanks, Emily!
Speaking of Carney, I’ve been perusing her yet again as I work on my foreword for the reissue, and I got curious about the novel everyone in this book seems to be reading: Queed. Isobel (Carney’s rich Eastern roomie at Vassar) reads it on the train en route to Deep Valley, and Carney is proud that her father has recently read the novel as well and is able to converse about it with Isobel. And then the day they all go to Sam Hutchinson’s house for swimming and lunch, one of Sam’s relatives is reading it. His mother, I think? Well, I looked it up and I find at Gutenberg a text by Henry Sydnor Harrison, published in 1911—the year during which Carney’s House Party takes place.
So Queed is the book everyone was reading in 1911. Have any of you read it? Wikipedia doesn’t have much to say about Harrison: Tennessee native, Columbia graduate, wrote articles for the Atlantic Monthly under the pen name of Henry Second. Queed was his first novel.
I must say the frontispiece of the Gutenberg text had me at hello:
MR. QUEED, YOU ARE AFFLICTED WITH A FATAL MALADY. YOUR COSMOS IS PURE EGO.
Anxious looking chap, isn’t he? The novel’s opening paragraph contains the word “behemothian.” Twice. No wonder everyone between New York and Minnesota is reading this thing. I’m going to have to read far enough to discern whether the tone is ironic or sincere. If it’s sincere, it’s unbearable. I’m betting on ironic, though, or at least wry. I mean:
“The dog was of the breed which are said to come trotting into Alpine monasteries of a winter’s night with fat American travelers in their mouths, frozen stiff. He was extremely large for his age, whatever that was. On the other hand, the girl was small for her age, which was twenty-four next month; not so much short, you understand, for she was of a reasonable height, as of a dainty slimness, a certain exquisite reticence of the flesh.”
A certain exquisite reticence of the flesh? Tennessee native or not, Harrison has a voice right out of Monty Python.
I know you’re really busy right now, so I went ahead and took the Which Jane Austen Character Are You quiz for both of us. Hope you don’t mind.
It came out that you are Charlotte Lucas and I am Elizabeth Bennet. Which wasn’t at all what I was expecting, but if you think about it, it makes a ton of sense.
Lizzie: skirts six inches deep in mud Me: clothes constantly smeared with peanut butter and masticated goldfish crackers
Lizzie: marries sarcastic, sensitive man who dislikes mingling Me: DITTO
Charlotte: possesses wide array of talents ranging from the practical to the entertaining iPad: ditto, though can only apply them one at a time
Charlotte: believes “it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.” iPad: might appreciate this point of view
Charlotte: makes decisions based on reason, not emotions iPad: is a computer
Charlotte: not flashy iPad: no Flash Player
And Lizzie and Charlotte are dear friends who, while vastly different in temperament, derive much satisfaction from their relationship—at least until Charlotte marries a man neither one of them can particularly stand to be around.
So I guess what I’m saying, dear iPad, is: I think we’ll get along just fine as long as you don’t go marrying Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s remote control.
But, you know, I was sort of hoping you’d be the Mr. Darcy of gadgets.
We have been participating in the Mystery Class hunt for five years now. I think it’s five. Could it be six? Five or six, it’s been a blast every time.
Here’s a post I wrote about it two years ago (full of nuts & bolts info).
Things don’t really get rolling until this Friday, when the first set of clues come out, so you’ve got plenty of time to sign up at the Journey North website. (It’s free.) It’s way fun.
Last week I shared pictures of Wonderboy’s favorite book. This week it’s Rilla’s turn for a books post. I’m going to try to get in the habit of doing this regularly, for our family records as much as anything else. These are the picture books she enjoyed most in the past week:
Big Bad Bunny by Franny Billingsley, illustrated by G. Brian Karas. This was one of the books I received for review as a Cybils panelist in 2008, and it was a hit with my family. Big Bad Bunny is on the loose, and Mama Mouse has just discovered her littlest mouse-baby is missing. She’ll brave any peril to find her baby—even Big Bad Bunny’s long sharp claws and fierce yellow teeth. Rilla loves the repetitive text and watches each page for the chance to shout “No!” when I ask if something will stop Mama Mouse. It’s very comforting, when you’re three, to know that Mama will face danger to find you and bring you safely home.
Alfonse, Where Are You? by Linda Wikler. Scott had the fun of reading this family favorite to Rilla at naptime yesterday. Lucky man. It’s out of print now, alas, but there are used copies floating around. Alfonse is a big old goose, and his fluffy yellow friend Little Bird wants to play hide-and-seek. Trouble is, Alfonse hides too well…all of our small fry have loved this sweet book. Rilla asks for it over and over.
Trubloff, the Mouse Who Wanted to Play the Balalaika by John Burningham. A strange little book with somber, gorgeous, heavy-toned illustrations, all reds, oranges, and blacks, with a vast expanse of snow. Trubloff lives with his mouse family inside the wall of a country pub. He befriends an elderly member of a band of traveling musicians, and the old gypsy makes him a tiny instrument of his own. Rather too text-heavy to hold my littles’ attention, so it requires a bit of impromptu editing, and yet they keep asking for it. Something about the mouse’s passion to learn how to play his instrument—so intense that he leaves his family to travel with the musicians—holds them rapt. And then when the mouse sister strikes out on skis to fetch Trubloff home to see his sick mother—Rilla does that quivering-in-her-seat thing that she does.
“Stand Back,” Said the Elephant, “I’m Going to Sneeze!” by Patricia Thomas, illustrated by Wallace Tripp. Good luck finding this one: it’s long out of print. Ours is Scott’s old Weekly Reader Book Club copy.
—OH!!!!!!!! JUST THOUGHT OF A MEME!!! Let’s do our favorite Weekly Reader books! I’ll move this to a separate post and do a Mr. Linky for it. Just the words “Weekly Reader” evoke such powerful memories for me. Dr. Boox, Sprout, Christina Katerina…OK, yes. Stay tuned.
Back to Stand Back, what a fun read. The elephant is going to sneeze, and all the animals are distressed; the last sneeze wreaked such havoc. The zebra lost his stripes, the alligator’s snout turned inside out, the giraffe folded in half…disaster all around, on this strange savannah where there are both alligators and crocodiles, and North American bears from the looks of it. Delightfully rhyming text. The whole book reminds me a bit of Johnny Crow’s Garden in tone and whimsy. Very glad Scott claimed it from his family’s bookcase.
Well, this only takes us back about two days, but it’s enough for now. I might come back later and add book cover illustrations if time permits.
