Further Adventures in Author Stalking

Those of you who actually read my blog (and I guess, if you are reading this now, than I am talking to you) may remember that I wrote about a forthcoming book by the great Lemony Snicket and the Caldecott award winner and honoree Jon Klassen called The Dark.

If you follow me on Facebook, you'd know that Mr. Snicket's representative Daniel Handler and Mr. Klassen were at Hicklebee's this morning and so, therefore, was I.

They presented a slideshow in which they showed pictures from their childhoods and some of the things they've done in their lives before they collaborated (a word which here means 'worked together') on The Dark.  Mr. Snicket's representative explained that while Mr. Klassen wasted his childhood playing on swings and looking at pictures, Mr. Snicket was busy doing research.

Here, Mr. Snicket's representative is demonstrating how he learned to perform the trick pictured in the slideshow.  We also learned that while Mr. Snicket is not afraid of the dark, he is afraid of crabs, and his representative appears to be as well. 

To add a layer of difficulty to the reading, Mr. Snicket's representative tied a blindfold on to Mr. Klassen who continued to illustrate the reading blindfolded.  There was a surprise ending to this but I won't give that away here.  I'll share it at school next week.

Here is the dynamic duo signing my books (one for me and one for Marshall Lane). 

This one proves that I was there.

If you would like the opportunity to meet Mr. Klassen and Mr. Snicket or his representative, depending on who shows up, they will be at the Burlingame Library tomorrow at 4.  It's about a 45 minute drive from here so if you leave right after school, you should be there in plenty of time.  I highly recommend you do this.  Especially if, like me, you love books and you like friendly and funny authors and illustrators.

A singularity of children's book authors.

Some of you may have read on Facebook yesterday that my head had exploded in a fit of squeee.  This is true.

After I posted here yesterday, I went on Twitter to promote my blog post.  While scrolling through my feed, I noticed that Jon Klassen and Lemony Snicket had kicked off their book tour for The Dark, a book I knew was coming. This made me excited and hopeful that they'd make an appearance somewhere in the Bay Area so I could stalk them together, as I've already stalked them separately as evidenced here and on my author shrine wall in the library.

Then someone tweeted that Neil Gaiman had shown up and joined the presentation.  How cool is that? But what was Neil Gaiman doing there?  I know he's pals with Lemony Snicket but is that enough cause for him to pop in on a book tour?  I decided to do a little digging and that's when I discovered that he was there because he is the reader of the audio book version of The Dark! Squeeeesplodey!
So here is a third author - my all time favorite author, no less - that I have stalked separately:

Working in collaboration with two of my other favorite authors on one project!  And they were all in one space for some very lucky children in New York.  You can read about it and see pictures here.

And, of course, I had to have this amazing work so that is when I discovered that the ebook is an enhanced ebook with Neil Gaiman's audio reading built into it so you have Jon Klassen's beautiful illustrations, Lemony Snicket's amazing words, and Neil Gaiman's velvety voice all at once.  This was my bedtime story last night and it made me so happy.

Also, it turns out Mr. Klassen and Mr. Snicket will bringing their book tour out this way on April 29 at  the Burlingame Public Library.  I'm going, who's with me?

Tales from behind the book case

The library has been transformed!  An amazing bunch of Book Fair elves showed up this morning to move boxes, push around book cases, and put up table displays.  Now the library looks like a book store:

I browsed around the fair and pulled some books for the library.  I'm happy to report there are lots of new and exciting titles in stock.  Most notably is the newest in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, The Third Wheel.  Other new titles include Rick Riordan's The Mark of Athena, Lemony Snicket's Who Could That Be at This Hour? and Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers, the first Captain Underpants book in a number of years.

Once again, I've set up my secret hidey hole behind the bookcases and I'll be cataloging all these new books so they'll be ready for check out after the fair.

The fair opens for business this Friday after school and will run all next week.  There will be a family event on December 5th, and we may have a special visitor!  Come and check it out!

