Books! Books! Books!

Two days ago, the Newbery Award Winner was revealed.  So I promptly downloaded the audio version of Dead End in Norvelt, by Jack Gantos.  I finished listening to it today and I believe it is well deserving of the Newbery Award.  The story is based partly on the author's own childhood growing up in Norvelt, Pennsylvania in the 1960's.  Grounded for the summer, Jack spends his time reading books about history and helping an elderly neighbor write obituaries for the local newspaper, all the while battling his "nose problem".  But things are changing in the little town of Norvelt.  The Hell's Angels have come to town and the little old ladies of the town are dying off.  Could these two events be related?  Jack Gantos tells his semi-autobiographical tale with great humor and reverence for history.  Several times I laughed out loud while listening to the audio book, which, by the way, is read by the author.  Incidentally, the books that Jack reads in the book are from the Landmark series which were published in the 1960's.  When I first started working at Marshall Lane, the library had many Landmark titles from the 1960's on the shelves.  Our library has been updated quite a bit since then.

 The next book I want to tell you about is The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester, by Barbara O'Connor.  Barbara O'Connor is the author The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis which I wrote about here.  This adventure is slightly larger than that of Popeye and Elvis.  One night, while lying in bed trying to fall asleep, Owen Jester hears the distinct sound of a large object fall off a train.  The adventure begins when Owen and his friends search the nearby railroad tracks for the mysterious object.  What they find brings even more adventure.  This was really a delightful story.  I highly recommend it.

This next book is not yet in the library, but I hope to get a copy soon.  I had to buy this one for myself.  Extra Yarn was written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Jon Klassen, who you may remember as the author and illustrator of one of my new favorite books I Want My Hat Back which also earned a Geisel Honor.  Anyway, I follow both Mac Barnett and Joh Klassen on Twitter and was alerted that they had this book coming out so I pre-ordered it immediately, sight unseen, because it's called Extra Yarn.  The story is about a little girl  who finds a box of extra yarn and puts it to good use, but the box never seems to run out of yarn!   I have a box of extra yarn and it never seems to run out either!  It's a sweet story and our old friend Bear makes a cameo in the illustrations.

Well, that's all I've got for now.  There's a pile of new books waiting for me to finish processing them tomorrow.  Yay new books!

Free books, author on the bus, CBLDF poster

Day 2 New Orleans. The exhibits at the American Library Association conference officially opened today. The convention center in NOLA is so huge that someone tweeted this morning that "not only does the east end of the convention center have its own time zone, but the conference directory has its own gravitational pull!"

Anyway, for me there wasn't much going on at the conference today so Mr. Richards and I strolled around the french quarter and had some food. Then we napped because that's what food and strolling will do to you. At 5:30 the exhibit floor opened. I've already spoken of the hugeness of this thing right? Well, it's huge. I'm a newb at this kind of thing so I kind of wandered around with my mouth agape and watched other, more savvy librarians grabbing all the free stuff. But I caught on pretty quickly and nabbed some goodies for our library. Mostly posters and book marks but also some free books. Tomorrow there will be authors signing books in the exhibit hall and I have a plan.....

Speaking of authors, I happened to sit next to one on the shuttle bus back to my hotel this evening. I can't remember her name at the moment, but she is a retired teacher librarian who now writes children's books. She's going to be signing books tomorrow, I'll try to stop by and say hello to her again if I can. Other authors I will be trying to see tomorrow include Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), Jack Gantos (Joey Pigza), Dan Gutman (My Weird School), Jennifer Holm (Babymouse), and Jenny Offill (17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore), all Marshall Lane favorites.

While I was checking out all the booths, I came across the booth for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. I made a donation and got a poster signed by Neil Gaiman. CBLDF does important work protecting First Amendment rights for comic book writers, illustrators, publishers, and readers. Here is a particularly chilling story illustrating the importance of their work.

It's late now and I have to get up early and hunt authors tomorrow. I'll let you know how that pans out.

The Exquisite Corpse

Mr. Richards loves the Library of Congress website. He is fascinated by their digital collection of old photographs, phonograph recordings, and early films. And I mean really old, items from the dawn of their respective technologies. It is truly fascinating and I recommend you spend some time wandering around there. One day he came across The Exquisite Corpse Adventure and discovered it was also a podcast that could be downloaded from iTunes, and because we both love podcasts, he told me about it. I spent today listening to it.

The Exquisite Corpse is a progressive story. You know, like that old party game where someone writes the beginning of a story and folds the paper over to cover it and hands it to the next person who writes the next bit, folds the paper over and passes it on to the next person, etc, until the page is full and you have a hilariously disjointed story to read aloud. I used to love to play this game (still do, in fact) but had a very hard time getting people to play it with me. Anyway, this time the game is played with a great handful of favorite children's authors and illustrators. Such recognizable names as Jon Scieszka -Stinky Cheese Man, Time Warp Trio, Katherine Paterson - The Bridge to Terabithia, The Great Gilly Hopkins, Kate DiCamillo - Tale of Despereaux, Lemony Snicket - A Series of Unfortunate Events, Jack Gantos - Joey Pigza Loses Control, Megan MacDonald - Judy Moody to name just a few.

The story is available at read.gov as an illustrated ebook or as downloadable audio files. The project was kicked off at the 2009 National Book Festival and a new chapter was released every two weeks for an entire year. The last chapter was put up September 29, 2010. Jon Sciezska, who at the time was the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, wrote the first chapter of the story, setting up the other authors for a crazy ride of a story which would have to include such things as werewolves and mad scientists, a roller skating baby, creatures from another planet, a monkey disguised as a pirate, a real ninja, two meatballs and a bad egg, plus a whole lot more. And each subsequent writer somehow worked all of these things in to the story. The only other requirement was that the authors had to use references to children's literature in their stories. In the final chapter, it was all wrapped up by this year's National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Katherine Paterson.

This was really fun to listen to. Each chapter was action packed and it was also a great way to compare the writing styles of each author. Some author's have very distinctive writing styles, like Lemony Snicket or Gregory Maguire and you could probably recognize them right away. And some author's I enjoyed much more than others. Anyway, I highly recommend this very entertaining adventure and it's free so you have nothing to lose.