Bedtime stories a problem for many parents

From the UK's The Guardian, a sad but true story: bedtime stories a problem for many parents.
My mother-in-law is a professor of literacy and remarked that many children's picture books are actually too "wordy". Picture books and read-aloud need to keep it simple to attract parents as well as kids. I understand the necessity of children hearing as many different words as possible their first year of life, but keeping them simple with beautiful illustrations is the way to keep both parents and children happy.

Book lust

Hmmm...lust seems an inappropriate feeling to have for these beautiful libraries (for the most part theological libraries!), but they are so lovely and exquisite I can't help myself.

Its National Book Festival time again

8 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes...er, make that 11 minutes...until the 2007 National Book Festival is here! I have conned Jeff into taking me and Griffin this year; it falls on my birthday weekend and since we get what we want on our birthday weekends...

This year we are meeting his parents on the way down to D.C. and then staying outside of the city somewhere in Fairfax County, VA (i'm sure I have the details written down somewhere...) and taking the Metro on Saturday morning. I can't wait; over 70 authors in one place, on one day! Mercer Mayer, Rosemary Wells, Jodi Picoult, Stephen White, Ken Burns, Joyce Carol Oates -- a bibliophile's dream. Make that 8 days, 2 hours, 7 minutes...

Swann

Swann, by Carol Shields, was a difficult novel to start (and not the least of which was my difficulty concentrating on a novel while also taking care of my six month old son!). The novel is about the mysterious Mary Swann, a Manitoba housewife who is murdered before the story even begins. Swann is a poet and her works are "discovered" by a feminist scholar, Sarah Maloney, who is manipulative and ambitious, plus much too in love with herself. The irony of Sarah, of course, is her much-too-much attention to her looks and ultimate marriage to Stephen. The novel is about a symposium devoted to scholarship of this unknown poet. The story is narrated by four different characters who are influenced and affected by Mary Swann and her legacy. The aforementioned Sarah Maloney discovered the poet when visiting a remote cabin and on the run from a lover. The second narrator, Morton Jimroy, is an esteemed literary biographer writing about Swann's life, but reduced to stealing a fountain pen from the poet's daughter when interviewing her for his book. The third narrator is spinster librarian (what a cliche!) Rose Hindmarch who supposedly knew the poet best, but actually knows nothing at all. And, finally, narrator four is Frederic Cruzzi, erstwhile newspaper editor and poetry publisher who meets Mary Swann on the day she is murdered and has a secret of his own about her poems.

At the same time each of these characters are narrating the story of their relationship with Mary Swann, pieces of Swann's life are mysteriously disappearing, as if traces of Mary herself are gone. The novel is ambitious and the last section is a humorous send-up of academic symposia, but the whole of the novel tries to convey the nature of Mary's loss -- her murder as well as the loss of any legacy she left behind. It succeeds at conveying the bumbling nature of the four people who supposedly "knew" her the best and the irony of what they did not know.

Book sharing the social software way

Its amazing how much you find through sharing and exploring the web through del.icio.us links! I have bookmarked sites, my friends add me to their network of bookmarked sites, I find other people's networks and their bookmarked sites...it goes on and on, but you can find some fascinating websites and applications. One of my fellow librarians has bookmarked some cool sites and this one called Shelfari is similar to LibraryThing, where you add books (catalog), make recommendations, write reviews, and talk about books with others. Shelfari is a bit more limiting than LibraryThing -- it doesn't have the capability of finding an exact ISBN match to a title (which, by the way, drives me crazy as a librarian!!) so the books on my "shelf" in Shelfari may not be the editions I actually own at home in the "real" world. These applications do have the capability of creating real communities on the web, much the way chat rooms and discussion forums did in the first generation of websites.
Besides, didn't every kid want to catalog their books and play "library"? Or was that just geeky me???

Late summer reading

Still have time to do some summer reading? Catch up with this handy list from the Worcester Telegram & Gazette News. The list includes such kid favorites as Jack Prelutsky and Douglas Florian.

Reading challenges

These reading challenges always get me. I would love to compete (I think in the past I could have quite easily been in medal contention) but don't have the time -- babies tend to get fussy if their moms ignore them for too long while they read. The one above from Kate's Blog sounds interesting, but what kind of challenge should I give myself?

Here's a thought: try to read all the books by a favorite author in a row. I.e. finish all Carol Shields, one after the other. Move on to A.M. Homes, then finish up the month with all the books Barbara Kingsolver has ever written. And don't let the preceding sentence fool you -- I would never manage to get through all these books in a month! That was foolish. More like the rest of the year...