14 Authors and a pair of socks.

Last Saturday, Mr. Richards and I spent the day in San Francisco and one of the things we did there was we went to the San Francisco Public library to see a couple of my favorite authors in conversation about a new book that I now have in the library. The book is called The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. It is a collection of short stories written by many famous authors inspired by the picture book by Chris Van Allsburg called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. The Mysteries of Harris Burdick was originally published back in 1984 and the story goes that an editor was presented with a stack of pictures from 14 stories written by Harris Burdick, who wished to be published. The editor was intrigued by the pictures which were accompanied by titles and captions, hints of the larger stories, and asked Mr. Burdick to bring the complete stories to him the following day. Mr. Burdick left the pictures with the editor, but never returned. The editor could not track him down. The editor handed the pictures over to Mr. Van Allsburg who compiled them into a book to allow readers to imagine the stories that might accompany the drawings. Which is exactly what the 14 authors of The Chronicles of Harris Burdick have done. This great collection of authors includes Stephen King, Kate DiCamillo, Jon Scieszka, Lois Lowry, Louis Sachar, and Linda Sue Park with an introduction written by Lemony Snicket, who was at the San Francisco Public Library along with Chris Van Allsburg and Mac Barnett (The Brixton Brothers Mysteries). Here is a picture of me and Mr. Snicket yucking it up while he signs my book:
Here is a picture of the slightly more phlegmatic Mr. Van Allsburg signing my book. (Yes, you have to look up the word phlegmatic for yourself.)
Sadly, I didn't know that Mr. Barnett would be moderating the discussion so I didn't have a book for him to sign. I'll get him next time, though!

In other news, I finished that pair of socks I started while waiting for Brian Selznick to give his presentation a couple of weeks ago. Here is what they look like now:

In other other news, the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Cabin Fever has been released. I don't have it in the library yet, but the Book Fair is coming to the Library December 5th and I'm hoping I can get a couple copies for the library then. Until then, I should be getting a new shipment from Junior Library Guild very soon and there's always good stuff in those boxes! If you've already read Cabin Fever, leave a comment and tell me what you thought of it.

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.

Responses to 13 Words

So I spent the last week reading Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman's 13 Words to the first, second, and third graders and I got some interesting reactions to the book. Before you read further, go here and read the book for yourself, better yet, share it with your kids!

I'll wait.

Okay, I trust that you've read it and will know what I'm talking about without my having to go into too much detail.

First of all, the humor of the book was mostly lost on the first graders. The prime audience were the second and thirds, though the thirds were fooled by the first page into thinking it was a too easy word book for little kids and thought it would be boring. When I asked the first graders what 'despondent' meant, looking at the bird for clues, many of them thought it meant wet due to the rain cloud above the bird. The 2's and 3's got it right away. They all understood that scarlet was a shade of red. Everyone laughed at the word 'haberdashery' and one girl asked me if it was a real word or just made up. They all thought the baby who owns the haberdashery was funny, too. I had more than one class point out how silly it was that the baby was so big in the picture and could talk. I then pointed out to them that the goat was driving the convertible, which they seemed to accept pretty readily. They all understood that a mezzo-soprano was a singer, the older kids knew that she was specifically an opera singer. Many of them, at the end, asked why the bird was still despondent, to which I replied "That's what kind of day she's having."

After reading the story to a class today, one student had misplaced her shelf marker and was starting to get a little upset about it. When she finally found it she told me about how she was starting to get a little upset about misplacing her shelf marker. I asked her if it made her feel despondent and she smiled and said "Yes!"

13 Words

Well, I just arrived home from San Francisco where my friend Donna, the library clerk at Monroe Middle School, and I spent an evening with Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman at the Herbst Theater. We had such fun evening! We drove part of the way, then parked the car and got on a BART train to take us into the city. When we got there, we had some spicy indian food and then we walked to the theater.

They were selling books in the foyer so I bought one right away and then we found our seats. After showing us the video that I posted above, Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman took the stage, along with Steven Winn, who interviewed them. They talked about their collaboration on the new book 13 Words. They talked a lot about Maira Kalman's illustrations and about how Lemony Snicket likes to use big words in children's books. This event was part of the City Arts and Lectures series so sometime in the near future, you'll be able to listen to it on NPR, which I recommend you do because they were very funny! Plus there was a surprise musical performance at the end.

Here are some blurry pictures of Mr. Snicket and Ms. Kalman signing their books:

I am now in possession of a signed copy of the fabulous book 13 Words, written by Lemony Snicket (The Series of Unfortunate Events, The Composer Is Dead) and illustrated by Maira Kalman (Max Makes a Million, Fireboat) which I may read aloud tomorrow. If you all aren't too despondent to listen to it.

ETA: I see the video doesn't fit right on the blog so here is a linky so you can watch it properly.