Critique de Mr. Chompchomp

I Don't Miss Paper

2012-01-10T10:56:00.001-08:00

Of late, when I get around to posting at all on this blog, it has often been more about eBooks than about children's books. It's an obsession, I admit it, and a problem I intend to fix in 2012 and beyond. But first I need to get some stuff off my chest.

While I've been writing about and worrying about eBooks for a few years now, up until six months ago I only read them from a computer screen. In July of 2011, I finally acquired as a birthday gift an e-reader (a B&N Nook Simple Touch) of my own. Since then, I've done the vast majority of my reading on it. My one sentence reaction: I don't miss paper. I don't miss hauling paper books around. I don't miss needing my reading glasses every single time I want to read something printed on paper. With my Nook I can just bump up the text size when I need to. I can read one-handed with the Nook (try that with paper) which is useful far more often than I ever realized. I've got some reference works--the built-in (subpar) dictionary, a bible, all of Shakespeare, several collections of fairy tales, etc.--right at hand within the Nook itself. I can take notes without needing to carry a pen. And the whole thing fits nicely into a jacket pocket or even in the pocket of my baggier pants.

I don't take it in the bath tub or the hot tub, risks I'd take with most of my print books, but I'm looking into a waterproof bag to solve this minor problem.

This is not a pro-Nook review. I have limited experience with other e-readers and can't make intelligent comparisons. But I am at this point strongly pro e-reader.

Which is not to say I've stepped into e-reading e-topia. There are many problems, the first of which is that eBooks remain too expensive. I've heard all the arguments from various publishers who claim that eBooks are still, if anything, too cheap, and I have to admit I still don't get it. Publishers need to see that they are now competing in a much wider market, against video games and movies and music and other digital materials. Angry Birds is free (with ads). Most little games for my phone are in the 0-3 dollar range. I can download a movie on my computer for what it costs to by a newly released novel on my Nook. How much more information is contained in a video game or a movie than in a novel? How much more production goes into those other genres? The comparison is ridiculous. I realize that the scale of distribution is very different. Few books get the audience that Angry Birds has, but still, $15 dollars for an electronic copy of a book seems wrong in this context. Very wrong.

The e-reader is also too limited in what it can do. I don't mind at all that B&N pulled the mp3 player and the games and the web browser off the Nook Simple Touch. They were lousy additions on the old Nook and did nothing to improve the reading experience. But now that e-readers are doing a pretty good job of recreating the paper book reading experience (other than some quirks with words chopped off when I use certain text sizes and a weird habit of hyphenating after quotation marks) it's time to allow the e-reader to do more than the paper book can. The Nook has some community features allowing sharing of some titles and limited posting to facebook, but it needs to do more. If I were teaching a class, I'd like to be able to share my annotations of a text with the whole class. I'd like them to be able to share their notes with me as well, and with each other. Currently that can't be done. The Nook should be an RSS reader as well, and I do use mine that way, downloading the latest from longform.org and longreads.com, but only rather awkwardly through an open source program called Calibre. It is shameful that the functionality to access this free material is not available natively within the Nook itself.

So while I don't miss paper I hope publishers and e-reader manufacturers continue to improve the e-reading experience and don't drop the ball in pursuit of tablets more suited to playing the aforementioned Angry Birds than to reading long works of prose. We readers deserve to be treated decently in the coming electronic world.

Picture Book Science

2012-01-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an amusing look at a few picture book classics and how they measure up to scientific inquiry. Not explored: the existence of pocketless kangaroos, or the maximize size of bright red dogs.

2012-01-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

Walter Dean Myers named National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Very cool.

2012-01-03T13:04:00.001-08:00

I post review of The Colour of Magic on GuysLitWire.

Publishers Pushing Paper

2011-12-07T11:47:00.001-08:00

A recent New York Times article, Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers, describes how publishers are fancifying their print books with artsy covers and nifty end papers and whatnot. This is done, apparently, to bring people back to print. Of an especially nice looking edition of Stephen King's "11/22/63", a publisher is quoted as saying "We hoped that a handsome object would slow the migration to e-book."

It's interesting, and it's expected. Books are not going to disappear. There's way too much history wrapped up in them. (Hell, vinyl hasn't even disappeared.) But, with a few exceptions, such as the picture book which still doesn't have a decent electronic equivalent (it's awkward to read an iPad app alloud to a classroom), paper and ink books will, more and more, become collector's items, rather than practical reading material.

But what I have to wonder is why are publishers clinging to paper? It's the same publisher handling both formats. Why do they continue see the eBook as a threat? With eBook pricing locked at $15 for new releases, they have to be getting better margins on electronic copies than on the print ones. In fact, most of publishers' griping about eBooks is that they can't figure out how their print book sales will be effected. But if nearly everyone goes electronic, that problem disappears. Print sales won't matter because there will hardly be any. Encouraging sales of a dying media seems to just extend the period of confusion. Why aren't publishers encouraging eBook sales, pushing customers to convert? Do they like paying for printing, shipping, warehousing, and disposal of remainders? Is it all just nostalgia? Seriously, can someone explain this to me? I really want to know.

A Nuclear Option

2011-09-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

Santa Fe, NM, if you've never been there, is a truly beautiful city full of adobe houses and free thinkers and great restaurants and a truly heterogeneous local culture. It also happens to be within blast radius of Los Alamos National Laboratory where the first nuclear weapons were developed and where atomic science continues to this day.

Julia Platt Leonard uses all of these aspects of Santa Fe in her new thriller and debut novel Cold Case. Thirteen year-old Austin "Oz" Keillor, hoping one day to become an accomplished chef, helps out at the family restaurant, Chez Isabelle, where his older brother serves as head chef. Early one Saturday morning, while his mother is out of the country, Oz comes in to clean the place and discovers a dead body, a murdered bodied, stashed in the walk in. What's worse, his brother's name is on a note in the victim's pocket. When the cops arrest Oz's brother, it's up to Oz and a couple of his friends to keep the restaurant going and find out who really committed the murder. As Oz uncovers clues it becomes more and more clear that all of this has to do with Oz's father, a Los Alamos scientist, now dead, but long suspected of selling the nation's nuclear secrets.

The book is a well-crafted thriller. The multiple mysteries unravel just steadily enough to keep the reader engaged. The story has all the plot twists you'd expect of a modern mystery and Oz's dogged determination is both admirable and infectious. The writing is fast paced and terse. There is, in fact, not a word wasted. And if the book has a flaw, that's it. Some readers, like me, enjoy a wasted word here or there. If I had to give Leonard advice for her second novel (and that is part of my job here) I'd tell her to loosen up a little bit. I think Oz could tell us a lot more about subjects like learning to cook and what Santa Fe really looks like when you're tearing around it on a bike.

The book is a little vague in using the word "nuclear" as well, never really distinguishing between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and, more basically, atomic science. Not that such distinctions are critical to the story, but they are critical to the decisions we make in our lives and it makes me a tad uncomfortable to see them used so interchangeably in a book for kids. We all need more level-headed clarity around these separate subjects if we're going to make the right choices for our future.

Ok, serious moment over.

Cold Case is more fun than that criticism would imply, so read it, get into, enjoy it. Just don't let it be the last book you read about Santa Fe, or gourmet cooking or, most especially, nuclear science.

For a bit on the critical nuclear power debate read this and this and even this (from Los Alamos).

Cross posted at Guyslitwire.

The Real Rapunzel

2011-06-24T12:29:00.001-07:00

I know Tangled has been out for quite a while now. I took my kids to see it at the theater. All three (3 yr old girl, 7 yr old boy, 10 yr old girl) loved it. They've seen it about half a gazillion times on video since then. Somewhere around the quarter gazillionth viewing I got the idea to check out the original Grimm's version of Rapunzel. Turns out there are two, an original and an updated version for the second edition of the Grimm's original volume. Check them out here: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm012a.html.

Here's what the Grimm's versions have in common with Tangled:

1. Hair

2. Desirable vegetation

3. Involvement of royalty

4. Magical tears

That's about it.

I won't spoil anything about Tangled except to say that the filmmakers have made Rapunzel a princess because the world can't have enough Disney Princesses. She also has eyes so large they make anime drawings look subtle and understated. In the mode of contemporary Disney princesses--as opposed to those squeaky-voiced, moony-eyed, prince-adoring classic princesses--Rapunzel is spunky. Really spunky.

In the original Grimm tale Rapunzel is not a princess. She has the misfortune instead of being born to a remorseless salad addict and her enabling husband. Maybe Rapunzel herself, in utero, is to blame for her mother's salad cravings, I don't know, but the mother claims "she'll die" if she doesn't eat some of their sorceress-neighbor's (and who doesn't have one of those?) enticing greens. So the husband jumps the fence and steals her some. Twice. The second time (first time's always free) he gets caught and threatened by the sorceress. The sorceress (evil fairy in one version) decides that in exchange for the junkie's daughter, once she's born, the couple can have all nutritious leafy veggies they want. This is apparently fine with them. After Rapunzel is born, they make the exchange and, it seems, live happily ever after in Sweet Tomatoes heaven. Rapunzel meanwhile is locked in a tower and forced to grow her hair out for tower-climbing purposes. (No mention is made of how the baby is cared for while hairless or short-haired.) A passing prince catches on to the hair trick and "visits" (if you know what I mean) Rapunzel in the tower. Rapunzel, being tower-schooled and all, hasn't developed much in the way of people smarts and figures it's just fine to tell her captor about the prince's visits. The sorceress doesn't take kindly to this news and Rapunzel gets shorn and banished to the desert (the tower banishment thing having failed). In the desert, apparently all alone, she gives birth to (the prince's?) twins. (Now we're talking spunky. She probably goes through her whole pregnancy without a single leaf of magical salad as well.) Back at the tower, the prince comes visiting, and the witch hauls him up by Rapunzel's stolen hair. The sorceress blinds him and sends him on his way. So with the prince blind and Rapunzel out mothering in the desert, there's no way the two are getting back together, except of course the prince wanders into the desert and trips over Rapunzel or maybe one of their kids. Seeing the prince blind makes Rapunzel cry, but Rapunzel's tears have magic healing powers (because of gestational exposure to really good escarole?) and the tears drip from girl eye to boy eye and the prince regains his sight so that he might complement Rapunzel on her new do.

The thing I love most about reading these tales as published by the Brother's Grimm is how they defy our normal narrative expectations. This is by turns quaint and brutal. The fact, for example, that Rapunzel's parents pay for their crime with a more abhorrent one and then get away with it is flatly offensive. Nothing bad happens to the witch either. It's this moral logic, rather than the internal logic, that needs to get fixed when these tales are Disneyfied, or turned into modern picture books. The magical tears thing makes no more sense in Tangled than it does in the Grimm version, but Disney grants Rapunzel decent parents from the start, and in the end the evil sorceress gets what she's got coming.

Ebooks outsell print

2011-05-20T05:11:00.001-07:00

The New York Times this morning reports that Ebooks have outsold print books at amazon.com: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/technology/20amazon.html?src=recg&gwh=75C8D1CB18F9895345F702BBC8E18A86

New Review on GuysLitWire

2011-02-07T09:45:00.001-08:00

Last week I reviewed You Killed Wesley Payne on GuysLitWire. You can read the review here:

http://guyslitwire.blogspot.com/2011/02/hard-boiled-high-school.html

Some Thoughts about EBook Pricing: Guest Post by Andrew Karre

2010-12-23T05:57:00.001-08:00

Below is Critique de Mr Chompchomp's first guest post. It comes from Andrew Karre, editorial director at Carolrhoda Books, Carolrhoda Lab, and Darby Creek

of the Lerner Publishing Group, who takes issue with my ranting about ebook prices. Being an actual editor for an actual publisher, rather than just a mouthy guy with a blog, Andrew certainly knows more about pricing issues than I do, so I'll now hand the microphone over to him. I think this is an important discussion, so please post comments and questions.

If you want to hear more thoughts from Andrew Karre, you can visit the Lerner Publishing blog where he posts regularly. You can also follow him on Twitter: @andrewkarre.

********************I'd really like to know why specifically people think ebooks are overpriced. Meanwhile, here's my take on why they're not.

First, some useful background so we have a baseline of numbers. Here’s a typical pricing scenario for an adult novel:

HC: 25.99
PB: 15.99
EB: 9.99

Here’s a typical pricing scenario for a YA novel (and I’m mainly talking about novels here):

HC: 16.95-17.95
PB: 8.95-9.95
EB: 9.99

At first glance, there’s something fishy about that ebook price on the YA, as you say. It seems like the ebook ought to be the cheapest. Maybe you think that because MP3 albums are cheaper than CDs. Maybe your reasoning is that the lack of a physical object and the attendant warehousing and shipping ought to translate to a lower price than the same work attached to a physical good. That’s not bad reasoning. But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. And in my opinion it’s more complicated in kidlit than it is in the adult world.

You cannot look at book prices in format isolation because books don’t exist in isolation. Books are a single piece of intellectual property (IP) that exists in several formats in a more or less carefully choreographed sequence. I can’t claim a complete understanding of the economic implications of all this, but maybe if I lay out what I know and believe, the pricing of ebooks will at least be less frustrating and opaque.

It’s not insignificant that ebooks typically come out with hardcovers, at the time of a book’s initial release. If you’re a publisher, this is a problem. Right now, the market is in an uncomfortable transitional place. Ebook sales are growing, but they’re still pretty tiny and not exactly reliable. It’s very difficult to judge print runs under any circumstances, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to do so when you’re not sure how many hardcover sales you’ll lose to ebooks sales. If the ebook transition were sudden, this would be less painful (unless you’re a printer or your skills are entirely tied to print). But it’s not , and so a publisher faces a market that looks like this:

1. He has to pay a lot of money to acquire a manuscript.

2. Then he pays another pile of money to get that manuscript to the traditional market (printing and binding), all on top of overhead (that would be me, writing this now). This was always the case, but here’s the kicker.

3. At the same time, he has to release an electronic version of that product at a much lower price (a price that it is largely out of his control at this point). It’s hard to know how many of those products he’ll sell, and how many of those sales will replace the currently more profitable printed-book sales.

4. Plus, the author is taking an ever-larger portion of the proceeds from those electronic sales (ebook royalties are higher than print).

Like I said, if we could just make the transition instantly, it wouldn’t be so bad. But that’s not how it works (ask the music industry). You have to be in print and digital, and—bonus!--print margins go down as your ebook sales replace printed sales and you print fewer hardcovers, but you’re not necessarily making enough money on the ebooks to replace the print revenue (and did I mention that you had to pay for the print months before you made a single sale in any format?).

This is a problem in any category, but it’s terrible in kidlit, because I believe our print pricing was already structurally out of whack. Why are they so much lower than adult books when none of the costs are meaningfully lower (especially when you’re talking about novels)? Printers don’t charge less if you ask them to print a YA novel as opposed to an adult novel. Advances aren’t proportionally lower, if they’re lower at all. My hunch has always been that this is disparity comes from a perception that adults don’t want to spend as much on kids as themselves. But that’s just a hunch. Whatever the reason, our print pricing makes the ebook situation extra complicated because releasing a 7.99 or 6.99 ebook at the same time as your hardcover is just plain untenable (for lots of reasons that I don’t think I can explain well in a single post). This the “analog dollars for digital dimes” problem that completely reshaped the music industry. In the simplest terms, if you condition the market to believe that your newest, most exciting product is worth 6.99, then you’re going to need to gain many, many more sales as a result of that price drop, or you need to pay the creators much less. And I don’t see any evidence of either happening. If your answer to that is to point to Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games, then all I can say is if you can be happy with a book world where publishers’ lists look like Apple’s product lineup (a tiny selection beautifully tailored for maximum appeal), then yes, we can trade selection for lower prices (and I’ll go find a new job). If you want selection, though, you cannot price based on the performance of the outliers.

(You might well ask aren’t adult books overpriced? If they were overpriced, it seems to me that a dramatic price drop would bring greater demand. And it hasn’t. If they were overpriced, it seems like the fairly competitive marketplace with lots of players would push down prices. It hasn’t. Conclusion: adult books aren’t overpriced, at least not in the present book market.)

Historically speaking, I bet books have never been cheaper than they are now. I bet an inflation-adjusted graph of all aggregate book pricing from Guttenberg until today would slant down, steeply.

Footnote: You cannot talk about ebook pricing without mentioning Amazon. Amazon has sold ebooks at a loss to gain market share. It was in their interest to price aggressively so they could own the dominant format. Seems to have worked well. The collateral damage in that move is consumer perception of what an ebook is worth. $9.99 seems to me a whole lot like squeezed toothpaste. I don’t see much room to go up at this point (especially since it correlates so nicely with album pricing in MP3s). But it isn’t a price based on the future well being of publishers or authors. It wasn’t a price publishers consented to. I’m sure this will be the subject of a million MBA papers I’ll never read.

File Under Unfortunate Holiday Titles

2010-12-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

Ummmm . . . . uhhhhh . . . http://loneliestho.com/index.html

The price of EBooks for Children

2010-12-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

Someone help with the math here, because something ain't adding up. Typically in the book market, children's books are sold for a bit less than adult books. I don't exactly know why, but I presume that this is due to demands from the market. People expect children's books to be cheaper and therefore they are. (At one time children's books may have been, by and large, shorter, and therefore the product cost would be lower, but this hasn't really been true for some time. It probably set up an expectation in the market, though.)

Enter the eBook. People expect eBooks, at least adult eBooks, to be cheaper than their print versions. This is fair. EBooks after all do not use paper, covers or bindings. EBooks do not require trucks to rumble across the country burning gas to deliver. They do not require shelf space in bookstores. They do not require an underpaid clerk to operate a cash register to sell them. So, while a typical hardcover adult book is $20-$30, a typical eBook is $10-$12. To me, that's still too expensive, but I've written about that before and will address it again. Let's suffice it to say that it makes sense to sell eBooks at a lower cost than print books.

Except, apparently, in the children's market. Children's books typically sell, in print version, for $7-$15. And, in the eBook version? Well, they sell for . . . $9.99. I checked out The Nixie's Song, the first title in the Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles series. Print (Hardcover) from Amazon: $9.59 (Reduced from the $11.99 cover price). Amazon Kindle: $9.99. Young readers (or their parents) pay forty cents more for the privilege of reading the book on their $100-$200 Kindles.

Thank the gods Google has come along to bring some competition to the eBook market. They are now offering The Nixie's Song as a Google eBook download for . . . wait for it . . . $9.99.

It's nice to see two of the world's most dominant corporations promoting children's literacy in this way, isn't it?

Next rant: the absurdly overpriced audiobook.

Through a Mirror, Darkly

2010-11-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

In the opening scene of Reckless, the first volume in Cornelia Funke’s new series, we are introduced to Jacob Reckless whose father has disappeared. Jacob, feeling abandoned and angry, searches his father’s room for clues as to what might have happened to him. What he finds instead is a mirror which serves as a portal to another world. As soon as crosses into this world, he is attacked by a grotesque spider like being. He barely escapes and finds his younger brother, Will, afraid, searching for him back in his own world.

The story then jumps ahead twelve years. Jacob, not deterred by the violence he met in the Mirror world has, over the years, spent more and more time there. The Mirrorworld is a place full of dangerous and enticing magic. In his time behind the mirror Jacob has become a successful, even famous, hunter of magical treasures and, like his father before him, has largely abandoned his family in his home world, forever making excuses for his long absences. But one mistake has allowed his brother to follow him through the mirror and tragedy has struck. A race of stone-skinned people called Goyl, at war with various human nations, has attacked the Reckless brothers and, because of the curse of a dark fairy that the Goyl use as a weapon of war, Will is slowly growing stone skin himself, turning into one of the creatures out to destroy the Mirrorworld’s humans. Jacob is certain he can find a cure for his brother, but the skin is changing quickly and with it Will is losing his human mind and soul.

The Mirrorworld that Funke creates is one of the most richly imagined fantasty worlds I’ve come across in a long time. Funke never misses an opportunity to elaborate on some detail of her invented world--the way Goyl distinguish themselves by the type of stone their skin resembles, the way fairies employ swarming moths in the execution of their terrible magic, the way modern technology (trains, guns, flashlights) slowly creeps into the magical world. Funke’s tale was inspired by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, but she completely avoids sugar coating the dark stories here. On the contrary, they are reimagined even more darkly than the originals, any happily-ever-afters stripped clean away. At one point Jacob’s band of adventures comes upon the body of Sleeping Beauty, dead. Her prince never arrived. She was never awoken from her sleep-like stasis and eventually just slept to death. The fairies of this story are not cute, Tinkerbell-inspired pixies, but Grimm’s fairies—beautiful, powerful, needy and cruel.

You’ll find Reckless shelved with the upper middle-grade fantasies, but really, the book could be equally comfortable in any fantasy section, including adult. The characters are not children (not after the prologue anyway) and while there’s no explicit sexual content, the pages are taut with sexual tension throughout. There’s no limit on the swashbuckling, gun fighting and head bashing violence either, though it all seems in the spirit of the story’s adventure, never gratuitous.

The story evokes a similar Grimm’s like feeling of alienation as well, largely due to what it leaves out. There’s no traipsing back and forth between worlds here, and no pages of prose wasted on characters gazing about in wonder at what they’ve found. They, like the characters of the fairy tales, don’t stop to heed warnings, their curiosity and human need drive heedlessly forward. For some readers this quality might make story a frustrating read. For me it only made it more intriguing and I eagerly await the next installment.

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire

Weeping for a Living

2010-06-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

Nieve's parents are professional weepers. They go to funerals, wakes, firings, and break-ups to cry for people who, apparently, cannot be bothered. It is, not surprisingly, a lucrative career. At the opening of the novel Terry Griggs' Nieve, named after its protagonist, the weepers are preparing for a major event, the funeral of the wife of one of the most influential men in town.

But there seems to be a lot more misery in store. The town's beloved Dr. Mory has suddenly fallen gravely ill. The town's spiders are multiplying. When Nieve encounters a Weed Inspector whose job is to ensure the proper level of noxiousness and viciousness in the area's weeds (they actually bite), she begins to realize that something is really wrong. Eventually people start disappearing, shops close and reopen under new management, Nieve's mother begins acting all evil, the sun is dimmed, and almost no one else Nieve meets seems to be aware that the world has gone completely haywire.

Nieve finally finds a few people who, like her, remember what the world is supposed to be like and who bond together to form a kind of resistence. Griggs creates a truly eerie and unsettling atmosphere for Nieve's adventure and heroism, showing off a perfect eye for the creepy detail--missing toes, contorted bodies, the use of living things for jewelry, furniture and clothing. He also has a special ear for the sarcastic, bickering tones of teenage dialog.

Nieve dives right into its narrative and then rips along, perhaps a bit too fast. The novel's primary flaw is that the reader never gets a real feel for what Nieve's world is like before all the trouble starts. Because the narrative doesn't fully foreshadow the conclusion, it seems to come out of nowhere. In the end, the book is not as satisfying as it could be, although it's dark whimsy and plucky heroine are enough to recommend it.
At its conclusion, Nieve leaves enough unsettled to prompt at least one sequel. According to the jacket copy, Nieve is the first in a "projected trilogy."

This review is based on a reading of an advanced copy provided by the publisher.

Released: 2010
Publisher: Biblioasis
Audience: Middle Grade
Length: 250 pages

Other reviews:
Charlotte's Library

Technology and Tyranny

2010-05-27T12:38:00.000-07:00

The Texas board of education has apparently adopted standards that encourage students to question the basis of the separation of church and state and the negative impact of the United Nations on American sovereignty. I'm all for "questioning." I don't even care of the questions come from the right rather than the left (though it might be nice if they came from both directions). In this particular context, though, I wonder what "questioning" means and if it isn't here more a synonym for "encouraging." I am concerned about what seems to be the underlying political ideology behind the textbook changes. But I am also concerned about liberal responses which suggest that informing students that the words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the constitution is committing some sort of crime. The words are, in fact, not in the constitution and it's really just fine to point that out. What the textbook requirements apparently don't require is for students to learn where the "separation" phrase comes from, the context in which it was originally used, how those sources relate to the writing of the constitution, and how our understanding of the role of both church and government may have changed in the last 230 years.

The reporting on the Texas board decision all mentions that essentially the rest of the nation is forced to adopt whatever standards Texas adopts because Texas orders so many textbooks and publishers are loathe to publish multiple editions of a single textbook. All I can say is "Huh?"

First of all, I thought we lived in a market driven system. Texas appears to have 1.6 million high school students (http://www.localschooldirectory.com/state-schools/TX) . The country as a whole has over 14 million high school students (http://www.betterhighschools.org/pubs/documents/USFactSheetandReferences_FINAL_080406.pdf). It seems to me, with those numbers, a publisher could make pretty good money serving the country even if they never sold a single textbook in Texas. In fact, a decent salesperson could use deliberately avoiding the Texas standard as a selling point.

Second, how hard is it today to publish a number of copies of a slightly altered edition of a textbook? In a world with a publish-on-demand model in which printing a very small number of copies can still be profitable, how can the entire country be held hostage by the Texas Board of Education?

Finally, the School Library Journal article suggests a possible response to the Texas decision is to create and apply a national standard. This worries me. Partly because it might suffer from a political influence similar to the one the Texas Board suffers from. When conservatives come into power, suddenly our "facts" will become more conservative. But national sets of standards also tend to become very large ships which are hard to change direction. If our understanding of history suddenly changes because of some new discovery, will our national standards be malleable enough to handle the change?

What we need are smart, tough local boards who truly have the best interests of students at heart, and are willing to make demands that publishers use the technology at their to disposal to create appropriate textbooks for non-Texas students rather than simply whining that "Texas has our hands tied."

Alice in Wonderland ebook on iPad captures spirit of the pop-up

2010-04-13T08:58:00.000-07:00

Check out this video of an iPad version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

http://mashable.com/2010/04/13/alice-in-wonderland-ipad/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:%20Mashable%20%28Mashable%29&utm_content=Twitter

I'm going to break from my usual rant against such things and admit that this looks pretty cool, pretty fun and seems to capture the spirit of the illustrated versions of the manuscript. I suspect kids will have a good time with it and they might just be drawn in to read the actual text.

But if I wanted to read Alice, rather than play with my iPad (no, I don't actually have one) I would still turn to a more traditional form of the text whether ebook or print. Unlike the original illustrations which don't overly distract one from the text, this stuff will, ultimately, get in the way of a real reading experience, of entering the so-called fictive dream. It's fine as an introduction to reading, but it certainly doesn't replace it.

It's my blog so if I want to make the same damn point over and over and over again, I will, ok? So here goes: When thinking about ebooks people forget that we've already had multimedia on print for years. Picture books, illustrated books, photography books, how-to books, coffee table books all benefit from the use of multimedia and will continue to benefit from the use of multimedia. I, frankly, am excited about the prospect of how-to books with embedded videos (if a picture is worth a 1000 words, well, at 30 per second, you do the math). We even already have 3D in the form of pop-up books. I love pop-up books and their fascinating blend of art and engineering. But, as far as literature goes, a pop-up book is a novelty item. This edition of Alice is in the spirit of the pop-up book. The pop-up book has not radically changed fiction and neither will the "interactive" multimedia book.

Fiction may be enhanced by eReaders, but if it is, it will be either through creating social media connections with authors and other readers, or it will be by deepening the fictive dream, not distracting readers from it. After a brief period where everyone thinks they have to experiment, eReaders will finally serve us up fiction that is again made of regular old words. As it should be.

Belated Ada Lovelace Day

2010-03-25T13:13:00.000-07:00

Ok. Ada Lovelace Day was yesterday, so I'm at least twenty-four hours late announcing it. Alas, that's less late than I am running on most things.

Lerner Publishing remembered, though, and put together a great bunch of essays and interviews by and about women scientists. It is fascinating and inspiring reading.

Update 3/26/2010: Added link to the whole list.

Finally some sense about eReaders

2010-03-25T05:59:00.000-07:00

Read David Lankes rant to eReader producers on the SLJ web site. It's perhaps the best, most sensible thing I've come across on the subject. Lankes doesn't get into wishing for multimedia or complaining about eBook prices or nostalgia for paper. He talks about the way we learn and how eReaders have the opportunity to facilitate that learning, an opportunity they are currently squandering. He suggests a host of note-taking, editing, organizing and social media features currently missing from pretty much all eReaders, and concludes:

The next evolution of the ereader should go beyond the artifacts of learning to engage the act of learning itself. Not textbook knowledge but what is derived through reading. We discover ourselves in the struggles of Holden Caulfield. We see the best of humanity in Atticus Finch. This isn’t about some romantic ideal around the love of reading, but a more fundamental need to understand. You want to change the world, give me an iPad or ereader that facilitates this; true learning happens when books and friends, writing and understanding intermingle in a rich soup of participation.

I'm done with March Madness and Paris Nice

2010-03-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

They both seem totally dull compared to this:
http://www.suvudu.com/cagematch.html?ref=TextLink_Top

A brilliant concept, intriguing match-ups, priceless commentary . . . the reasons I prefer reading fantasy to watching sports in the first place.

via Charlotte's Library

Miss Potter Review

2010-03-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

Moving this up in honor of this year's Women's History Month (and because I don't think many of you have dug this deep into the blog).

Watched Miss Potter with the wife the other night. The wife warned me I wouldn't like it. She was right.

"It's a nice story," she said. "You don't like nice stories." It's true that Miss Potter is a nice story, but that wasn't the problem. I can go for a nice story now and then. Really.

In Miss Potter, Renee Zellweger plays Beatrix Potter. In general, I do not like Renee Zellweger. I find her squintiness untrustworthy. I know people like Jerry Maguire think her squintiness is cute. I just don't see it. And she smiled way way too much at the Academy Awards a couple of years ago. I know these aren't fair criticisms, but I can't help it. To tell the truth, though, Renee Zellweger made a decent Beatrix Potter, or at least a decent Miss Potter as she was written in the script. She was eccentric and self-confident and tough and absolutely, utterly likable. And Zellweger toned down the squint for the role, which helped.

I don't know that much about Beatrix Potter. Like most people, I think her stories are adorable and her illustrations are irresistibly charming. She really makes you like bunnies. She makes you want to drink herbal tea and gossip in a kind sort of way about the farmer who raises turkeys down the road. I like reading her stories to my kids. My kids love them.

I do know one interesting fact about Beatrix Potter: before the children's stories and the bunny in the blue vest, Beatrix Potter was a scientist, an accomplished botanist. Her favorite subject was fungi. She drew and painted a lot of fungus pictures. She discovered new species. She carried out elaborate and tedious experiments on lichen in her kitchen. She wrote papers and sent them to the Linnean Society for publication.

And Miss Potter, the nice story starring Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter, mentions this scientific career not at all. Nowhere. Not a fungus painting casually flipped past in a portfolio of bunnies, duckies and woodland scenes; not a casual line like "the other day when I was examining some fascinating polypores . . ."; not a stray beaker or petrie dish in the kitchen scenes. Nothing at all. In fact at one point, Beatrix starts talking about a beautiful thing she found herself painting one day. It turned out, she says, to be "pig swill." Well, there's an opportunity right there, why not "wood mold" instead?

I know better than to trust a biopic for accuracy. Or at least I know better since A Beautiful Mind, which added imaginary friends to John Forbes Nash's debilitating schizophrenia. It turns out, if you can trust the book upon which the movie was "based," Nash didn't have visions of imaginary people. OK, I can understand how much fun it would be for a screen writer to dramatize Nash's problems, which were quite dramatic already, with some visions of folks that no one else can see. That temptation might be very strong. But when realizations about those entirely fictional fictional characters form the pivotal moments in the film and thus suggest pivotal moments of Nash's life, you've gone way too far. You haven't just misrepresented Nash's disease, you've now misrepresented his entire life, and then what is the point of a biopic? It's interesting that when book writers are guilty of fictionalizing their non-fiction books, they get beat up, knocked down, and kicked while they're writhing on the ground. When Hollywood does it, only worse, you can start polishing Oscar's head. Plus A Beautiful Mind is one of those math movies, like Good Will Hunting, that has no math in it at all. I hate those.

Anyway, I know force-fitting an entire life into a 90 minute movie is a formidable task. Some important things are going to get left out. I'm sure the producers were aware of Beatrix Potter's accomplishments as a scientist, but thought they would be distractions in a movie about her children's writing and love life. I suspect that they calculated, perhaps through focus groups, that the main audience of this movie would be women of late middle age who keep stuffed bunnies dressed according to the season on antique furniture in living rooms that never see human use. If you ask these women their opinions on fungus, lichens, and people who call themselves "mycologists" . . . See?

But I think, by deleting her long scientific practice, the film shortchanges BP's character. The movie does a wonderful job of capturing her whimsy (with some delightful animation worthy of her illustrations), her knowledge of books and publishing, and her forceful determination. But the truth is, she learned to paint the natural world partly through a highly disciplined study of it, and that part is lost along with her career as a botanist.

It's especially curious since the movie takes a feminist approach to BP's life, showing the myriad ways in which she defied the gender expectations of her time regarding career, marriage and money. Today, we are more open minded. Today women are free to become scientists and they are also free to become writer's of children's books. But according to Miss Potter, they're not free to be both. Perhaps we still have a ways to go.

Like a Wardrobe Times Ten, Squared

2010-03-05T23:56:00.000-08:00

You might get the impression that N.D. Wilson really likes the name “Henry.” The town in which his 100 Cupboards series of novels are primarily set is called “Henry, Kansas.” His protagonists’ name is “Henry York” and another major character is named Henrietta but goes by “Henry” much of the time.

The odd little details like this peppered throughout Wilson's writing are as compelling as the wildly imaginative stories he tells. In 100 Cupboards, Henry York is taken at age twelve to live with his Aunt and Uncle in the aforementioned namesake town. He’s been raised by parents who, despite their own adventurous natures (they’ve been kidnapped during a travel-writing expedition by bike through Bolivia) have made Henry's own life so sheltered he hasn’t even properly learned the game of baseball. Through much of his childhood he’s been forced to wear a helmet and he’s been shoved into a car seat well past the age of nine. Even before arriving in Kansas, Henry is vaguely aware that his life is not quite right, not quite normal.

But if his life is not quite normal, the lives of his aunt, uncle and cousins have elements that are even odder, though much more positive in their curiousness. They have, for instance, a room in their house which has been locked for two years, ever since its occupant, Grandfather, died. This is not out of respect for the deceased, but because the door simply will not open, not even with the aid of a locksmith, or an axe, or a chainsaw. Uncle Frank himself is at same time the kindest most understanding fellow imaginable and rather detached both from Henry and his own children.

Of course there are secrets behind that un-openable door. And there are secrets in Henry’s own attic room. Henry discovers that there are cupboards there, magical cupboards, 99 of them, hidden under the plaster of one wall. And they go places. Odd and often dangerous places. It isn’t long before Henry and Henrietta go through the cupboards exploring and get themselves into all kinds of trouble.

In Dandelion Fire, the second book in the series, Henry returns to the cupboards, but the cupboards also begin sending visitors to Kansas. Kansas, which N.D. Wilson says in his opening paragraph, “is not easily impressed.” But in this case even Kansas has to stand up and take notice. The cupboards seem to warp time and space and Kansas changes from what it was.

The 100 Cupboards series contains many of the usual elements of young people’s fantasy. There are doors which lead to magical places. There are orphaned children searching for hints of their past. There are mentors and weapons and magic. But what makes 100 Cupboards special is how much more Wilson gives readers of these familiar things. He provides not just one magical wardrobe, but 100 magical cupboards, and all of them let people out as well as in.

All of this excess doesn’t always work. About half way through Dandelion Fire the reader is so overwhelmed with the constantly changing settings and with all of the possibilities that the story itself gets a little lost. Henry himself is so overwhelmed that he’s unable to act as a hero until quite near the end.

Still, a dive into this head-spinning baroque world is entirely fascinating. There is fine adventure and boundless imagination. But for all that, the most valuable part of Wilson’s writing is not its fantastical elements. It’s his characters and what they mean to each other. The love between his siblings reflect realistic blend of appreciation and constant annoyance. The children treat their parents with a similar blend of respect and utter dismissal.

Both of Wilson's worlds, the fantastical one and the domestic one are rich enough to warrant multiple readings.

Dandelion Fire was a 2009-2010 Cybil awards nominee.

The third book in the series, The Chestnut King, was released in January. A paperback version of Dandelion Fire has also come out. For more information on The Chestnut King and on N.D. Wilson and his career visit his website. Or read this excellent review on Eva’s Book Addiction. Or read this in-depth interview on Mundie Moms.

FTC required disclaimer: I got 100 Cupboards from the library. I received a review copy of Dandelion Fire as part of the Cybils judging process. Receiving the book did not in any way influence my review. In theory I'll receive a small commission if you buy anything after clicking on the Amazon links on the site. Feel free to test that theory.

CYBILS!!!!

2010-02-14T16:00:00.001-08:00

Besides hearts and roses and lots of red everywhere, Valentine's day means the Cybils awards are announced!

The whole list is here.

In Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction, the winner was . . . . .
Silksinger, by Laini Taylor. It is a truly deserving book. Nice work Laini, and nice work judges.

Libraries without Books

2010-02-11T11:25:00.000-08:00

The New York times Room for Debate Blog is running an extensive debate on whether libraries (school and public) should move to a primarily online model.

I haven't had a chance to read it through closely yet, but trust that when I do I'll be posting an irate, rambling opinion piece right here.

Awkward . . .

2010-02-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

Ok I've seen the iPad. Shrug. Looks nice for surfing the Internet while sitting on a couch, but that's about it. Probably ok for eBooks, who knows? But Apple somehow thinks it's going to compete with Amazon by selling eBooks for more, not less. Hmmmm.

Speaking of eBooks and prices, in the Macmillan vs. Amazon war, well, I hate it, no, I abhor it, and plus I'm ashamed, but I have to side with Amazon here. I suppose it's possible that Macmillan has the numbers it needs to support its insistence on the 15.00 eBook. But I sure haven't heard anything about them.

The trouble is the print publishers are thinking about eBooks as if they were versions of print books. To a publisher an eBook is like a trade paperback in that it can be produced much more cheaply than the hardcover version. But it's like the hardcover version in that it comes out (most of the time anyway) as a first edition and it hasn't proven itself in the marketplace. So given those two things, it makes sense in a way to split the difference between a $30 hardcover and a $10 paperback.

But, of course, an eBook is MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper to produce than a paperback. In fact, I have this novel I've been working on. It's about 70,000 crappy words long right now. If I wanted to release it to the public (and believe me, you don't want me to) I could have it available later this afternoon in a perfectly readable .pdf version. So, ok, if I wanted to lock it down with DRM and collect payment for it I might be up late tonight, but I'd still have it available by tomorrow. That's one person, working all alone. If I collected, say, an outrageous $200 an hour for my time and I really stretched it out, I could probably amass a $2000 bill for the publication of an UNLIMITED number of copies. If I charged $10 a download, I'd be in the black at 200 lousy copies. What print book can claim that? So lets say I manage to sell a modest 20,000 copies at $10. I've just made $198,000.

Now, I know a professionally published book goes through all that editing and everything and that costs a bunch of money (though as I understand it, publishers expect books to be pretty well edited by the time they are accepted). And there are royalties to the author. And sometimes publishers bother to pay for marketing and promotion too. I also understand that in general, big publishers are publishing real books along with eBooks so they still have to pay publication costs.

Still, as Amazon and Wal-Mart and Target have demonstrated, when books get cheaper, people buy more of them. Amazon is taking a loss on eBooks right now because it understands that eventually it will be possible to make more money from a $10 (or even cheaper) eBook then from a $30 print book.

The $10 eBook helps the market by reducing risk across the board. The reader is more likely to take a chance on a title that hasn't been promoted by Oprah or reviewed in the New York Times. The publisher is more likely to take a chance on publishing something that won't cost it much to produce. The seller is more likely to take a chance on stocking something that won't take up shelf space and may entice people to spend a little money.

In the end, what that means is more people reading. It also means more titles published. Now why would Apple and Macmillan be opposed to that?

Texting and literacy

2010-01-20T07:36:00.000-08:00

The cranky old people can stop now with their "Technology is ruining the English language, what with it's smiley faces and stupid abbreviations, ggwmm* . . ."

A British study has revealed the reverse. Kids who text do better with spelling.

Back when only a handful of my students used email or chat programs, I noticed that those who did were more facile writers. Now that everyone emails and texts, and many blog, tweet and update FB statuses, it's fair to say that we are becoming, again, people who write. This should be celebrated without qualification.

We do write differently than we did in the 19th Century when we were sending long letters over land and sea, but you'd expect that, wouldn't you?

* ggwmm = grumble grumble where's my Metamucil

More ALA . . .

2010-01-18T08:49:00.001-08:00

Over at Charlotte's Library, more ALA awards announced and a hand-count of how fantasy and science fiction fared.

When You Reach Me wins Newbery

2010-01-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

Well, Randomhouse Kids faux pas'ed and tweeted their win before it was announced. Not cool. Let me just say this would NEVER happen with the Cybils. Still, I think the committee made a fine choice with Wen You Reach Me. My review is here.

Other ALA Media award winners, as scraped from Fuse #8 are below.

Newbery Award: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Honor: The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick

Honor: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

Honor: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

Honor: Claudette Colvin by Phillip Hoose

Caldecott Award: The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

Honor: All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, illustrated by Marla Frazee,

Honor: Red Sings From Treetops by Joyce Sidman illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski

Geisel Award: Benny and Penny in the Big No-No by Geoffrey Hayes

Honor: I Spy Fly Guy by Tedd Arnold

Honor: Little Mouse Gets Ready by Jeff Smith

Honor: Mouse and Mole: Fine Feathered Friends by Wong Herbert Yee

Honor: Pearl and Wagner: One Funny Day by Kate McMullan

Poetry Friday at Great Kids Books

2010-01-15T06:21:00.001-08:00

Poetry Friday is at Great Kids Books this week.

Here's my contribution:

January always makes me think of this poem, but after both the desolation and stupidity of the last couple of days it seems especially poignant.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/these/

Measured in Millimeters

2010-01-05T07:57:00.000-08:00

Like most of the rest of the civilized world, France uses the metric system. So diminutive Toby Lolness, the protagonist in Timothee Fombelle's fantastic Toby Alone (translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone), is described as "one and a half millimeters tall." That's better than "3/32 of an inch," although I had to wonder how the people of Toby's world, who are confined to the landscape of a single tree, ever figured out what a millimeter was.

Toby's world is one in which water runs like rivers through the canyons created by tree bark's texture, in which birds are almost immeasurable monsters that descend from the sky like a mythical dragons, in which everyone lives on or in or at least fastened to one truly enormous (to the little people anyway) Tree. The Tree provides everything. Of course there are those who appreciate what the tree gives them, and then there are those who just want to exploit the Tree for their own gain. Sound familiar?

Toby, our 1.5 mm hero, is on the run, being hunted by nearly every other citizen of the Tree (all of whom are in the single digits, millimeter-wise). Toby's parents are in prison and some of his closest friends have turned on him. Why? Because Toby’s father is an inventor who has discovered an almost magical source of energy within the Tree's sap, an energy source that, if harvested, may cause irreparable damage to the Tree. Toby's father, more concerned with the health of the Tree than with the benefits his discovery could bring to the Tree's people, refuses to reveal the secrets of the energy source. Led by big time construction contractor Joe Mitch, the people of the Tree turn on Toby's father and drive him into exile amongst the distant lower branches. Down there, Tree people must contend with the savage Grass People who constantly threaten to invade the Tree—at least that’s what Toby has heard. But finally, Joe Mitch considers exile not punishment enough for the Lolnesses and Toby's parents are captured and Toby is left to flee on his own.

Toby's adventure is well-paced and while the narrative jumps around quite erratically in time, its elements unfold organically. The reader sweats and pants along with Toby whether he is fleeing or facing his enemies, in either case relying on superior cleverness to defeat them. Each time someone betrays Toby, the reader feels the knife in his own back. Toby also grows organically, becoming, by the end, an almost entirely different character. And yet the change occurs so subtly that it's difficult to pick out a single point in the narrative where the change takes place. Toby's world is masterfully presented and de Fombelle has no end of fun in finding tree corollaries for many of the technologies that we larger people (measuring approximately 1,753 millimeters) enjoy. While we milk cows, the Tree people milk insect larvae. While we have bulldozers, the little tree people breed and train giant weevils. The reader begins to believe that if people really were that small they could indeed live off the bounty of such a tree. Thousands of species, after all, do exactly that. De Fombelle seems to understand bugs and vegetation well enough to make the story perfectly believable.

I did find some of the themes of the book cause for . . . maybe not concern but at least careful consideration. Toby's father does not exactly act as a censor of information; he promises not to stand in the way of other scientists and inventors who seek the secrets of the Tree's sap. But I wonder what his moral obligations are regarding this information. While of course I agree with the book's environmental message that the Tree should not be mindlessly and limitlessly tapped for its energy, I don't like the idea of an elite individual privy to knowledge which isn't shared with the larger populous. Still, that Toby Alone's plot centers on such an issue is laudable. It's one of the more complex treatments related to science and environmentalism that I've seen in a book for young people and it certainly leaves the door open for debate on what's right.

I also found the violence in the book mildly disturbing. While in general de Fombelle seems to emphasize the use of brains over brawn, and his good and noble characters usually fret over situations in which they must hurt people in order to survive, there are also instances of particularly brutal violence being treated as funny, as a kind of slapstick pratfall which might leave every bone in your body bruised or broken. Again, this inconsistency is at once unsettling and an invitation to the reader to consider the consequences of physical confrontation.

The book has a satisfying ending, but leaves a number of unanswered questions likely to be addressed in the forthcoming sequel, Toby and the Secrets of the Tree.

Crossposted at Guys Lit Wire

Cybils shortlists

2010-01-04T07:00:00.000-08:00

I know it's not exactly breaking news, but Cybils finalists were announced on Jan. 1.

All of them are here.

And here are the finalists for the Science Fiction and Fantasy / Middle Grade category, the panel on which I proudly served. Follow the links from there to my fellow-panelists blogs. They are all excellent.

Expect more reviews of Cybils-nominated books here and on Guys Lit Wire in the coming months.

Happy Holidays

2009-12-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

If you visited Critique de Mr. Chompchomp in 2009 you were probably either trying to advertise Viagra in the comments or hoping to steal a book report for your junior high school English class.

But in the event that you had other motives for visiting, I want to thank you personally and wish you a happy holiday season. Mr Chompchomp is very slowly becoming a Successful Blog and it is because of all of you. Thanks especially to those of you who have taken the time to comment on my posts and those who found them interesting enough to provide links to them.

Have great holidays, all of you.

Children and the future of the fictive dream

2009-12-03T10:58:00.000-08:00

Theoretical ebooks for kids are becoming actual ebooks for kids. Elizabeth Bird at Fuse #8 channels Stanley Kubrik in a post about a small press doing some interesting things with books for the iPhone. And here's an announcement about the Flip, an ebook reader for children. Finally, Andrew Karre of Lerner Books speaks to the subject of how children will read in the future.

Once again I find myself apologizing for being a curmudgeon. What Winged Chariot Press is doing sounds great. A perfect use of the technology to present literature, teach literacy and engage children. It makes me think of a hyped up "read-along" text, but with out the bulky tape player and the lost tapes.

The Flip article, though, gets all jumpy over the possibilities of animations, quizzes and puzzle-solving in the midst of story reading. Hmmm. Lots of commentators shrug and say "if it gets kids into reading . . . "

I have nothing against this sort of thing, in and of itself. These "interactive texts" are just the electronic version of an activity book, a long trusted educational aid/distraction for the kids. For some types of reading, like reading for simple information, the quizzes and animations and puzzles may help motivate students, I suppose.

But there is a type of reading, both a pleasure and a skill, that all the flashy images and intrusive puzzles inhibit. It's that fully absorbing type of reading, sometimes called entering into the "fictive dream." While for many avid readers, reading in this fashion is second nature and is the reason why we read, it is, nonetheless, a learned skill. A reader must learn to fully engage the text, to offer up his or her imagination to the writing, engage in the collaboration of creating the fictive dream.

I often fear that gizmo reading, especially for children, ignores and devalues this kind of reading. Gizmo promoters talk about making books interactive, as if they weren't. As if the kind of reading that leads to the fictive dream were not a much more profound kind of interaction than any animation or video game or quiz or puzzle.

But maybe I should stop worrying as Ms. Bird suggests. Before the gizmos, children moved from touch and feel books to picture books to readers to chapter books to novels, the multimedia interruptions (mostly illustrations) to the fictive dream growing fewer and fewer with each graduation. Perhaps fictive dream type reading should be waded into slowly.

But, then again, so many of the proposed ebooks and ebook readers for kids seem to be aimed at that older set and seem to kowtow to their video-game-oriented minds. Maybe we're in danger of creating more and more distracted readers, rather than less.

Anatomy Jumble

2009-12-01T06:43:00.000-08:00

The title of Martin Chatterton's novel, The Brain Finds a Leg, evokes disturbing images, the kind of thing you encounter in nightmares or the fine details of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of the depths of Hell: a brain liberated from its skull hopping about spasmodically on a leg that sprouts from its hypothalamus, the knee flexing as gelatinous gray matter jiggles. (The title doesn't suggest it, but in my my mind the leg is also wearing a high-heeled shoe.)

The Brain Finds a Leg isn't actually anything like that. The Brain isn't an actual brain, but a guy by the name of Brain, Theophilus Brain. And the leg is lifeless, having been severed from the corpse of a murdered surfer. And the story doesn't take place in Hell but in an Australian town called Farrago Bay which includes characters nearly as strange as those imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. If you ask Sheldon McGlone, fatherless, bullied by teachers and fellow students alike, living in Farrago Bay is pretty much like living in Hell.

So, while The Brain Finds a Leg doesn't include a brain bounding about on a high-heel-shod gam, such a thing would probably find a nice home in this story.

Let me start again.

Sheldon McGlone is fatherless because his father, the captain of the whale-watching vessel The Coreal, was "lost at sea" in an unexplained and unlikely accident involving killer humpback whales, although those tormenting Sheldon have suggested that his father's incompetence was the real cause of the mishap. Sheldon's mother has taken to dating Sargeant Snook of the Farrago Bay police force who Sheldon considers a less-than-stellar paternal replacement. At school Sheldon finds himself the preferred spitball target of bully Fergus Feebly and the favorite humiliation target of the evil Mrs. Fleming. To deal with the stress, Sheldon has adopted a sugar binging habit.

Into Sheldon's depressing life walks Theophilus Brain, a new kid so nerdy--oversized head, oversized glasses, oversized intellect, etc.--Sheldon has hopes that some of the pressure will be taken off of him. But The Brain (no he's not Wellesian mouse) shows himself more than capable of standing up to both Feebly and Fleming. What's more, the evening of his sudden appearance in Farrago Bay, The Brain knocks on the McGlone's door and makes Sheldon a proposition: The Brain declares himself to be The World's Greatest Detective and asks Sheldon to play the role of his trusty sidekick, the Watson to The Brain's Holmes. Sheldon's outlook is so gloomy that The Brain's offer actually looks like an attractive option.

The two immediately have a case to solve: the murder of champion surfer and Dent-O toothpaste spokesperson Bif Manly who's body was recently discovered, minus a leg. It's not spoiling anything to announce that The Brain's first clue is the surfer's leg which The Brain finds.

In the meantime, not only the humpback whales are acting strangely. So are the koalas, the lorikeets, an out-of-place crocodile, and one particular classroom teacher. And nothing about The Brain, including hi story of being the victim of his mad scientist parents' experimental mishap, quite adds up either.

The Brain Finds a Leg starts with the absurd. Then each page tries to outdo the last. Chatterton has a Pynchonesque gift for quirky character names (Infinity Override and Carefree O'Toole are my favorites) and for slipping hyperbole into even his most offhand phrases. In short, The Brain Finds a Leg is a lot of fun, what you might get if Daniel Pinkwater channelled both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Chuck Jones then told a story with an Australian accent while standing in one of those Bosch details.

The Brain Finds a Leg made it's US debut this year and is a Cybils award nominee.

Crossposted at Guys Lit Wire

Random thoughts of a Cybils panelist #1

2009-11-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
--Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope

The Harry Potter series culminates in a story about the most powerful of magical items: the Elder Wand. The Lord of the Rings centers around an immensely powerful ring. Magical swords, potions, crystals, gems, mirrors are all things to quest for, or covet, or fight entire-world-on-the-brink battles over.

The Cybils nominees in the Middle Grade Sci-Fi Fantasy category sometimes draw on these old tropes, but have also introduced a few surprising and unique Items of Power. Two otherwise unrelated novels agree that dandelions have immense magically power. Didn't see that coming, but I can't argue with it either.

But there is a general consensus among the nominees that the most powerful of magical items are books. Books as portals, books as secret codes, books simply emanating power, books offering either narrative or knowledge. This idea isn't new, but its omnipresence does seem a little, I dunno, prophetic? I struggle over what this elevation of the printed word means. Is it sign that books are growing in importance? Or that they are becoming rarer, less read, less comprehensible and therefore more dangerous. Perhaps it's a "we-can-play-that-game-too" reaction to Biblical literalists. Or perhaps it's a kind of preemptive nostalgia for a form everyone assures us is breathing its last.

When you . . . something something something

2009-11-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

The worst thing about When You Reach Me is its title. Not that it misrepresents the book or anything. In that respect it’s perfect. But I have trouble recalling it. When I think about the book, the first thing that comes to my mind is “Wish You Were Here” and then my brain says to me “That’s a Pink Floyd album” and with haunting guitar chords now echoing through my brain’s cavernous file room, I have to rifle through the ‘W’s’ until I come up with “When You Reach Me.” If your brain uses a more efficient filing system you may not have this problem.

But once you get past the title (and, really, it’s just four words) you come upon a beautifully written narrative under a thin sci-fi veneer that captures the odd “tweener” world of the older elementary school student, the odder world of the 1970s, the stresses of single parenthood, and the poetry of both hope and regret.

When her best friend, Sal, stops speaking to her after he gets arbitrarily punched by a neighborhood bully, Miranda finds herself falling in with a whole different group of friends, among them, weirdly, the bully, who turns out not to be a bully at all. At the same time, Miranda needs to negotiate her mother’s relationship with her boyfriend, also known as Mr. Perfect, who, though he seems to live up to his name, is not being granted a key of his own to the apartment. Mr. Perfect and Miranda are helping Miranda’s mom prepare for an appearance on 20,000 Pyramid (if you were around in the seventies and for some reason, like perhaps a brain filing problem, you don’t remember that show-- should it go under ‘t’ or with the numbers, before ‘a’?-- this book will bring it all rushing back). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Miranda begins to receive notes from someone. The notes appear in weird places. They predict things in the future which inevitably come true, and they ask Miranda for something in return: to write the sender, whoever he or she may be, a story, a true story.

That’s a lot to handle in such a short book. In order to get all the elements quickly in order, the book seems a bit directionless in the first few pages. For many readers this won’t be a problem, it might even be intriguing, but it is not typical of middle grade science fiction or fantasy. In fact, my oldest child, aka Mini-Chomp, who is a SFF addict, tried reading it and gave up after the first few pages. Not only was she discouraged, she was actually angry. “It’s not even a story!” she declared, thrusting a fist into the air.

But, tyrannical nine year-olds aside, this book does tell a story and a little patience with the opening pays off when all the elements gel together and the narrative glides forward seamlessly, becoming more intriguing by the page. Despite all the mystery driving the plot, what Stead is best at is portraying her characters through quirky, peculiar details, the kind we recognize in our friends. (Discovering these little gems is part of the pleasure of reading this book, so I won’t spoil any of them here.) Because of them, you’ll soon befriend these characters and start to care almost as much about them as they care about each other.

This book will eventually be placed on Mini-Chomp’s required reading list, right there beside A Wrinkle in Time (which she also refuses to read and which just happens to be Miranda’s favorite book). Mark my words. Eventually Mini-Chomp too will grow to appreciate Rebecca Stead’s When You Wish You Were Reaching Me Here. Is that right?

When You Reach Me is a Cybil Book Awards nominee.

FTC disclosure: The publisher provided me with a copy of this book in order to evaluate it for the Cybil awards. The image at the top and any side bar images are linked to the Amazon Associates program. I get a small commission if you buy anything after following these links.

A new favorite blog

2009-11-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

School Library Journal's Elizabeth Bird linked to Bookie Woogie in her latest post. It's new favorite. The "reviews" are discussions about books between a dad and his three kids. The discussions are free-spirited and each review ends with some fan art. Very fine fan art, if you ask me.

Graphic Metamorphosis

2009-11-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

From my post this month on GuysLitWire:

The opening of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes to discover he has been transformed into a man-sized cockroach, stands as one of the most recognizable moments in all of the Twentieth Century literature. If you've never read the story, Peter Kuper's graphic novel adaptation can serve as a fine introduction, and if you have, it will make you see the story in a whole new horrifyingly funny way.

Because, when the novel opens, being turned into a bug is not Gregor's biggest problem. No, weighing much more heavily on Gregor’s mind is that he is late for work. He has to figure out how to get out of bed, how to collect his salesman's samples, how to get dressed and how to catch the morning train. Gregor has been so terrorized by his bosses and is so obsessed with making money to pay off his family's debts that being stuck on his beetle-shell back with six spindly legs waving in the air pales in comparison.

And while Gregor recognizes the horror of becoming a vermin, the difficulty it might present, he is only devastated when his condition results in losing his traveling salesman job.

This is horrifying, agonizingly sad, and . . . well . . . kinda funny. For us, nearly 100 years later, The Metamorphosis can serve as something of a morality tale for our "uncertain economic times."

Peter Kuper's graphic novel adaptation fits perfectly into this landscape of eerie, comical horror. The use of a white on black background puts everything into comic-book negative, creating an appropriately nightmarish aura. Most of the characters are drawn broadly, as they are written: Gregor's sister Grete is a cute cartoon figure with a terrified expression pasted on her face, what might have happened if Blondie Bumstead had posed for Edvard Munch's The Scream; Gregor's father is a puffed out man with an over-sized angry head taken from an Otto Dix painting; and his mother looks quite simply like a corpse. Gregor is the most grotesque of all but is given the most emotional breadth: he is depicted as a beetle with a head still vaguely recognizable as a human. Kuper uses all of Gregor's attributes, from both man and insect, to convey his perpetually conflicting emotions. Graphic elements like off-kilter frames and jaggedly outlined dialog balloons contribute more to the edgy aura.

Not everything translates perfectly. The novel gets some of its horror from the visceral elements of being a bug--the ooze, the stench, the sticky and rotting stuff. Kuper's stark graphics can't really portray this kind of thing, and he doesn't really try, focusing on the story's other horrifying elements instead.

One of these is that Gregor never stops being human. He never loses the ability to hear others talking about him, although they assume he has and thus are not at all careful free in what they say. He never loses the ability to feel love, rejection, humiliation, and, finally, betrayal. What remains of his humanity Kuper expresses in his large terrified eyes, revealing an inner horror more terrifying than his invertebrate exterior.

As countless other commentators have pointed out, The Metamorphosis can be read in a number of ways, as a religious allegory, as social commentary, or as an expressionistic expose of a tortured human soul. Still, what struck me upon rereading it this time, both because of Kuper's adaptation and because of current events, is how much the story is about employment, about jobs. Even after the opening scene, Gregor continues to obsess about his lost employment as much as about being a bug. He recalls how he counted down the days until he could tell off his bosses. He swells with pride when he thinks about how he rescued his family from certain doom, working his way up from stock clerk to traveling salesman, after his father's business collapsed in an economic downturn. And he shrinks with shame when he considers all they have to go through now that he can no longer work. His retirement-age father must return to work as a bank messenger. His mother brings in sewing and his teenage sister becomes a salesgirl. The family also brings in three demanding borders who discover the family's secret shame, Gregor.

In the end, the conflict between Gregor's point of view and his family's creates the deepest irony. To Gregor, work has been mostly torture and humiliation, a life metaphorically like the one he adopts as a bug, but his family has come to find that work means something different to them. The story ends with the family, minus Gregor, riding a train together, and the three remaining members deciding that they each actually like their jobs. It seems mundane, but in this story it's the equivalent of Jason popping up out of the lake to terrify the audience one last time. Everything Gregor was about, all of his sacrifice, was for naught. All along, his family would have been happy, happier even, going to work! SKREET SKREET SKREET SKREET!

Is there a moral? I don't know. But if it's about jobs, I'd get a good one if I were you. Stay in school. Find something you love and work like hell at it. Don't let what happened to Gregor Samsa happen to you . . .

Check out the book's website. The opening movie is well worth a visit and provides and excellent preview of the book.

Ebook versions of the original, translated by David Wyllie, are available free at Project Gutenberg.

Elephants from the Sky

2009-10-28T05:25:00.000-07:00

An orphan, Peter Augustus Duchene, wants to know where his sister is. His caretaker, the retired soldier Vilna Lutz claims that she died shortly after being born, but Peter has his nagging doubts. At the market one day he hands over Vilna Lutz's grocery money to a fortune teller who reveals two irreconcilable pieces of information: one, his sister is alive; two, an elephant will lead him to her.

Given the utter absence of elephants in his city of Baltese, Peter doesn't know whether to be filled with hope or ashamed of his foolishness until an elephant does arrive, conjured, half-accidentally, out of the sky, by a desperate stage magician.

Like the phenomenally successful Tale of Desperaux, Kate DiCamillo's latest book is a fairy tale told with simple poetic language from multiple points of view. In The Magician's Elephant a character which seems to merely add atmosphere to one scene will take over the story in the next. Each part of the tale is constructed perfectly to fit with the others. I'd say the story works like gears meshing together, but the narrative is so much more elegant than that. It's more like an elaborate folk dance.

While Peter remains at the center of the story the reader's sympathies connect with the wishes of so many other characters (including the elephant's) that the story relates the regrets and hopes of a whole fairy tale community. In the end it's a story of love of every kind except the romantic kind, and in that it is truly refreshing.

My only question is whether this really is a kids' book. It has a child as its protagonist and it's written using language that is fairly simple on the surface. And it is a fairy tale. But really Peter Augustus Duchene is more an adult-idealized child (damaged, innocent, unswervingly moral, and absolutely determined) than a child that real kids can relate to. Peter is the anti-Wimpy Kid.

So The Magician's Elephant might be described as a "crossover" book. But, if I am right that children will read this book only to indulge the adults in their lives, it just might step over the kid/adult line with all four elephant feet.

The Magician's Nephew is a Cybil Book Awards nominee.

Disclosure to please the FTC: My copy of The Magician's Nephew was borrowed from the Cleveland Heights Public Library with no strings attached. The image of The Magician's Elephant above, and in the side bar, is linked to the Amazon Affiliate program. I get a small commission from Amazon for books purchased on Amazon that were accessed through this link.

Percy Jackson Retires

2009-10-22T10:44:00.000-07:00

Rick Riordan wraps up the Percy Jackson and the Olympians story in book 5, The Last Olympian. (If you are SPOILER sensitive and haven't read all four of the previous books, I'd suggest you head on out of here right now. To keep you busy, I have a review of the first book, The Lightning Thief, here. Or check out The Lightning Thief movie teaser trailer here.)

When The Last Olympian opens, Percy is engaged along with the other Camp Half-Blood campers, in a war against the forces of the titan lord Kronos. Kronos has completely taken over the body of the traitorous Luke, and, intent on seizing Mount Olympus, leads a massive force of monsters in battles on multiple fronts. Poseidon, Percy's dad, is engaged in a losing fight under the sea while most of the other Olympians are attempting to stop the unstoppable monster Typhon from raging across the United States. Kronos/Luke still commands the demon cruise ship The Princess Andromeda.

This final volume includes some of the best of Riordan's writing. He's held onto some awesome monsters which now unleashes here, he provides a stage for some of the less flashy Olympians to reveal themselves. He gives the Oracle's prophecy a new quirky twist. And the battles, of which there are plenty, grow truly epic. Despite all the action and intrigue, what drives the story is what readers have come to love about the campers--their romantic escapades, their sarcastic dead panning, and their undying devotion to each other.

The Last Olympian does suffer a bit from last-book-itis. Riordan has too much to wrap up, too much that he's left for the final volume to deal with, and so he has to resort to some clumsy devices to fill in all the holes. For one, Percy does an awful lot of dreaming. Dreams have been important throughout the series and became rather central to the plot in book two when Percy's satyr Grover established an "empathy link," allowing Percy to see through his dreams what was happening to his distressed friend. This was already cheating a bit since an "empathy link" has no place, to the best of my knowledge, in Greek mythology and more and more throughout the series Riordan has been using the dream device, usually without any explanation, as a way of providing exposition. In The Last Olympian, though, the dreaming gets completely out of control. About half the book takes place while Percy is asleep and even with this cheat The Last Olympian doesn't answer all the questions that the story opens up. There remain a few niggling loose ends.

When Percy is awake, he is just as determined as ever to not let down his friends, whether he has to face gods, monsters or red-headed debutantes to do it. Ultimately, he doesn't disappoint readers either.

The Last Olympian is a 2009 Cybil Awards nominee.

Armed with Smarts, a Necklace, Some Tae Kwan Do, and a Sister

2009-10-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

If, upon reading the prologue of Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow, a new fantasy adventure from James Rollins, which follows Dr. Henry Bethel, Oxford University archaeologist, as he is being pursued through a jungle by grave robbers after the package he holds tightly to his chest (the package contains clues to a dark secret and priceless treasures) you were to think "Haven't I seen this movie? A few times?" you would be forgiven. And, if, when, the Dr., sinking into quicksand, relinquishes the package to the bad guy who thanks him with the diabolical line "Thank you Dr. Bethel. You've proven most resourceful," you were to audibly groan, no one would hold it against you.

Still, the book ultimately is not about Dr. Bethel, but about Jake Ransom, the son of two of Dr. Bethel's lost colleagues, Richard and Penelope Ransom. Jake is a somewhat nerdy and brilliant high school student, obsessed with the circumstances of his parents' disappearance. He studies archaeology and, more specifically Mayan culture, incessantly hoping to uncover clues to their fate. He trains in Tae Kwan Do in order to be prepared for some future dangerous expedition. His sister, Kady, reacts in diametric opposition to Jake, throwing herself into cheerleading and high school popularity in order to bury the pain of missing her mom and dad. In their parents' honor, they each wear Mayan amulets on their necks from a mysterious package sent to them after Richard and Penelope vanished.

When Jake and Kady are invited to a museum opening of a show (sponsored by an Evil Corporation) of the Mayan artifacts discovered by Richard and Penelope Ransom, their adventure begins. They are thrown into an alternative world, populated with humans from various periods and places in history as well as with dinosaurs and other prehistoric and fantastic creatures. This strange world is somehow connected to the corporation which originally sponsored the Ransom parents expedition and has sponsored the show which lured the younger Ransoms to the museum.

Jake and the Skull King's Shadow is plagued by a tendency toward cliché. The first thing that happens to Jake and Kady in the alternative world? They are attacked by--what else?--a T. Rex. (With so many newly discovered dinosaurs each year, many of them immensely cool and ferocious, one is forced to cry out with arms thrust heavenward, "WHY? WHY?") When, later in the tale, a traitor is revealed, the scene reads suspiciously like the mask-removing wrap-up from a Scooby Doo episode. "Why it’s you! How can this be? The character we would have least suspected!" This is followed by paragraphs of dialog, justifying the "surprise" in a spray of as-yet-unrevealed exposition.

In an afterward, Rollins explains that the references to Mayan technologies are based on factual archaeological research, and the dinosaurs he mentioned are all actual creatures form the fossil record. I can’t argue with the Mayan research, but I do take issue with some of Rollins’ paleontology. For one, he uses the term brontosaurus to describe a massive long necked dinosaur, but the designation “brontosaurus” hasn’t been recognized by paleontology for more than twenty years and the brontosaurus should be properly called an Apatosaurus. The book also makes the claim that pterosaurs lacked teeth, though in fact several species did have teeth.

Putting aside these flaws, the book's fast pacing, and collage of borrowed fantasy elements combined with archaeological fact-dropping are all expertly woven into an oddly original world, making this adventure an engaging read despite itself. Both Jake and Kady show dimension and depth, overcoming the lack of promise of their early scenes. Many of the supporting characters have real life to them as well. There are enough surprises thrown at Jake as he fights to get home with his sister that it's worth wincing through a few questionable “facts” and painfully cliché moments.

James Rollins promises more Jake Ransom titles to come.

Jake and the Skull King's Shadow is a Cybil Award Nominee.

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire.

Neil Gaiman reads and speaks and pees in Cleveland

2009-10-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

This past Sunday I attended, with my wife and not my children, a Neil Gaiman "author visit" at the Cleveland Public Library. Expecting a crowd, we arrived a little after noon for a two o'clock event. The line at this point extended nearly the length of a rather long parking lot and was rapidly growing. We ended up a little further back than the middle of the line. I worried for the people at the end of the line. A cooperative sky and wind made the wait gray and a little chilly, like a graveyard.

The doors opened at 1:00, an hour before the event and, amazingly enough, everyone who was in line at that point got a seat in the main auditorium. Over the next hour the auditorium finished filling up and the organizers made a lot of announcements about insuring that all seats were filled. Then the library opened a 350-seat overflow room wherein a live video feed of the event could be viewed.

"If anyone wanted to get rid of the white, nerdy population of Cleveland, this would be the place to drop a bomb," my wife quipped, examining the crowd. They weren't really all that white.

The library crammed, in total, about a thousand people in and then started turning fans away. (The photo shows maybe half the crowd.) You can read Neil Gaiman's own account of the day on his blog, including an apology to those turned away .

Five minutes before the event began my wife had already visited the restroom twice and the power of suggestion was now weighing heavily on my bladder. "You have time," she assured me, so I jumped out of the auditorium, past a group of rejected fans arguing with a library official, ran around the auditorium and ducked into the loo. I did my business, washed my hands (never forget the hygeine) and left the bathroom, walking right into . . . Neil Gaiman. Apparently he pees too. For a moment I had trouble recognizing him because he was much shorter than I expected. I said "Hi" and got out of there before I said something even less imaginative. He was wearing a bluetooth headset at the time so wasn't really disposed to engage in the chat I'm sure he would have loved to have with me.

At the event he was warm and funny. The first thing he did was to go visit the overflow room to thank them for putting up with the less-than-ideal accommodations and then repeatedly referenced the overflow people the rest of the afternoon. He read from Odd and the Frost Giants, written for World Book Day, the first that I'd ever heard of it, dumb American that I am. He answered some questions (his favorite color is green, he's currently working on an adult short story about a man whose made-up girlfriend comes looking for him, he aspires to be a head-in-a-jar on a Futurama episode. and his early influences include C.S. Lewis, Harlan Ellison and a big fat book of modern poetry). He read a bit from The Graveyard Book and then buckled down to sign things for a long long time.

2009 Cybil Award nominations open Oct. 1- Oct. 15

2009-10-01T05:29:00.000-07:00

Nominate books for the 2009 Cybil awards. Just click here.

If you don't know what the Cybils are, then read up.

Mr Chompchomp named to round 1 panel for middle grade sci-fi and fantasy category

2009-09-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

That's right. I'll be doing first round Cybil judging of Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy. So if you know of a great book that fits that description you can nominate it starting tomorrow. Just visit the cybils blog site.

Now, if you are an author with a nominated book in the MG/Elementery Sci-Fi Fantasy category, please do not try to bribe me. I'm incorruptible.

Do not send cash.
Do not send a case of Sprecher Black Bavarian.
Do not send a 2010 Trek Madone (size 56cm) with full Dura-Ace Gruppo and Bontrager Aeolus 5.0 wheels.
Do not send a prototype model of one of these.

Seriously. Don't do it. It won't work. I swear.

Books for a Buck: Wee G.

2009-09-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

This post marks an exciting development at Critique de Mr. Chompchomp. I'm introducing a semi-regular feature called Books for a Buck. In honor of the ongoing recession I will relate my most frugal reading experiences. The books discussed in this feature must have been acquired for one dollar or less. They might come from rummage sales, remainder piles, used book stores, library sales, the gutter outside my house, or my attic where my retired-school-teacher parents dumped their old literary holdings.

Perhaps the most cherished book in the Chompchomp household is Wee G. by Harriet Zeifert. I first picked up this book when my first child (Mini-Chomp) was about two and spotted it at a library book sale. I paid 25 cents for it, brought it home and read it to her that night before bed. It instantly became part of a bedtime ritual nearly every night for at least a year. No book, not even The Very Hungry Caterpillar, held her attention as raptly. As soon as she could talk she memorized the text of Wee G and spoke it along with me as I read.

A few years later my son (Extra-Mini-Chomp) reacted almost identically.

From an adult perspective it's tough to grasp the appeal of this book. In it, Wee G gets out of bed, goes out to play, chases a butterfly until she's lost in the woods, finds her way back home where her mother greets her, eats dinner, takes a bath and goes to sleep. It's nice and all, but not exactly gripping. It lacks the humor of the other books that have become kids' favorites. As a story, it's just kinda "there."

But the art and the language combine to make for a picture book that is irresistibly sweet. The art is primitive and childlike. Figures are boldly outlined and misproportioned but contain perfectly recognizable details that mark spots in the story. Wee G waits for a friend in a bucket, she wears a cozy pink sweater and bathes in a claw foot tub.

The language is gently rhythmic and captures the thoughts of Wee G, who gets excited but never hyper, worried but never panicked, providing just the appropriate amount of adventure for a toddler (even, apparently, one who bolts for the woods at every opportunity, eats fistfuls of garden dirt and enjoys head-butting mastiffs).

A little over a year ago, horror struck the Chompchomp household when our dog, a part German shepherd mutt with an insatiable appetite for ballet slippers and children's books, ate Wee G.

My youngest--and last--child (Ultra-Mini-Chomp) is now 20 months old. Yesterday, a replacement copy of Wee G. arrived from AbeBooks (it was a dollar, plus some postage, so unless you incorporate addition--which I don't recommend--I'm still within the Books for a Buck rules). It's been read to her over and over already and today she's been wandering around the house saying "weeshee."

Things about one guy I wouldn't mind being for a day

2009-09-24T08:43:00.000-07:00

New Gaiman teaser available online. Read the first 25 pages of Odd and the Frost Giant, by Neil Gaiman, newly available in the US.

In other Gaiman related news, The Graveyard Book wins the Hugo (I'll have something to say about this eventually) and also hits its 52nd week on the New York Times bestseller list.

Smart and dumb ideas on eBooks for kids

2009-09-18T22:13:00.000-07:00

A Publishers Weekly article called Children's Publishing in the Digital Age, in which several industry experts speak up, serves as a microcosm of some of the smart and dumb ideas floating around about eBooks for kids.

Smart: Adding value to eBooks by allowing user added content. Wireless eBook readers should work two ways. Allowing reader discussions, possibly even engaging the author, by way of the eBook adds tremendous value and would engage kids in a deep and thoughtful way.

Dumb: Adding value to ebooks by introducing other forms of "interactivity," taking advantage of touch screens, like on the iPhone. We already have fully interactive narratives. They're called video games, and we've had no trouble getting children to engage with them. I'm not against video games at all. It's just that books are already interactive. The reader of a narrative provides the final images of characters and setting and adjusts those images accordingly as she reads. It's a deep engagement that should not be trifled with. It's true that books, with a few exceptions are not physically interactive the way video games are, but there's a reason for this. Books, narratives at least, immerse the reader in a "fictive dream." That's where all the pleasure lies. That's what it means to "get lost in a book." Simply turning a page is a potential interruption to the fictive dream but one most of us get used to. But "interactivty" in the cyber sense, making decisions, watching videos, playing little games, will only pull the reader out of that dream state and replace a physical interactivity for the deeper and more complex interactivity occurring in the dream. Words, all by themselves, are a fantastic technology with thousands of years of refinement behind them. They work beautifully. Please, eBook publishers, don't break them.

Sort-of-smart: Adding additional content to eBooks, like author interviews, to justify the relatively high cost. This worked well when DVDs replaced video tapes and DVD publishers wanted to charge more. Here's a freebie for publishers along those lines: bundle the audiobook and text versions of a book in a single eBook file. I'm talking about a real audiobook, with a professional reader and high production values. Then, index the audiobook and text together so that when you stop reading to, say, drive to work in the morning, you can play the audiobook from where you left off while you drive and then pick up to read to yourself later. It would be technically simple, would justify paying a decent price for the eBook (not to mention the reader), and would kick the Kindle's dead-flat computer-reader's ass.

Really really dumb: Complaining that selling eBooks for $9.99 as Amazon does for Kindle versions, will "devalue books." Do libraries, which offer books for free, devalue books? No. They only increase a books' value. This is just an incredibly weak excuse for publishers who want to pocket the savings that eBooks will bring them rather than passing some of that savings on to readers. The music industry tried this and it angered their buyers into stealing more music than they bought. Be nice to your eBook readers and they will be nice to you. Find a price point that takes into account how much is saved by eliminating printing, shipping, warehouse space, shelf space, and the whole physical retail store infrastructure.

Smart: Offering sample chapters in eBook form online.

Even smarter (I'm taking credit for this as no one interviewed in the PW article mentioned it): Offer a subscription service like the music industry does (do whatever DRM you need to to feel comfortable with this). Better yet, you might even offer subscriptions to individual "serial" works. I can imagine that my kids, who have eaten up Harry Potter, Warriors, Percy Jackson, and A Series of Unfortunate Events, would love a "series that never ends" in the form of a weekly serial delivered to their eBook reader every Saturday morning.

Really really dumb: even trying to get picture books in eBook format. At least for the moment, the screen is simply too small. As I've pointed out before, picture books are printed big to allow for a communal story experience. You can't read an iPhone to your child at bed time (really, you're not going to read to the kid from your laptop either). It's an abomination that hopefully won't sell and if it does it will kill picture book dead. And anyone who wants to do that deserves a special place in hell IMHO.

And the really really really dumbest idea of all: adding animation to eBook versions of picture books. Why? Because we can! Dear publisher, we already have animated picture books. They're called cartoons and there are several cable networks fully dedicated to their broadcast. If you have trouble finding them, let me know and I'll get you in touch with my kids.

Harry Potter theme park plans

2009-09-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

Universal has unveiled Wizarding World plans, according to the New York Times. Perhaps more importantly, buried deep in the middle of the article are answers to the nagging questions about Marvel characters' attractions: in Orlando they'll stay at the Universal park for a good long time. In California and elsewhere they might start showing up on Disney properties at any time.

Which kinda sucks. I was hoping that in a few years the Marvel merger would mean we could save some money on theme park tickets. Whatever. The kids are gonna want to go that Harry Potter thing anyway.

Week of Grossness

2009-09-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

We're two days into the LernerBooks blog week of grossness.

Click for Day 1: Five new words to add to your vocabulary of grossness
Click for Day 2: Q & A with an Itchy Pre-Press Operator.

More Lies we Tell Our Children

2009-09-14T12:08:00.001-07:00

Following up on an earlier post about lunar cycles in picture books and inaccurate phonetics in alphabet toys, I'm now ready to complain about the way we teach children to write.

The other night my daughter asked me, "Do most paragraphs contain five sentences?"

I thought it was an odd question. "No," I said, rather bluntly, not realizing that she was following up on something she'd been told in school. We talked a little bit about what she'd noticed in her own reading, that many paragraphs contained only a single sentence and that others went on for a dozen sentences or more.

Seeing where this kind of subversive thinking was leading, my wife stepped in and suggested that the five-sentence-per-paragraph rule was a way for her teachers to encourage the development of ideas.

I can understand this approach. One needs to start somewhere with teaching and children have an inherent, possibly even instinctual, sense of rules and their application, so applying rules results in success which keeps the student engaged. Simply telling a third grader that paragraphing is a subtle art as informed by style and emphasis as by logic will not get an educator very far.

But the problem I have with arbitrary rules is that they tear the students between two powerful sources of authority: their teachers, and their own eyes. (I started this paragraph with "but." If my daughter did it, imitating one of her favorite published writers, she'd be rewarded with a big red mark.)

So now the student is in an untenable position. If she believes her own eyes, she's in danger of getting cocky, imagining that she knows more than her teachers and can safely ignore their advice and guidance. If she believes the teacher, she has to assume that her own observations are somehow invalid, and may ultimately end up questioning her own thinking to the point that she needs approval from a superior before feeling comfortable with any of her own thoughts.

By the time these students get to college composition classes, they have a lot of unlearning to do. Almost all of my freshman comp students believed that starting a sentence with a conjunction was a felony, and many of them believed that paragraphs had either a set number of sentences or at least had to fall within a specified range. They mostly believed that a "run-on" sentence was one that went on too long (as if there were a maximum number of words that could be used in a sentence), and that a fragment was a sentence that was too short.

Educators in general place too much emphasis on correctness in writing. I would much rather they teach various parts and assemblages of language--words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, essays and stories--not to dictate how they can be used, but to allow students to discover how language works like Tinkertoys or Legos or clay and that they can put the parts together in various ways, to change a meaning, to emphasize a point, to clear up or introduce ambiguity, or for fun, just to see what happens.

-- 9/15/09 -- Edited slightly for clarity.

Folsom Library Blues

2009-09-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

If only Johnny Cash were still around to lament this in song:

California School District Closes All 28 Libraries

iPhone picture books

2009-08-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

It was coming. I knew it was coming. The UK's Telegraph announces what it calls "he first children's picture book on a mobile telephone."

I don't think this will catch on. I certainly hope it doesn't. Don't get me wrong. I like iPhones. My wife has one and she loves it. The kids watch movies on it when we're on long car trips and that keeps them occupied and that's a very good thing.

But picture books come in large formats for a reason. Picture books are meant to be communal experiences, parent reading to child, teacher reading to children, children reading to each other. You can't do that on an iPhone. No parent will read bedtime stories from their iPhone.

I hope, instead, parents will just keep reading real books, or at least books from an electronic device (maybe a good-sized tablet) that's easy for kid and parent to view together.

If, however, as the article suggests, parents just send the children to bed with their iPhones to read electronic picturee books all alone, we will have lost something very precious indeed.

Google and the declining worth of words

2009-08-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

On the surface what Google wants to do with out of print books seems preposterous. If I have this right--and please correct me if I'm wrong, a succinct and sensible summary of the project is hard to find--Google plans to gather up all of the OOP and public domain books it can find and OCR scan them with some special super scanner machines and make them generally available online. They will somehow make money from this.

First reaction: wow, what super-great idea! a whole vast free (maybe) online library! the future has arrived!

Second reaction: they can't do that. there's more to publishing work than just snagging it from wherever it is that they're snagging it from. You have people with interests in these works. There are copyrights and stuff.

Which is why there was a class action suit filed against Google sometime ago.

Even weirder is the settlement of this suit (which still has to be approved by some court)--again, if I don't have this right please let me know. Apparently the settlement says that Google can just go ahead and scan and electronically publish (they'll pay some royalty fee too, I think it's roughly $25 dollars or the cost of a pack of cigarettes, whichever is more) copyrighted works that are OOP unless the copyright holder "opts out." That's right. It's like a spam campaign you got locked into because on that one lonely night you'd rather not talk about you went online and ordered a Girls Gone Wild DVD. All you have to do is "opt out" of the dozen or so NSFW email campaigns you inadvertently joined and all will be well. Right . . .

If an author of an OOP work doesn't get the message from Google that his work is being electronically published against his will, that's ok too, because as soon as said author, while doing a Google vanity search hoping perhaps for a flattering mention somewhere on HufPo, discovers to his surprise a link to his OOP instructional text, How to Macrame Artful Wall Hangings: Your Guide to Decorative Owls and Psuedo-Native American Belts, he just has to ask Google to take it down and they will comply within 48 hours.

I'm trying to follow here. If we extrapolate . . . then if I distribute via Bit Torrent, only, say, Sony Music's out of print music collection until the copyright holder of each individual recording "opts out" of my file sharing program, I'm going to be ok, right? No RIA busting down my door?

The reason any of this is even remotely OK is that written words have gotten ridiculously cheap. Way too much supply. Some publishers and writers are perfectly happy to squeeze just a little more blood from the stone of OOP works. Half Price Books, after all, doesn't pay them anything. Plus a whole bunch of stuff on the Internet is being written for free. This blog is being written for free, for instance, or almost, anyway. I think I'm due for a $100 Google Ads check in February of 2132, unless, of course, they decide to opt out.

Everything I ever needed to know . . .

2009-08-19T07:22:00.000-07:00

MSN is running an article on kids being tutored before entering kindergarten.

Every now and then an article comes up about parents pushing pre-schoolers or even babies to be smarter. I'm sure it happens, but I also have the gut feeling that its an over-hyped story, probably because it gets people so worked up. Perhaps I'm wrong, but this seems like a largely news-generated, audience-grabbing type phenomenon. I doubt not that it will be featured on Oprah if it hasn't been already. I expect that in reality, most people just want their kids to be kids.

The article mentions something that seems to be a real problem, though, which is parents holding kids out of school for an extra year so that they'll be naturally more advanced than their classmates. I had never heard of this until I enrolled my first kid in her public school kindergarten class. Of course it's only middle class and upper middle class families that practice this. Less privileged families enroll their children in public schools as early as possible, because it represents free child care for them. Besides the other disadvantages that kids of less-well-off families come in with, they now have to compete with kids who are as much as two years older and that much more prepared for academics.

It turns my stomach. Not only because of the basic unfairness and injustice of the practice, but because it heartlessly indoctrinates into the world of competition and "playing the system," taking every advantage they can for themselves at whatever cost to their peers. This is not what kindergarten ought to be about. In my day, we learned sharing and cooperation in kindergarten and saved beating the bejesus out of each other for the little league field.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean an ice cream truck isn't trying to run you down

2009-08-04T06:33:00.000-07:00

The cover of Sean Beaudoin’s Fade to Blue suggests it’s a book for Goth girls who are maybe into comics. This is misleading. Fade to Blue is a book partly about a Goth girl who is maybe into comics, but that's not the same thing at all. (See last months' mrchompchomp entry.)

So if you're not a Goth girl, don't go browsing about the bookstore looking at the cover and thinking "this book is simply not intended for me where is the zombie section anyway?" Because you'll be missing out. First of all the Goth girl, Sophie Blue, is pretty cool. Funny, resourceful, a talented artist, wears fishnets and combat boots to gym class, tough, bitter and sarcastic but in a charming way. She's really not bad for a guy to hang out with for a good chunk of the story. Besides, this book is about much more than Sophie and her issues.

One of Sophie's major issues is that she keeps getting run over by an ice cream truck. Somehow it doesn't kill her. She'd think it was a dream, but it leaves some pretty nasty ice-cream-truck-grill shaped bruises. No one else can see the ice cream truck. But they can all see the bruises. It's a problem. Her father has vanished, possibly abducted, and that has something to do with the ice cream truck. There's a sexy nurse, too, who regularly shows up, also ice-cream-truck-related. And there are streams of ones and zeros that enter Sophie’s head. You can guess what they might be related to.

Ben Fade, super successful basketball star and school hero, is seeing ones and zeros as well. It's not making him feel too well.

Nearly everyone at Sophie and Ben's high school, from the hot girls mostly named Kirsty to the basketball playing thugs to the evil gym teacher to the evil janitor, keeps drinking a hip beverage called Sour White. So does everyone in town. Anyone not at the high school works at the town’s bio-pharmaceutical lab. Eventually, all of this comes together to help explain the disappearance of Sophie’s father. And the appearance of the evil ice cream truck.

I'm not sure how you would, but if you think you can see where all of this is headed, you're wrong. Fade to Blue starts throwing surprises at the first turn of the page, and doesn't let up until the end. Past the end, really, as the book laughs, literally, at the idea of closure (you can check it's appendix). And for all of its quirkiness, all of its satire, all of its over-the-top twists and turns, it doesn't shy away from real pain, and from the fact that people can do truly evil things, and how much it would suck if those people were related to you.

In short, Fade to Blue is a complete trip. It does cartwheels with reality and then back-flips. (Did I mention the cheerleaders?) It will make you question life and death and the difference between the two. (Did I mention the zombies?) It's written in fast-paced prose so packed with cultural references that Kant and boner–humor have no choice but to hang out in the same paragraph together. (Did I mention the inspirational posters?)

If you already know you like trippy books, dive in and enjoy the ride. If you want more stuff to mess with your mind, you can try one of these: Ubik, Philip K. Dick; V, Thomas Pynchon; Vurt, Jeff Noon; Girl in Landscape, Jonathan Lethem; Geek Love, Katherine Dunn; The Trial, Franz Kafka.

Reality bids you farewell.

Cross-posted at Guys Lit Wire

Yes, DRM is evil, and not just for consumers

2009-07-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Some reporting on the eBook freak-out:
Jack Shafer in Slate
The Digitalist Pen-Mac Blog
The New York Times Book Section
The New York Times Technology Section, Part I
Part II of above, continued on ReadWriteWeb

I'm going to start with one little point made on The Digitalist, in an post called DRM is not Evil, because I think it underlies most of the wrong thinking about ebooks in the publishing industry in general.

Here it is:

. . . paper is a form of DRM. If you buy a book you can lend it out to a few of your friends. Can you send it to all of them? No. You are inherently limited in the spread of that book. We don’t assume that it would ever be possible to distribute that book to everyone we know, only that we can do with it what we want. This is both sensible and sustainable.

Ok. Let's start with the most obvious. Paper is not a form of DRM. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Paper is not digital. Now, with that out of the way, let's look at the larger sense of Baskhar's point. Because paper is hard to copy, it limits the number of people who can use the media. Generally speaking, only one person uses it at a time as it gets passed around until finally it ends up lost in somebody's attic. Now, if one wanted to, one could photocopy the book and distribute it that way. We used to do this sometimes in the University when some texts were hard to come by. To do it legally some royalty fees had to be paid. But, basically, that's such a pain in the ass, that it's pretty rare for anyone to do it. It makes more sense to just buy the book, especially if you can get it used.

Once upon a time, books were even harder to come by. They were printed with time-consuming block printing techniques. Before that they were written out by factories full of underfed monks, and they were all in Latin anyway. Before that they were on scrolls and before that they were on tablets and before that they were on cave walls. Each one of these forms of media was, by Baskhar's definition, a form DRM. each, I expect, in its time, seemed sensible and sustainable.

But no one made paper so it would be hard for a user to copy (except in the case of money). In fact, the whole history of book publishing has gone in the other direction. Books have become progressively easier to print and distribute. This has meant that books have become cheaper, more widely distributed, and available at more income levels. The wide availability of books is the primary driver behind greater literacy in the world. What might have happened in history if the publishers of the time had looked at the Gutenberg press and said, "That's neat, but it's going to be too easy to make books now. We can fire all the monks, but let's not make any extra copies of anything, and let's not print anything in a language other than Latin, or the price will fall and we'll lose money."

Essentially, this seems to be the attitude of book publishers to the introduction of technology that makes book creation and distribution easier than ever. In fact, like the distribution of music, it's something that anyone with computer and internet connection can participate in. In fact, to a certain degree, I'm participating in this brave new world right now. How much does it cost to read Critique de Mr Chompchomp? Nothing. How much does it cost to produce? Well, only my time, and since I can't figure out how to make much money with that, it's pretty close to nothing there too. Fair trade.

Just as paper is not digital, digital media is not paper and we should try to stop making it behave in the marketplace like paper. The main advantage of digital media is that it can be easily copied and distributed. Crippling that just to maintain some outdated economic model seems like Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

Now, here's the thing. People like technology. They like it enough to spend money on it. They paid for the damned Kindled to let them read books. They'll pay for songs off of iTunes even though they could easily get the CDs from their friends or the library and rip the music. Why? Because technology that makes their lives easier, that puts them in touch with art and culture, is worth money. But it has to be convenient and reasonable. Bumping the price of ebooks up to match print books and then locking them up with a bunch of obnoxious DRM is not what people will pay for. iTunes is slowly doing away with DRM altogether. Why? Because they don't need it and it inconveniences the customer. It costs them sales and it doesn't protect them from piracy.

Publishers: The formula is simple, share the cost savings of producing ebooks with your consumers and make it super slick and easy to access them. Then you won't need DRM at all. Use the medium. Stop fighting it.

#Update: another NYT entry into ebook conversation: Overnight, Amazon pulled copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from people's Kindles, and refunded the users' accounts. Are they completely nuts? First, the irony is just too rich. You don't even need to make a joke. Second, are they nuts? Third, since Orwell's work is in the public domain in Australia it is very easily available on the Internet. So here are people who have paid for a book they didn't need to pay for, and Amazon/completelyinsanepublisher has yanked it away from them against their will.

eBooks freaking everyone out.

2009-07-16T13:23:00.001-07:00

Tons of articles lately about ebooks and DRM and Kindle and whatnot. It's got me all fired up and I'll have a whole bunch of links and rant of my own shortly. In the meantime, read Jack Shafer, who has the best ideas about this.

Book length issue

2009-07-01T11:29:00.000-07:00

Fasinating discussion at Carolrhoda Books Blog triggered by Tough Love: An Open Letter to Kids' Book Publishers in School Library Journal on book length and other issues.

James Frey's YA series

2009-06-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports that James Frey, notorious for playing fast and loose with facts in his Oprah-endorsed memoir about drug addiction, is shopping a YA series around. Well, fine. More power to him. On the surface, the idea sounds a little tired, but if it's handled well enough, it could potentially be readable. And lies are not a problem in fiction, so Mr. Frey should be safe in that regard.

Here's what's odd in the article, though: a) it sounds like he's sold the movie rights to a studio who has already selected a director (Michael Bay) for the films before he's even placed the first volume of the books with a publisher; b) his last book brought him a million dollar advance but sold only 81,000 copies, so somebody ate it big time there; c) his agent originally submitted the YA book anonymously, making one wonder how much confidence anyone, even his own agent, might have left for this fellow; d) the co-author of the YA books has still withheld his/her name, making one wonder what writer might have such a bad reputation that he/she is hiding behind James Frey; e) this is the kind of gossip that belongs in snarky blogs, not the NYT book pages.

Why must we lie to our children?

2009-06-26T05:32:00.001-07:00

I'll start by confessing that this is a completely neurotic post. No one in their right mind would nitpick what I am about to nitpick. So here goes:

At the library last night I was reading picture books, one after another, to my sixteen month old daughter. She was having a delightful time and thanks to David Shannon's fantastic Duck on a Bike, she learned to say "duck"--well, "duh" actually, but she was pointing at the duck so it counts.

Mostly we read books about the day ending, the night starting, going to bed, etc. In nearly every one, when the sun went down the moon came up, when the sun set the moon rose. My problem is that this is not what happens in reality. The moon does not operate on a 24 hour cycle like the sun. The moon is often out in the daytime; it's often not out at all because it's on the other side of the earth, even at night. And of course, sometimes it's not out because it's a new moon.

I asked my six year-old son about this. "When the sun sets does the moon rise?"

"Yes," he answered instantly.

"Really?" I asked. "Can't you see the moon during the day sometimes?"

"Yes," he said. His preschool used to sing a song that went Mr. Moon, Mr. Moon, you're out to soon. The sun is still in the sky.

"So," I prompted. "The moon doesn't always rise when the sun sets, does it?"

"I guess not. Dad, can I just read my book?"

I just wonder why we insist on telling our children this lie? I realize that children like order, or anyway, they understand order. That's why when they learn to speak, they are able to apply the rules of English, but not the exceptions. They say "I eated my lunch." It takes time to learn the exceptions, and to apply the rules less absolutely.

Still, if children learn simple rules innately, why do we emphasize them to the point of lying about the world, instead of helping them understand the more complex stuff?

All three of my children learned the alphabet in part with the help of a Leap Frog refrigerator magnet toy. When the kids would stick a magnetic letter into the toy, it would sing a song about that letter and the sound it made. Every letter makes a sound. E says 'ee' or 'eh.', it would sing. Well, now, that's now exactly true, is it? Not all the time, anyway. In my head, I revise the song to say Every time it makes a sound, E says 'ee' or 'eh.' Subtle change, but with it, it's ~~telling~~ closer to* the truth.

I wonder if these little untruths do damage of even a subtle sort. Could asking children to ignore their observations in favor of an easier to understand model of reality affect their thinking long term on some level?

BTW, if you want to see where the actual moon is in realtion to the sun, you can check out Moongiant, a very cool online tool.

* see comments below

Graveyard book readings available online

2009-06-23T08:10:00.001-07:00

~~It's ridiculously early to announce this, but~~ mousecircus.com ~~will be~~ [is] hosting video readings of the Newbery Medal winning The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. ~~The readings begin October 1 and the entire book will be available in this form by October 9th. I'll try to post a reminder when that date gets a little nearer.~~

#UPDATE 4:04 PM: It's already there! The October the site refers to took place in 2008. In my defense, no year is mentioned and, if you don't scroll down you don't see the active links.

Evil, Amatuerish Personification

2009-06-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

Because I have my own aspirations as a writer of children's literature, and because its praises have been so widely sung, I've been looking at The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children's Books. It is a gentle introduction, very basic, and completely realistic, constantly reminding the aspiring writer how hard they'll have to work to get anywhere and that even then they might not get anywhere. Fair enough.

I was troubled though, by a section that breaks down the types of fantasy in children's literature. On the subject of "personification" (giving human traits to inanimate objects) in children's stories, Mr. Underdown explains that while celebrities can get away with personifying objects in their stories, no one else should even try:

You are not a celebrity so personification is an area you want to avoid. Publishers that actually take manuscripts from the outside world don't want this kind of story, and they wouldn't even spend much time looking at it because they would assume it's from a real beginner.

Now, I've been a slush pile editor for a sci-fi and fantasy magazine, so I understand the temptation to set up rules for writers. But there are rules and then there are rules. I can say things like "Don't send me a story in which the last line reads anything like 'and then my father tore his face off as if it were made of rubber and stared at me with huge, black alien eyes.'" I can say "Don't send me an abduction story in which the protagonist is paralyzed throughout and incapable of taking any action at all." I can say "Don't send me fantasy in which the ~~phrases~~ clauses 'his muscles rippled' and 'their swords were a blur' appear in the same sentence or even in the same paragraph." Exceptions to these rules would be rare indeed.

But I would never say, we don't want alien impersonation stories, or we don't want abduction stories, or we don't want fantasy stories that involve sword fighting. Granted, it's unlikely that stories of this type will be interesting. But I can think of interesting stories that match each of these descriptions, and it's certainly possible I might find another, even from a beginner submitting to the slush pile.

Do publishers really not "want" stories that incorporate personification? Why then did they publish The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane? Why do they continue to publish editions of Aesop's fables, editions of the Velveteen Rabbit, of The Little Engine that Could? The Brave Tin Soldier? Why are Toy Story, Cars, and the classic Pixar short of two lamps playing ball so popular? Will they really reject all personification stories because a lot of them are bad? Doesn't this seem fantastically short-sighted? Doesn't blind adherence to rules reflect a wish to be immortalized along with those editors who rejected Theodor Geisel and J.K. Rowling?

Publishers? Editors? Writers? What think you?

Simon and Schuster and Scribd

2009-06-15T08:46:00.001-07:00

An article from last week in the New York Times, announces that Simon and Shuster will begin selling electronic versions of 5,000 of its titles on Scribd.

The good news: It will make most those titles partially browsable online--a nice feature that book buyers already enjoy with many titles available on Amazon.

The weird news: electronic copies will be 20% off the cover price of the print edition. 20% off is the discount Borders offers on new hard covers. 20% off is pretty close to the markdown at Walmart. A lot of Amazon's stock will go for about 20% off cover. Anyone with five minutes and a web browser can find a copy of any print book offered somewhere for at least 20% off the cover price. So the savings that Simon and Shuster experiences for not having to print a book, not having to ship it, not having to find room on a stock shelf in a book store and not having to pay a bookstore worker to ring it up at the cash register is, effectively, nothing. If anyone actually buys any of these titles, Simon and Shuster will simply pocket the extra profits. Oh, and you have to have a computer to download the thing, and a $300 ereader if you want to take it on the bus.

$9.99, the typical price of a Kindle ebook, is still too much, but at least in the long run it's a bargain over paying for print. Keep up the insane price model, guys, and you will make Kindle the ITunes of the book world.

Yeah, we've been through this already. Remember? With music. Learn a lesson.

Poetry Friday Roundup

2009-06-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Poetry Friday at Critique de Mr. Chompchomp. Thanks for coming. Add your links in the comments below.

On Monday June 8th, the poet Ruth Stone, a true national treasure, celebrated her 94th birthday. She is still producing fantastic work. To wish her a happy (only slightly belated) birthday, I'm kicking things off with a link to her recent poem, "The Cabbage".

Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom

2009-06-11T19:34:00.000-07:00

I nearly didn't get to review Eric Wight's Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom. When it arrived in the mail, my son, a voracious reader of both chapter books and comics, pounced on it, read it from cover to cover immediately and then refused to hand it over. He wanted to take it to school; he wanted to read it again; he wanted to have it on his shelf in his room. He kept relating parts of it, repeating bits of dialogue. And he put the next installment in the Frankie Pickle series—Frankie Pickle and the Pine Run 3000—on his Christmas list. (I do discourage Christmas lists in June, but he’s unstoppable. He also expects Santa to produce a super sonic car and a mind-operated Wii controller, so a book not due out until February is the most realistc item on his list.)

Frankie Pickle and the Closet of Doom is a hybrid, part comic book, part chapter book. Frankie has one of those "active" imaginations, and when he finds himself playing the role of an Indiana Jones style adventurer or a city-protecting superhero—always accompanied by his sidekick, Argyle the Westie Terrier—his adventures are related in comic book form. When he's Frankie Piccolini, a regular kid dealing with a regular kid's problems (an obnoxiously sporty older sister, a needy baby sister, and a fantastically messy room) the story is related in chapter book prose.

The boy (or girl) who slips easily into daydream fantasies is classic material for children’s literature, and similar techniques have been used in both film and literature. What’s surprising here is how well the hybrid form works to relate the inner workings of Frankie’s mind. Despite bouncing between comic s and prose, fantasy and reality, the story progresses seamlessly. The prose in the chapter book portions is punchy, comedic and fastmoving. And the illustrations bleed out of the comics to invade the prose chapters. At the same time, elements from reality slip into Frankie’s comic book fantasies, and all the moving parts mesh together around Frankie’s one central problem.

Frankie Pickle is also a wonderful tribute to both contemporary graphic novels and classic comic books. The drawings, with simple, bold figures, are nonetheless cinematically framed, with establishing shots, point-of-view frames and evoctive camera angles, giving the art in Frankie Pickle a certain sophistication. At the same time Frankie Pickle, with its fast pace and goofy puns, reminds me of the classic comics from my childhood . It even incorporates “extra features” including a two page tutorial on how to draw Frankie and Argyle and a four page Franke Pickle bonus comic.

Let’s not forget to mention how attractive Frankie Pickle may look to educators eager to convert new readers. For my son, who loves reading, Frankie Pickle was simply an extra delectable treat. But it’s comic book elements could be a big draw for reluctant readers as well, perhaps providing just the ticket to the marvelously rich and delightful world of literature.

How to eliminate parents

2009-06-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

Most middle grade and YA novels involve one or more child protagonists facing the world without their parents around to protect or hinder them. One of the first jobs of the middle grade novelist is to get the parents out of the way. In the novel I'm working on, I'm struggling with how to do this, so I'm gathering examples of how it's been done before. Please contribute, identifying books that use strategies listed here or suggesting strategies I'm missing.

How to eliminate parents:
1. Parents are dead
2. Parents are on vacation and put sister in charge
3. Parents are away on business and put grandma in charge
4. Kids are at grandma's house (or aunt's, uncle's, older siblihg's)
5. Kids are at boarding school
6. Kids are at camp
7. Parents are off to war
8. Kids are sent away because of war
9. Kids are off to war
10. Kids travel through a portal to another world
11. Parents travel through a portal to another world
12. One parent dies and the other goes on a date
13. Divorced parents each think the other is watching the kid
14. One or more parents goes insane
15. One or more parents goes on a quest
16. One or more parents mysteriously disappears
17. Parents are too busy and important to pay attention to kids
18. Parents are too stupid to pay attention to kids
19. Kids are involved in a secret government plot
20. Parents are involved in a secret government plot
21. A nanny is in charge of the kids
22. A dog is in charge of the kids
23. A robot is in charge of the kids
24. Kids run away from home
25. Kids are kidnapped
26. Time freezes for the grown ups but not the kids
27. All grown-ups mysteriously vanish or are killed
28. Parents are abducted by aliens
29. Kids are abducted by aliens
30. Children are stranded on a desert island
31. Time travel makes the parents children
32. Time travel makes the parents not parents
33. Kid exchanges places with look-alike kid
34. Parents exchange places with look-alike parents
35. Story takes place while parents are asleep
36. Parents don’t believe kids so kids must act alone
37. Parents are pit against each other in a battle for domination over multiple universes
38. Kid gets changed into an animal
39. One or more parents gets changed into an animal
40. All adults are under mind control of a superior power, but kids aren’t
41. Kids have secret identities
42. For political reasons, kid is sent away to marry prince/princess of another kingdom/realm
43. Kid is alone, home from school because of illness or fake illness
44. Parents got rid of kid when kid was a baby

When the Tripods Came, by John Christopher

2009-06-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

Before I even get started today, let me just say right here and right now that I am against brainwashing. No matter how good it might make you feel, being brainwashed is something you want to avoid. It’s better to be tormented by confusion but have your own ideas than to become some sort of blissed out zombie with spinning spirals for pupils under the complete control of an insidious master. I hope that’s clear.

When the Tripods Came is John Christopher’s belated prequel to the original series (which I reviewed here). The whole series, in large part, is about brainwashing, and just how bad it is. Though what it means to be brainwashed is something that seems to be open for discussion. Or it seemed to be, anyway, before the prequel existed.

The prequel was inspired, according to the preface, by critics who complained of the story being implausible. Even a few years after the publication of the books, real human technology had advanced so rapidly that fictional Tripod technology looked rather primitive and even silly by comparison. So, how would the Tripods have taken humanity over so easily?

It’s curious that Christopher felt the need to answer these critics. Juding dated science fiction on its plausibility is a little like complaining that 80s fashions looks dated in the year 2009 (oh, wait).

But the author composed an answer anyway. It turns out that the Tripods began their conquest of Earth slowly and rather unsuccessfully. When the Tripods Came opens with two boys, Laurie (short for Laurence so don’t make fun of him) and Andy (short for Andrew, duh) on a camping trip in England who witness a massive (several stories high) Tripod’s initial exploration of our planet. The Tripod mirthlessly destroys a farmhouse, abducts a man, kills a dog, and battles some tanks before jet fighters swoop in and nonchalantly demolish it. Two other Tripods are sighted elsewhere in the world and meet similar fates.

The Tripod technology, then, did look a bit silly to humanity whose long history of warfare had given them quite a few tools with which to engage an invading force. “They didn’t even have infrared!” hoots one of Andy and Laurie’s teachers in a post-invasion classroom discussion. Humans expend much energy patting themselves on the back. There’s even a television show, from America, called the Trippy Show, dedicated to satirizing the Tripods. It acheives wide international success.

It’s so successful, in fact, that a cult begins to form around it and by the time anyone realizes that the audience is being brainwashed by television (imagine that), it’s too late. Communes of TV-hypnotized “Trippies” form to welcome and defend new invasions of Tripods. The Tripods extend their mind control powers by hard-wiring human brains through the use of Caps, and soon their conquest is, more or less, over. Christopher’s answer, to his critics, is that while their weapons of mass destruction may have been primitive, the Tripods understanding of the human mind and human culture gave them what they needed to take over the planet.

Now, my review of the original trilogy gave a general, and I think, generous reading of the Tripod allegory. I claimed the Masters represented authority and that the uncapped represented free-thinking youth. In the comments that followed, A Paperback Writer proposed that the books were a kind of Cold War* propaganda, and that the Masters represented Communists. I didn’t like that reading because I find propaganda insipid by definition and I thought the Tripod series was too interesting and engaging for that.

But maybe I was fooled. While I think the generous reading is still the better one, and the one that may allow the series to remain readable and interesting into the future, its hard to argue, after considering When the Tripods Came, that Christopher did not intend the Masters to represent Communists. There are a number of passages in the novel singing the praises of “individuality” and “freedom”—obvious anti-communist code words. And the countercultural references to “Tripping” (drug use) and “Trippies” (hippies) make it difficult to imagine that Christopher had a lot of warm feelings for tie-dye wearing vegetarians who were often associated with the propagation of socailist/communist ideology in the West. The mass gatherings of Trippies also look a lot like the countercultural protest movement. (Groups that gather in large masses appear from the outside like people brainwashed by common ideology, even to those looking at them while nestled within the warmth of a large mass.)

Does that make When the Tripods Came, or the rest of the Tripod series, Cold War propaganda? Maybe. If you let yourself read it that way. You could instead focus on the things it has to say about the demise of the nuclear family, which I didn’t get into here, but which are actually rather subtle and touching. Or, you could just read it as a ripping good sci-fi saga. Which it is.

The problem, of course, with propaganda is that it’s an attempt to brainwash the reader. And, as we’ve established, brainwashing is to be avoided. So even if the propaganda is against brainwashing, it’s brainwashing that’s against brainwashing. So I’m confused. And tormented. But my mind is free.

*If you weren’t around for the Cold War, let me give you a brief summary. There was the Eastern Block (or Bloch), led by the Soviet Union, which wanted to create an empire in the name of Communism (often considered evil, but on its surface about sharing) and there were the Western countries, led by the United States, which wanted to form an empire (but claimed they didn’t) in the name of Capitalism (which is supposed to be good but on its surface is about selling things for more than they’re actually worth). The two sides really really wanted to blow each other up, but were very nervous about accidentally blowing themselves up in the process.

Crossposted ate GuysLitWire

The Talking Animal Problem

2009-05-29T02:40:00.000-07:00

I recently filled a gaping hole in my knowledge of kid lit by reading Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. For starters, a brief review: engaging and witty with a rambling directionlessness that only adds to its charm. A good read, for the understated British prose and touching sentiments throughout.

Like most fantasy novels, The Wind in the Willows slowly reveals its own internal logic. We learn in the opening that Mole has grown weary of keeping house and runs away from his responsibilities, and so we know that Mole, and the Animals he meets along the way, are like humans in more ways than being able to think. Animals in this world live in villages and use human-like technology: Rat rows his boat, Toad drives a cart and later a motor car, they all use manufactured tools like knives and baskets and rope and later, even swords and guns.

One is tempted to conclude that the Animals are simply replacements for humans, metaphors for particular character types. Vivid, amusing, engaging. Good to get the kids involved. And then Toad goes out and gets imprisoned by humans, then helped by humans, and then he disguises himself as a human, etc. Theory blown. Animals are not metaphorical humans, but distinct from them after all.

There's this whole problem of scale in the book too. At the outset of the book I assumed that all the Animals, regarless of species, were roughly terrier-sized--I don't know why--and everything around them was scaled down to fit. I accepted that. When Toad goes off, though, steals a human's horse, and rides it away, we discover that all the Animals fall within the range of normal human sizes. Still, there's mention of humans making pets out of Animals. Personally I would find a human sized toad, not to mention a human sized mole or god forbid a human size badger, rather terrifying.

It is to Grahame's credit that most of the time these questions are not in the least bit troubling and a reader generally doesn't feel the need to ask them or simply delights in Grahame's ability to address or ignore them as the story demands. The fantasy is somehow aware of reality, but in no way beholden to it.

I couldn't let it go, thouh. These Animals ride horses. They keep livestock. They eat chicken, pork, beef. I kept expecting a cart-pulling pony to complain, or a horse to at least defer verbally, but farm animals in this world apparently can't talk. (Wild rabbits can talk. I kept wondering if domesticated ones would be able to.)

Now I know none of this should bother me. But I can't help reading the two classes of animals as, well, a matter of class, especially since a fair portion of the book, specifically Toad's adventures, deals directly with issues of class. The Animals seem aware, even proud of their status as Animals, but fully unaware that the animals they "employ" and, uh, consume are worthy of any status at all. To me, this is a telling hole in the story's logic. Though perhaps all it reveals is the British obsessive schizophrenia with class issues--"Well, there it is. Nothing to be done about it. Ta-ta."

It made me think of the solution to Alex the lion's problem in Madagascar. Alex has this desire to eat his friends who are, like him, all talking animals. The brilliant solution is to feed him fish. Because fish, of course, can't talk, or think or become buddies with you. Penguins can talk and even conspire to mutinize a cruise ship, but fish, well, a talking fish would be ridiculous.

Someone, I think, needs to attend the "Fish are friends, not food" self help group.

Finally, technology that really will change the publishing industry

2009-05-19T12:36:00.001-07:00

I get so sick of reading about all the things that are going to change the publishing world--such as multimedia enabled ebook readers or the wovel--which will supposedly introduce "a whole new dimension to reading" or "create entirely new genres." It ain't going to happen, for reasons I've discussed in the past and for other reasons I'll discuss in the future.

But today, The New York Times ran an article announcing a new service called Scribd, which they call an online "vanity" publisher, among other things.

Scribd will allow writers to post electronic versions of books and charge what they want for them, keeping 80% of the profit. The service will be open to major publishers, independents, and individual writers, and will provide (at additional cost I'm sure) digital rights management for the uploaded documents.

Amen, I say. Bring it on. I suspect that many publishers, especially the biggies are not so excited.

Yes, Scribd will be loaded with tons of absolute crap. Lots of people will try to use it for nefarious purposes. I predict at least half the titles will, in short order, be guides to getting rich quickly. And of course people will attempt to hack the user reviews. Some will succeed. It will be a mess.

But just as happened with blogs, lots of self-published cream will rise to the top. Quality titles that publishers knew were good but were too afraid to invest in will be available here. The word will get out on some and we'll be able to read wonderful things we might never have seen before. It'll put pressure on publishers. It will reduce the costs of books. It will change the world. Really.

It will be a happy mess.

It's got me wanting a Kindle.

Guys Lit Wire Book Fair

2009-05-19T06:18:00.000-07:00

Check out the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Boys. You can purchase books to donate to the LA Juvenile Justice System to put books into the hands of some boys that need them.

From Colleen Mondor's original post last week:

Today we start the first two week Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Boys to help the teens incarcerated in the LA County Juvenile Justice System. They have no books - at all - and they need them; they need them desperately.

Visit, check out the wish list and help out.

Clearing it Up

2009-04-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

In case you were confused:

This is Mo Williams:

He's a Cleveland Cavalier who scored twenty points against the Detroit Pistons last night. He's been called Lebron James's Scottie Pippen, which is an awkward nickname, but probably true. He is responsible for making the Cavaliers a team led by Lebron James rather than a team that consisted only of Lebron James. He has never written a children's book, or, to the best of my knowledge, any book. We in Cleveland will owe him a great deal of gratitude if the Cav's can bring us a championship.

This, on the other hand is Mo Willems:

He draws loud-mouth pigeons, sincere elephants, devious pigs and rebellious naked mole rats, among other things. He writes wonderfully irreverent children's books. He was never drafted by or traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers, or, to the best of my knowledge, any basketball team. We, of the chompchomp family, are all huge fans.

I hope that helps.

The Friday Poetry Roundup

2009-04-17T10:35:00.001-07:00

The Friday Poetry Roundup travels from blog to blog each week and gives readers a chance to post their poems and poetry links. It's at Becky's Book Reviews today.

Poetry post

2009-04-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

I've gotten a bit behind on the promised poetry links, so I'll knock out a few a day for a while.

First up is the Poetry & Popular Culture blog written by Mike Chasar. I went to college with Mike Chasar. We edited a magazine together there. Now Mike is the respected Professor Chasar of the University of Iowa. And I'm . . . ahem, Mr. Chompchomp.

I like the poem Mike posted today too. Rhythm and rhyme without getting sing-songy. Not easy to do.

Poetry give away!

2009-04-10T13:14:00.001-07:00

At The Miss Rumphius Effect interviews with fantastic kid lit poets have been posted at an alarming rate.

Comment on one of these interviews by midnight tonight and you stand a chance to win some poetry for yourself.

Another magnetic poetry link

2009-04-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I wanted to include an online magnetic poetry app, but none of the ones I found actually worked at all. C'mon people, this isn't that hard. I wrote a decent one in javascript when I was first learning to code, but alas, it is lost to history.

Anyway this one works, though it is lacking in features. If you know of a good one, please give me a link.

Magnetic poetry links for poetry month

2009-04-08T07:44:00.000-07:00

My favorite poet laureate of recent years, Robert Pinsky, was a big fan of magnetic poetry, and even wrote the intro for a magnetic poetry anthology.

If you've ever in driven by a craft store, you probably don't need this nifty roll-your-own how-to. Fun thing to do with the kids to honor the month of April.

Kenneth Koch

2009-04-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

There may be several links to Poets.org throughout the month. The site is simply huge, so it's completely legitmate to point there a few times.

Today I direct you to an excerpt from Rose Where Did You Get that Red? by Kenneth Koch. In it, Koch speaks of teaching children to write poetry by introducing them to serious, literary adult poems. What I love most about Koch's approach is how seriously he takes kids and their art. It's rare, it's refreshing, and reminds us how complex a child's mind can be. And, if the poems he cites are representative, it helps them write some very surprising poetry.

30 poems / 30 days at GottaBook

2009-04-02T07:25:00.000-07:00

Gregory K, at his GottaBook blog, is featuring 30 unpublished children's poems in thirty days. He's got some big names lined up. He kicked things off with none other than Jack Prelutsky.

I think today's poem, by Rebecca Kai Dotlich is just about perfect--vivid, thoughtful, even haunting, but at the same time plainly sweet. And it's completely accessible to children.

National Poetry Month Kicks off

2009-04-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

We'll start the poetry extravaganza with a link to the official Academy of American Poets Nation Poetry Month site.

And from that site, a little poem to honor my two daughters. The baby increased her vocabulary by fifty percent last night, adding "bubble" to "hi" and "doggy." The eight year-old, ever the scientist, concocted her own "slime" yesterday. Just don't tell her mother how much of her expensive lotion the recipe calls for.

The son will be honored later in the month.

National Poetry Month

2009-03-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

April is National Poetry Month. If you don't know that already and you're at the site, well, I'm surprised. But now you do know.

As a former poet (I prefer "former" to "failed" don't you?) I'd like to honor National Poetry Month. So throughout the month of April, Mr Chompchomp will bring you daily links to poetry month events around the web. That's right, daily. I reserve the right to define "poetry month events" however I dang well please. I'll try to make most of the links kid lit related, but hey, no promises.

Anyway, what do you want? You're getting a month's worth of daily poetry links. Isn't that enough?

Whirligig by Paul Fleischmann

2009-03-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

It's lucky that Paul Fleischman's Whirligig is short, because it starts so poorly that had it been a longer book I probably would have set it down in the interests of saving myself time. That would have been a shame. After its weak opening, Whirligig settles into a rich and moving story that achieves moments of real beauty.

In the opening scene, Brent Bishop is headed for a party where he intends to impress the cool kids and ask out a very popular girl, hoping to increase his value on the social status market. You can see why I might have been disappointed. At the party Brent (who, unaware of the black and white chess theme, has arrived dressed inappropriately) is mocked by the cool party host, and rejected, publicly and loudly, by the girl he wants to date. It all comes across as a cheap scene from 90210 (except that it's set in Chicago).

The tone of the novella changes, however, when Brent leaves the party, both drunk and emotionally devestated. On the highway, he decides the only answer, the only way to take back control, is to kill himself and so he closes his eyes and lets go of the wheel. He doesn't succeed in killing himself, though. Instead, the accident he causes kills a young woman, Lea, in another car.

In the ensuing hearings the victim's mother asks for neither money from Brent or his parents nor punishment for Brent, but only that he travel by bus to the four corners of the country and build and erect a whirligig (her grandfather had made her whirligigs when she was a child) in each place, in memorium of Lea's lost life. Brent, to the chagrin of his parents, eagerly agrees to the trip and the task, as it will give him a chance to atone for his tragic mistake and to escape a life that has become oppressive. Nothing that happened before the accident seems to matter anymore and as Brent travels the country he rediscovers meaning in his life through the art of building the whirligigs, and the connections he makes to other people.

Some of these connections he is not even aware of. Brent's story is interspersed with the stories of people who Brent will never meet but who are affected by his whirligigs. Each finds a different metaphor in the art-objects which helps put his or her life in perspective, and these stories beautifully illustrate Fleischman's primary theme that people's lives are connected in ways well beyond their knowledge or understanding.

Unfortunately, Brent's journey is marred by Fleischman's cast of supporting characters who are all created to illustrate a political point. Everyone from Brent's previous life, including his parents, is shallow, closed-minded, and obsessed with material possessions and social status. Not only is this difficult to believe, it's unfair, especially to Brent's parents who have nearly lost a son, have just become aware of how deeply disturbed he is, and yet still only manage to see the monetary and social implications of his tragedy. At the same time, everyone that Brent meets on his cross-country voyage is a hip, open-minded, deep-thinking bohemian. Don't get me wrong, I subscirbe to Fleischman's political outlook. I think bohemian artist types are usually better people overall than investment bankers and suburban social ladder-climbers. But still, in real life there are interesting people everywhere. Likewise there are jerks and troubled people everywhere. Sometimes these are even the same people. Beyond that, anyone who has ever travelled, especially, like Brent, with a Greyhound bus ticket, knows just how vulnerable one is to hucksters and criminals. Brent never comes across anyone unethical. In real life, deep-thinking bohemians are sometimes also addicted to heroine or emotionally unstable pathological liars. But everyone Brent meets is a great person, through and through. Fleischman's message is that being free of upper-middle class social expectations will make you completely free as a human. This, of course, is a fairy tale. Brent doesn't have to struggle with a lot of the human complexity that one would expect him to encounter on his journey, and the book suffers for it.

Still, Whirligig is rich enough in its other aspects that it's easy, once you're immersed in Brent's story, to overlook its flaws.

Hungry Caterpillar on Google home page

2009-03-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

The google logo today features Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar, to mark both the first day of spring and the 40th anniversary of the book's publication.

In other Hungry Caterpillar news, George W. Bush lists it as a favorite from his childhood. He was 23 when it was first published.

The Tripods

2009-03-03T14:00:00.001-08:00

As a youth, I discovered John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy the way I discovered most books, by browsing the fiction section and dismissing everything not adorned on the bottom of the spine with a rocket ship sticker, indicating its inclusion in the Science Fiction genre. (I visited a small town library which didn’t feature a separate Sci-Fi section, or not in the YA stacks anyway.) I had virtually no interest in realistic fiction. A few titles were OK. I enjoyed the realistic novels of Madeleine L’Engle which I found via her better known science fiction and fantasy works. But most realistic YA fiction was either about kids coping with trouble--booze or sex or drugs—or kids’ arguments with adults, usually their divorced parents. I had enough of my own crap to get depressed over, I reasoned, without having to engage in the traumas of a pretend person.

And so I escaped with escapist fiction. True to its characteristic flaws, the fiction that I read was somewhat predictable, and its characters tended to be a little one-dimensional and its themes rather black and white. I could not have cared less. I knew what I liked and that’s what I was going to read.
So I judged the Tripod series by its covers, which promised sci-fi adventure. I gobbled up those library copies of The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire, and then I reread them again and again. I doubt I could have voiced just what it was about them that I liked so much. They certainly contained all the elements I looked for in a book: a setting in a world vastly different from my own, a fast-paced adventure plot, fascinating and strange new concepts, and themes of overcoming great adversity while staying true to ones friends. But now rereading them again, thirty years later, I think I understand better what attracted me to them.

The White Mountains, the first in the series, opens with the image of a stolen watch. The watch is a prized possession of Will Parker’s father. The watch doesn’t work, but is an artifact of “the ancients,” people who once knew how to make such things. Will’s world is vaguely medieval, lacking in the technologies driven by the invention of the steam engine and everything that followed. Instead, the lives of Will’s largely agrarian people revolve around a coming of age ceremony called Capping in which a metal net is fused with the flesh of a person’s skull. All this takes place inside a Tripod, a giant machine which strides into town on Capping Day, and draws those old enough to be Capped inside itself. Once Capped, each individual continues with his or her life but becomes completely loyal to the Tripods, stops asking questions about their origin and authority, and ceases to be curious about the world, preventing the discovery of dangerous things like explosives and electricity. For a few, the Capping is unsuccessful, and these people, called Vagrants, are left to wander, mad, about the countryside. Will, thirteen, and rapidly approaching his Capping Day, still has a free mind which begins asking questions. A man disguised as a Vagrant, but wearing only a fake Cap, finds Will, explains to him what the Caps do, and recruits him to escape to a stronghold of free men who are planning to revolt against the Tripods. His journey will take him across a deteriorated Europe, to a completely alien city (The City of Gold and Lead), and turn him from a boy into a dedicated freedom fighter (The Pool of Fire).

The appeal of this transparently veiled metaphor to a young man is plain: all the adults, with their rules and their loyalty to their jobs and their stress over bills are simply tools of the system, brainwashed into accepting a world that only wants to control them. Even today, although most outside observers would identify me as most like the Capped, I strongly identify with the freedom-loving, free-thinking Will Parker and his comrades. (I’m not really Capped; I’m just living undercover.) The story is blatantly one of resistance to the status quo. In contemporary terms, the Tripods represent The Man. And what self-respecting youth doesn’t want to stick it to him?

But what is most intriguing and ultimately most powerful about the series is that John Christopher never leaves the concept of freedom alone, never lets his characters, or his readers take it for granted. Christopher's idea of freedom is distinct from that referenced in country music songs. For Will, the cost of freedom, of free-thinking, of challenging the status quo, is very great; he pays with the loss of his family, his predictable life, several of his friends, his first love, and in many ways his childhood. For Christopher, living freely flies in the face of much of what we desire as humans—the wish to belong, the desire for comfort, the need to self-aggrandize. The struggle for freedom, throughout all of these books is both an external battle against the domination of the Tripods, and an internal one, of Will fighting against his own ignoble tendencies. At one point in the story, Will is offered a life of complete comfort, to be adopted into a family of royalty, as long as he is willing to be Capped. It’s not so simple for him to walk away.

The books are not perfect. The pacing is often uneven and the weirdly formal tone which works so well to help establish the setting sometimes slips into something more casual. Occasionally Christopher’s political messages can get a bit heavy-handed, as when Will discovers the aliens’ collection of beautiful women placed under glass like an insect collection, or when we learn that the original brain-washing of humanity was conducted through television. But for each of these conks over the head, Christopher illuminates other issues—e.g., the weirdness of tourism, and humanity’s own drive to “colonize”—with real subtlety.

Throughout the adventure, Will Parker is a wonderfully flawed hero on which to rest the hopes of mankind. He is often petty and too quick to temper, sometimes childish and even lazy. He is, thus, easy to identify with. A young man will recognize his own flaws in Will (as will a still-seeking adult) even as Will becomes more and more aware of these deficiencies and learns to correct them. At the same time, it is Will’s stubborn, youthful rebelliousness that empowers him. His job, after all, is to help save humanity, as it is all of ours.

See also:
Arthur C. Clarke has written that no trilogy should contain more than four books. This trilogy has a fourth book tacked on to the front, twenty years after the original series. The prequel, When the Tripods Came, details the initial conquest of earth. I have not yet read it.

Sam Riddleburger recently reviewed another of John Christopher’s books, the ecological thriller, The Long Winter.

Cross-posted at http://guyslitwire.blogspot.com

Is the publishing industry dying?

2009-02-23T14:03:00.000-08:00

I've heard a number of times in the last couple of days that the publishing industry, the book, and the professional writer are all dying. I think the news is overblown. The world of words is certainly changing, but if the book made it through the introduction of film, radio, TV, and the poetry slam, it can survive the Internet. It won't be unchanged, but it will survive.

Other People Complain about Scholastic

2009-02-10T10:35:00.000-08:00

The New York Times is running a piece on Scholastic's book clubs and how they push all sorts of non-book related toys, trinkets and video games (video games?).

This seems related to my complaint about the 39 Clues being about pushing playing cards and website games rather than about telling a decent story.

To be fair, my kids's school does a Scholastic book fair every year and at that at least, there was very little that was extra-literary. I think you could buy 39 Clues cards, but that was about it.

The Newberry

2009-01-27T11:52:00.000-08:00

I grabbed a book the other day off the shelves at the library. It was an intentionally random grab. I wanted something to review that I hadn't ever heard of, that no one had heard of, to bring to the few people who, every now and then, wander through this blog.

Fifteen pages into this unknown novel, I set it down. It was awful and I decided not to review it after all. What would be the point of giving a bad book that no one had ever heard of a bad review?

Reviews are written for a lot of reasons, but mostly they're around to advise readers on how best to spend their reading time and money. If there is very little chance of reader accidentally spending time or money on a book, there's very little reason to warn them against it. So bad reviews of unknown books are pretty much useless IMHO.

Good reviews of well-loved books are slightly less useless, as they might add a distinct opinion to a reader gathering information about a particular read. There are, of course, a number of those sorts of reviews here.

Critical reviews of well-loved books can be valuable, especially if you find a reviewer you trust, and whose taste you share. They might save you from diving into a book that everyone else declares as wonderful that you, in fact, won't like at all.

The most valuable review, of course, is one which discovers an excellent book among the stacks of the obscure. This is what any reviewer worth his or her salt strives to do--to bring you something fresh and new and wonderful that you might never have otherwise found.

It's also what an award like the Newberry medal can do, and has done, recently. It's dug some fairly obscure stuff up and brought it to the attention of a larger public. Many of their picks have been books which aren't for everyone, but, then, popular books don't generally need medals to become popular.

That's why I'm torn about Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book receiving the Newberry this year. I haven't read it yet but I am a huge Neil Gaiman fan. For purely absorbing storytelling, he's among my favorite writers and I trust that The Graveyard Book is deserving of the award.

But does Neil Gaiman really need another award? I can only imagine that the ALA is passing up an opportunity.

A new kind of Ender's Game

2009-01-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

Around 23 years ago, Orson Scott Card published Ender’s Game, a YA novel about a boy trained as a soldier to fight in a war against an invading alien species. The novel launched an extensive series of books that followed, across solar systems and centuries, not only the original protagonist, Ender Wiggin, but several other major characters from that first novel. Now, in a new story set immediately after Ender’s stint as a battle commander, Card returns to the subject of the teenage soldier and explores the years in which Ender grows into a full-fledged adult.

SPOILER ALERT! If you’ve never read Ender’s Game, and you plan to, stop reading this review now. There’s no way to discuss Ender in Exile without exposing certain plot points in Ender’s Game. So just move along. There are plenty of other reviews to hold your interest on this site. Better yet, step away from the computer, go to the bookstore or library and get yourself a copy of Ender’s Game. Let me assure you it is a far far better novel than Ender in Exile anyway.

The cover describes Ender in Exile as "The All-New Direct Sequel to Ender's Game" but it is really an expanded retelling of the final chapters of Ender’s Game, when after destroying the “Buggers” (or, more properly, the formic species) Ender departs with a shipload of colonials to establish a new human colony on a former formic world. While on this new world, he discovers hidden there a cocooned larval formic queen and establishes a psychic link with it to learn why the formics attacked humans in the first place and why they allowed Ender to destroy them. He then writes an influential work called The Hive Queen and the Hegemony and establishes himself as a sort of pseudo-religious figure called the Speaker for the Dead who reveals the truth, good or bad, of a person’s life after their passing as part of the mourning process for survivors. In Ender’s Game, all this is glossed over in just a few pages and not much of it is explored in other books in the series.

So it ought to be fresh and interesting material for a new novel. But in Ender in Exile, Card explores almost none of it, and when he does, very little is illuminated. Instead, the first fifty pages of the novel are a collage of letters and discussions between various characters trying to determine whether Ender should return to Earth. Everyone attempts to manipulate everyone else, until a great deal of tedious blathering leads us to understand that pretty much no one, not even Ender himself, thinks that his return is a good idea. Instead, at the tender age of thirteen, he will be appointed governor of a new settlement planet named Shakespeare Colony. His sister Valentine volunteers to go with him. The next several hundred pages (or is it several hundred thousand?) log the colonists two year space flight (because of relativity, the Earth and those who live there will have aged 40 years in this time). Much of this flight involves conniving and counter-conniving between Ender and the ship’s captain who hopes to steal Ender’s governorship from him once they reach the distant planet. This is all done through endless formal dialogue in which characters pretend to be nice to each other and debate about what’s appropriate speech and behaviour for various ranks and ages of military and civilian personnel (it’s like while Card was writing Jane Austen sneezed on his laptop keyboard). There’s a timid ship-board romance between Ender and one of the colonists that never threatens to go anywhere and there is a significant amount of paper dedicated to describing a production of The Taming of the Shrew that the colonists engage in to amuse themselves. A lot of people point out, over and over again, in praise and in disgust, that Ender is only a young teenager.

What is most disappointing about the book, overall, is its lack of vivid imagery. Ender’s Game is a memorable book because it is full of images that sear themselves into the reader’s mind. There are the brutal encounters of Ender’s childhood, the stark descriptions of Battle School, the range of Battle School students, the glimpses of the Buggers themselves, and the strange and vivid dream-like landscape in Ender’s leisure-time escapist video game (to name but a few). Ender in Exile, by contrast, almost manages to avoid creating any visual images at all for most of the book. Card doesn’t even give us a decent picture of the colonists’ ship. Finally, about two-thirds of the way through, we’re introduced to an intelligent grub which metamorphoses into a metal mining beetle. Ender hones his telepathy by speaking to these beetles, which prepares him for meeting the hive queen. That part is kind of cool and there are a few other surprises in the waning chapters, but, unless you have an extreme tolerance for the tedious, you’ll never get there.

Given that you are not an absolute die-hard Ender fan, I’d say it’s safe to avoid this latest installment. If you’ve read every other book in the series and you want to make it a clean sweep, pick this novel up and see how far you can get before you are driven mad. It’ll make for a new kind of Ender’s Game.

Crossposted at Guys Lit Wire.

NPR reports on the Wovel

2009-01-05T08:21:00.001-08:00

On Morning Edition this morning NPR ran a story on the wovel. A wovel is an online serial novel--resurrected, so claims NPR, from the serial forms of the 19th Century--which allows readers to vote, at the end of each installment, on the plot's development. I'd like to start my analysis of this "new" form by saying, 'ick.'

Anyone who follows this blog is probably beginning to think I'm a technology curmudgeon what with all of my complaining about interactive sites. I'm really not. In fact I think there's a lot of future for new interactive forms on the web. But there's not for obnoxious, gimmicky ideas like the wovel.

I like democracy. It's nice to vote on things like who our leaders should be or whether we should all chip in to build a new wing on the library. But democracy is not so good for selecting plot development.

Isn't fiction supposed to surprise readers, and sometimes make them uncomfortable? I mean, what if the world voted for Gregor Samsa to wake up one day and discover it was all a dream, just to get out of the queasy feeling that reading "The Metamorphosis" causes? On this site a wovelist admits that readers always vote to save a character, rather than kill him off. Surely this is going to make for poorer fiction.

NPR compares the wovel to the "choose-your-own-adventure" form (with a technological twist!). While my kids occasionally enjoy choose-your-own-adventure books, I have yet to see an even marginally serious work of fiction that adopts this form. I suspect there are reasons for this, and expect the "edgy" wovel to find it's way to the literary dust heap faster than I can complete this post.

But what really gets me is that there are so many richer, subtler, and more complex ways to include interaction in online fiction. For example, a fictional character's blog to which readers are invited to respond, is a perfect opportunity for a complete literary interaction. And such a form resurrects the 19th Century tradition of the epistolary novel, if NPR needs some English Major BS to throw in to its reporting.

To be young and to read fearlessly

2009-01-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Also today, a nostalgic, sentimental piece on girlhood reading from the New York Times. (I never understand why the Times has so many completely un-fashion-related pieces in the fashion section, though.)

I'm also getting a little tired of the excessive press that girls' reading has gotten of late. Yes, my daughter is a voracious reader and I'm proud, even envious, of her. But my five year-old son is pretty unstoppable in the book-consuming department as well, and no one is writing purple prose about him. Maybe I ought to . . .

Teach your kid to read

2009-01-02T11:01:00.000-08:00

Slate has published a level-headed and straightforward guide to helping your kid learn to read. I don't know that the advice is all that fresh, but the authors do a nice job of both acknowledging parents fears and then palliating.

Arby's includes books in kid meal

2008-12-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

I like Arby's curly fries and their shakes are ok. That's about it for me. But I was impressed that they actually put books in my kids' meals the other day. And not books promoting some holiday blockbuster, but actual DK non-fiction. My kids loved them. I hope they're as generally popular.

National Book Award Nomimees

2008-10-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

The nominees for young people’s literature are “Chains” by Laurie Halse Anderson; “The Underneath” by Kathi Appelt; “What I Saw and How I Lied” by Judy Blundell; “The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks” by E. Lockhart; and “The Spectacular Now” by Tim Tharp.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book One: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

2008-10-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

Percy Jackson, the protagonist of Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1), is a troubled kid with ADHD who can't seem to stay out of trouble and around whom lots of weird things happen. He has exactly one friend, a kid by the name of Grover who has a giant appetite and some sort of problem with his legs. Exactly one teacher, his Greek and Latin teacher, understands him and has sympathy for him, but also pushes him, he thinks, too hard. When he's not at boarding school, Percy lives with his mother and his abusive stepfather, Gabe ("Smelly Gabe" as Percy likes to call him) in New York. Percy's real father is mysteriously absent, "lost at sea" according to his mother.

On a field trip to the Big Apple things get weird enough that Percy can no longer deny that something is odd about him. After a minor altercation with a classmate who ends up inexplicably doused by a fountain, Percy's algebra teacher, Mrs. Dodds, takes him to a gallery where she morphs into a furious leather-winged creature. Just as inexplicably, Brunner shows up when Percy is about to be attacked by Mrs. Dodds and throws Percy a pen which, inexplicably, becomes a sword that Percy inexplicably knows how to use and which he does use to pulverize the teacher/creature. Immediately after the incident, no one in Percy's class has any recollection of Mrs. Dodds at all.

It turns out the Percy's friend Grover is a satyr, assigned to look after him, because Percy happens to be a demi-god, the child of a Greek mythological god. No one knows precisely which one, but a variety of mythological monsters (including The Furies, one of which was Mrs. Dodds), are out to get him on a hunch that he's pretty important. His mother explains that now that the monsters have found him, there is only one safe place for him to go, a camp called Half-Blood Hill where demi-gods like Percy can live and train and learn how to become proper heros. Percy makes it to Half-Blood Hill, but at great cost, and he must set off almost immediately on a Hero's Quest in order to prevent nothing less than a war between the gods.

I have to admit when I first came across the Percy Jackson books on the Barnes and Noble shelves I dismissed them as cheap Harry Potter imitations. Here is a kid who is extra special, for whom odd and magical things happen all the time, who doesn't know why, but who, finally, becomes discovered and sent to a school (in this case a "camp") where he is finally recognized and nurtured. Sounds just too familiar.

And, to an extent, it is. Either the author or the publisher had Harry Potter at least partly in mind when they put together the Percy Jackson series. But this is not a cheap imitation. For one, as a middle grade series, younger readers may find it easier going than the Harry Potter novels. And beyond that, Percy Jackson has his own special qualities, not the least of which is that it provides the reader with a general introduction to Greek mythology. The stories, as far as I can tell, are pretty accurate and much of the ambiguity of the myths is maintained. Just as in the original myths, heredity is a powerful force, but it isn't destiny, and the children of gods are sometimes at odds with their parents. And, as in the myths, good and evil are powerful concepts but not the exclusive domain of any individual, human, god, monster, or otherwise. There's plenty of good and plenty of evil to go around in The Lightning Thief, but with rare exception (Percy's mother, who seems to be made of syrup, is one) neither quality belongs exclusively to a single individual. Percy at one point even finds sympathy for Hades, as he ought, and is fairly rewarded by the Underworld when he upholds his end of a bargain. There's much adventure, many surprises, and it's great fun to see the stodgy old gods modernized and rewritten into contemporary American culture (Ares rides a motorcycle, Procrustes sells water beds).

The unabridged audiobook version is read by Jesse Bernstein. He does fine job with the a variety of human and non-human voices, but his performance is marred by an affected lilt he gives to Percy, the narrator. Still, both my kids have enjoyed listening and my daughter has obtained the second volume to read to herself. So, for them, it works.

Healthy Reading

2008-10-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

We know that reading is good. It's rather obvious that literacy is important for functional living and that reading helps develop cognitive skills that make for better problem solving and foster intellectual curiosity.

But it's sometimes hard to tell what makes reading one book better than reading another (see my rants on Harold Bloom trashing Harry Potter and on high school English curricula that insist on teaching "Great Literature" even when it's clearly turning kids off to reading). But Tara Parker Pope, in her New York Times "Well" column discusses one study that shows reading a particular book can directly affect girls' weight and eating habits.

The book, Lake Rescue (Beacon Street Girls, No. 6) from the Beacon Street Girls series, focuses on the struggles of an overweight girl named Chelsea Briggs. The study examined 81 girls enrolled in Duke University's childhood obesity program. For the study:

Thirty-one girls were given a copy of “Lake Rescue”; 33 others got a 2006 Beacon Street book, “Charlotte in Paris,” that carries a positive message of self-esteem but doesn’t focus on weight or healthful eating. And 17 girls received the regular program counseling, but no book.

After six months, the girls who got “Lake Rescue” posted a decline in average body mass index scores of 0.71; those who didn’t read the book had an average increase of 0.05. That seemingly minor difference means the girls who read “Lake Rescue” will achieve a healthy weight in a few years if they maintain their regular growth rate and do not gain any more weight.

To see real, positive, and measurable effects of a particular work is rare. Of course, this is just one small study and it's easy to give it too much emphasis, but still, it's good to see affirmation of kids reading, and reading good stuff. Check back for a review of one or more Beacon Street titles.

Kid Lit for Economic Woes

2008-10-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

When times are tough, cue the stories about times that were even tougher.

Erica S. Perl has posted on Slate a slide show that features kids books throughout the century which address economic hardship. Some fascinating texts and analysis.

How to Annoy Your Science Teacher

2008-10-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

I have a new post this month at Guys Lit Wire on Michael Brooks's book 13 Things That Don't Make Sense. This is an excellent popular science book that illuminates some of the most vexing scientific problems facing science today.

I'll be posting more How to Annoy reviews on GLW in the future. I'm trying to create a series of articles that finds a way to bring serious non-fiction to younger readers, specifically by highlighting information, controversies, and new theories that their school textbooks don't cover.

Next month look for my How to Annoy Your Sex Ed Teacher post reviewing Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex by Olivia Judson.

Told you so

2008-09-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

I don't get much traffic here. But I'm starting to get just a little more.

Some months ago, I posted a rant about Scholastic's blockbuster follow-up to Harry Potter, The 39 Clues. Scholastic's claim is that the book, and accompanying cards, will draw kids into the world of reading by offering them rewards for solving puzzles with clues hidden in the text of the novels. In the rant, I predicted that kids would be more likely to cheat by searching the Internet for the answers than really spending time with the books.

Alas, the first volume has been out for not even a week, and MrChompchomp is suddenly getting more hits. Why? Google searches for "39 clues hints" are directing kids to this site, specifically the rant mentioned above.

I bet those kids are disappointed.

A couple of mainstream media links

2008-09-11T09:39:00.001-07:00

Slate V, the multimedia arm of Slate has "Fun with John and Sarah," a children's book version of the McCain-Palin run for the white house. Pretty amusing.

More seriously, the New York Times has a look at Maurice Sendak just before his eightieth birthday party. He's had a rough year even considering his rough life. Seems like a nice, humble, delightfully curmudgeonly guy.

NY Times on The 39 Clues

2008-09-02T13:38:00.001-07:00

Next week Scholastic publishes the much promoted and discussed The 39 Clues. I chimed in on it back in May.

Today The New York Times had this profile of the series' first and primary author (it will have many).

I hope soon to post a review of the initial volume in the Percy Jackson series.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson: Before the Internet Got Cute

2008-09-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

Way back in like the 1990s, the Internet was a dangerous place, peopled by cool, super-tough dudes who carried samurai swords and dared posers to mess with them.

Well, not really. Really, the Internet was a sparse place peopled by pale geeks who sat in their parents’ basements and waited fifteen minutes to download, line by painstaking line, a picture of the MIT solar car race team, because that was pretty much all there was on the Internet.

But what the Internet offered then, by the bucket load, was Possibility. Enough that even those pale geeks (ok, I was one of them) could imagine themselves in the roll of bad-ass samurai sword-carrying outlaw hacker.

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopic cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash, imagines a future where a worldwide computer network is represented as a virtual reality “Metaverse,” (basically a way cooler and way more dangerous Second Life). The virtual Metaverse is where hacker Hiro Protagonist, the aptly named central character, feels most at home. He, after all, programmed much of it.

After Hiro loses his day job back in reality, delivering pizzas for a mafia-run franchise, he returns to hacking and information gathering (and thus the Metaverse) full time to pay off his considerable debts and keep himself out of trouble. He adopts an unlikely partner in YT, a teenage girl who works as a skateboard “Kourier.” She rides a high tech board outfitted with smart wheels that can navigate any terrain, and catches tows from cars by “‘pooning” them.
In the Metaverse, Hiro discovers “Snow Crash” a bit of programming that, it turns out, is both a kind of computer virus, attacking a user’s computer, and a kind drug, attacking and reprogramming the user’s mind. Driven both by the moral imperative to rid the world of something so poisonous and the promise of money, Hiro and YT set out to discover the origins of Snow Crash.

In the strange future world the pair navigates, the American federal government has broken down and exists only as shattered memory. The once formidable American defense department, for instance, has fractured into several organizations such as “General Jim’s Defense System” and “Admiral Bob’s National Security,” armies for hire. There seems no longer to be a central source of law and order in the world, all the jobs of government have been privatized, even the courts. People congregate in whatever communities can best protect them from what seems to be an increasingly hostile outside world. “Burbclaves,” each with its own border police, arise to protect those with enough wealth to own property. Hiro lives with a roommate in a converted U-Store-it, one of the nice ones, with its own door.

There are endless corporations to sell products and services to these communities; there are gangs to steal from them or exploit them; and there are churches to proselytize salvation to them. But where a corporation ends and a church or gang begins is difficult to tell. Cosa Nostra Pizza, Hiro’s former employer, for instance, is the corporate manifestation of the mafia, with a truly religious devotion to on time pizza delivery.

The most illustrative community of Snow Crash’s vision of the future is the Raft. Part cult, part self evolving nation, the Raft is a community composed of millions of boats, barges, abandoned military sea craft, pretty much any form of flotsam, all strapped together to form a kind of floating hodgepodge nation that drifts here and there about the Pacific Ocean. The Raft, separated from the last shreds of remaining order on land, attracts criminals, religious zealots and other outcasts, yet somehow forms its own kind of order.

Odd constructions like the Raft confront the reader on virtually every page of this novel. But every weird technology or fantastic community or oddball occupation has a logical reason for existing here, and Stephenson is generous with explanations. When confronted with a problem, human beings will find a creative and expedient solution, but generally one which brings with it its own set of problems. Stephenson simply follows these webs to create ever more intricate settings and plot points.

The real Internet that has emerged since the publication of Snow Crash is every bit as strange as Stephenson’s vision, if not quite as dangerously hip. It certainly has its own seedy, near criminal elements (extensive porn, gambling, wild-fire viruses, devious site hackers, etc.) but the real world Internet also has a cute face. Even the early Internet gave rise to the Hamster Dance. Funny infants dominate YouTube. eBay was originally created to trade in Beanie Babies. One can “Poke” people on facebook, and for your avatar, you can be Hello Kitty or a Fuwa. It’s fun, and nice, and ever so inviting. But you just wouldn’t come across endless laughing baby videos in Hiro Protagonist’s Metaverse. I sometimes miss that.

So, apparently, do many others. A collector’s edition of Snow Crash, selling for up to $200 a copy was released recently from Subterranean Press. It sold out in just weeks. Fortunately, you can still get the old trade paperback for a pretty standard price. You can also still get your hands on the collector’s edition. You’ll just pay $500 to an Internet reseller for the privilege.

Ah, the Internet.

Crossposted at GuysLitWire.

Back to school rant

2008-08-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

An opinion piece from Sunday's Washington Post proposes that English classes which put too much emphasis on analyzing "Great Literature" are turning students off to reading.

I, for one, would like to applaud the author of this essay for taking this stand. After citing much evidence of the problem (kids are bored, kids are frustrated, they don't like
The Scarlet Letter, they don't see the purpose of analyzing Great Literature in the first place and certainly not when it's already been analyzed to death, etc.), she concludes:

I'm not suggesting that every 11th-grade English teacher adopt "Catcher," drop Shakespeare or ride the multicultural bandwagon. But if we really want to recruit teen readers, we're going to have to be strenuous advocates for fresh and innovative reading incentives. If that means an end to business as usual -- abolishing dry-bones literature tests, cutting back on fact-based quizzes, adding works of science fiction or popular nonfiction to the reading list -- so be it.

I'd go a bit further say we SHOULD revamp every stodgy 11th-grade English classroom. The 9th, 10th and 12th could use a bit of remodeling too.

To be fair, English teachers have a hard time of it. Physics teachers have it easier. They just have to keep up with the times (Einstein replaces Newton, for instance) and they know exactly what to teach. They also know why.

But no one has ever provided a satisfactory definition of Great Literature. You can provide examples, sure. Hamlet pretty much always makes the list, and it should. But why? What are the criteria that can be consistently applied to work after work to determine if it is "Great"? Thousands of years of thinkers have failed to settle this issue.

So in truth, we (including English teachers) don't even know what Great Literature is.

But it's wose than that. We also don't have any idea why it's good for us. Some have said it provides a moral compass, that by considering the difficult problems of characters embodied in Great Literature, we will develop into better, more moral people. But a smarty-pants once pointed out if this were true we ought to see evidence of it: English professors ought to be more moral than average. Anyone who has ever spent an evening at an English department faculty party has witnessed the negative result of this test.

Once upon a time, even though we didn't know what was Great or why Great Literature was good for us, we still had a good reason for studying it. If we could manage to agree on just a few works (we called them The Canon) that everyone read and studied, we'd have a common vocabulary with which to discuss literature and the world (if in fact the two were related). Unfortunately, some troublemakers started asking annoying questions like "why is the whole Canon written by dead white guys?" and "doesn't The Canon seem like it's trying to brainwash us into certain ways of thinking?" No one had very good answers for these questions and so, for the past forty years the Canon has been crumbling and now exists mostly as a memory.

So there it is. We don't know what it is, we don't know why it's good for us, and we have no practical reason to continue teaching it. Still, it is Great Literature. We've always taught it and supplanting it with something as non-Canonical as a "bandwagon" multicultural text by the likes of Richard Wright or Toni Morrison, or, a humorous essay by David Foster Wallace, or heaven forbid, Catcher in the Rye, seems, for some, to be going too far.

Don't get me wrong. I love Great Literature, whatever it is. For instance, I love Shakespeare. I think students ought to be subjected to Shakespeare, early and often. One of the most satisfying moments for an English teacher is when a student starts to "get" Shakespeare, starts to enjoy the music of the language, its rib-splitting humor, its thunderous power, its wilting pathos. But as much as anything, when we're teaching this way, the way Shakespeare ought to be taught, we're teaching kids to be entertained by Shakespeare. There's nothing wrong with that. Being entertained by writing, by language, is a rich experience, perhaps invaluable. It's an experience our youth deserve.

And they deserve it from all kinds of literature (note the lowercase 'l'). From sci-fi and horror and popular non-fiction and revisits to the children's literature they were raised on. On some level, if a work of literature isn't entertaining, doesn't engage us emotionally and draw us in, draw us along, it's failing as literature. ('Us' includes English teachers and their students.) And so much of that Great Literature doesn't do it's literary job for a certain audience.

The weird thing is that grade school reading teachers seem to understand this instinctively. Teachers and writers at the elementary level go through Olympic-qualifying gymnastics to see that kids are engaged and entertained when they read. Texts for younger kids are wildly inventive, encourage response and engagement, are wide-ranging and appeal to all sorts of children. It is truly a great time to be a kid learning to read. I'm a father of two such children and they are absolutely loving it. Why schools aren't interested in carrying this passion for reading into the upper grades is beyond me. There's some need to trumpet an English program as "difficult" and "college preparatory" (even when many college English departments are far more experimental in their approaches), that is killing students' interest in language.

It is far more important to teach language than to teach English Literature. And guess what? Science fiction and contemporary essays and muli-culty lit works are written using language. They can be discussed using more language. And kids will learn to use the language, and enjoy it at the same time.

I might conclude that reading should be fun. But that's a little simple. There's plenty we ought to read that is unpleasant or challenging. But most reading, literary reading anyway, ought to be engrossing. That should be as true for teens as it is for adults and first graders.