The Kid Stackz

This piece by Jessica Kane is interesting: she proposes that public libraries create areas in their buildings for childcare. Parents drop off their kids for a couple of hours while they read. The library could charge for the service and help fund their collections with the money they receive from the childcare center. What a (ahem) novel idea!

I would certainly sign up for it -- I never feel like I have enough time to read now that Griffin is here. If I could drop him off at a childcare facility just for the express purpose of reading (as opposed to dropping him off at workout gym-sponsored childcare area), I would certainly feel freed up to do my daily quota of reading...

Author Rushdie and wife to divorce

Its amazing that Salman Rushdie is generating this much buzz for something other than pissing off relgious fundamentalists...

Author Rushdie and TV host Lakshmi to divorce - omg

Gotta love subtitles...

So admittedly, it was the picture of actor Ed Norton holding a pink bar of soap with Pajiba written on it (a la Fight Club), but the subtitle of this blog did me in: "...scathing reviews for bitchy people..." Thats me!

The Generation's Best Books - Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People

Jane Smiley and women writers

Here is the Jane Smiley post about women and national book awards that precipitated Erica Jong's "open letter"...

What's Erica Jong's problem with Jane Smiley?

Erica Jong has a problem with Jane Smiley -- read about it here...

Lloyd Alexander dies at 83

Author Lloyd Alexander died at age 83; listen to the NPR audio obituary. Author of such classics as The Black Cauldron and The Chronicles of Prydain series, Alexander was a beloved children's fantasy writer who won a Newberry Medal in 1969.

British bookshop lists 25 up-and-coming writers

British bookstore chain Waterstone's lists 25 up-and-coming young writers from such varied genres as cooking and science fiction.

Ian Rankin's writing space

Neat photo of writer Ian Rankin's workspace. The environment where Detective Inspector Rebus was conceived and lives...

Cartoonist ponders Mother's Day

Berke Breathed, cartoonist, ponders the ultimate sacrifice of parenthood -- would he die for his child? In Breathed's new children's book, Mars Needs Moms!, a little boy wonders why anyone needs a mom, but discovers that moms are pretty special when Martians come to Earth and want to take his mom away to their planet.

Now that he's a parent, a cartoonist ponders the ultimate sacrifice

Mothers' fiction

Since I am a first-time mother, it is only fitting that I want to read novels or non-fiction accounts of motherhood. I just finished The Stone Diaries and the novel's account of one woman's journey through a life unfulfilled really affected me. I'm also working on Rachel's Cusk's memoir of her experiences as a first-time mother, A Life's Work: On becoming a mother, which is both funny and sad in turn. Controversial too, since Cusk doesn't mince words and is honest about her conflicting feelings of being a mother, woman and writer at the same time.
I'm thinking about some other titles that might go into a "mother fiction" category on my bookshelf -- some funny, some sad, some downright disturbing (Re: Loverboy by Victoria Redel and her mother character's desperate obsession with her own son). Motherkind by Jayne Anne Phillips is a great novel about the mother-child relationships, both mother-daughter and the daughter's relationship with her newborn son. What other titles would YOU recommend?

The Stone Diaries

What's up with the Canadian literature kick I've been on? First, The Blind Assassin and now Carol Shields. This novel was deeply affecting and is probably one of the best I've read so far this year. Winning the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Shields' novel is an exploration of one woman's life -- from witnessing her own birth in 1905 through her death sometime in the 1990s. What is so affecting about the story is the telling of a life that did not seem to make an impression on others, how women can be marginalized and how one woman didn't take her life and live it to the fullest. Amazing...

The Blind Assassin

Just finished Margaret Atwood's Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin . Phenomenal book -- I was not expecting it to be so good. In fact, I was surprised I even attempted to read this book with a two-month old baby in the house to distract me (it did take almost a month to finish it, natch!).
The last Atwood book I attempted was Cat's Eye and I hated it. I believe I only got through the first few pages. I read The Handmaid's Tale in college and love it. In fact, it is one of my favorite novels.

Case Histories

Kate Atkinson is decidedly humorous...British-"y" humorous. Meaning that many Americans may not like her humor. Her mothers are very unsentimental and often unlikeable. One of the mothers in this novel is a murderer, for crying out loud. Case Histories is a detective novel/thriller and is a departure from Atkinson's more literary previous endeavors, like Emotionally Weird or her Whitbread Award-winning novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum.