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Summaries of chats and announcements are posted to the right. Use them to add to your own TBR piles and for collection development.
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GalleyChatters
A librarian’s Shout & Share pick at BEA, The Tenth Parallel was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday, on the cover of the NYT Book Review and was reviewed in the Washington Post.
It rose to #56 on Amazon sales rankings.
The author will be interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air on Tuesday night.
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Blackstone Audio; UNABR
11 CDs; 1-4417-5360-1; $109
1 MP3CD; 1441753632; $29.95
10 Tapes; 1441753595; $79.95
Before I leap into my picks of kids books for September, I wanted to mention that, while at ALA, Jo Ann Jonas, the woman who inspired me to become a librarian, and I made a recording for StoryCorps. We both enjoyed talking about why we love about our jobs.
Part of what continues to inspire me is discovering new books that kids will love. Below are some of my favorites for next month.
A Bedtime for Bear by Bonny Becker, illustrated by Kady MacDonald Denton, Candlewick. Ages 4 and up.
The bear who likes things in his house to be “just so” and the mouse (small, and gray and bright-eyed of course) from A Visitor for Bear return to deal with going-to-bed rituals.
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Switching on the Moon: A Very First Book of Bedtime Poems by Jane Yolen, Andrew Fusek Peters, and illustrated by G. Brian Karas
Here is a Little Poem is an essential buy for every children’s room. It is one of my favorite collections for young children. The same team brings together poems, old and new for nighttime reading paired with Karas’s dreamy paintings.
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Max and Ruby’s Bedtime Book, by Rosemary Wells, Viking. Ages 3 and up
Very short stories of our favorite sister and brother bunnies are collected in a lavishly illustrated volume perfect for settling our own little ones during the night time read-aloud ritual.
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The Baby Goes Beep, by Rebecca O’Connell, illustrated by Ken Wilson-Max, Albert Whitman. Baby to toddler.
Baby goes beep, Baby goes splash, Baby goes shhhh. Hats off to Whitman for bringing back this rollicking repetitious toddler read aloud in a board book edition.
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I’m Big!, by Kate Mcmullam, illustrated by Jim Mcmullan, Balzar and Bray. Ages 4 and up
The latest from the creative duo of I Stink, I’m Bad, and I’m Mighty bring forth a not-so-little lost sauropod (check out the book trailer).
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Children Make Terrible Pets, Peter Brown, Little Brown.
A very feminine girl bear finds a little boy in the woods and brings him home for a pet. She names him Squeak for the noise he makes. Domesticating a human turns out to be more than she can handle because children DO make terrible pets. Brown makes the most of this ludicrous premise with his detailed cartoon drawings and deliberately tongue-in-cheek storytelling.
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A Pig Parade is a Terrible Idea, by Michael Ian Black, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes, Simon and Schuster. Ages 5+
In a droll serious tone the narrator details why it would be imprudent to stage a parade with a hundred pigs. Hawkes double page spreads of realist paintings not-at-all picture-book-cute (bringing to mind more Jamie Wyeth than David McPhail) instill an understanding of the madness of expecting porcine mammals to dress up in majorette costumes, play band instruments and tether balloons to the earth. Did you know pigs lack of any appreciation for floats except for the root beer kind?
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Three Little Kittens, retold and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, Dial. Ages 2 and up.
Caldecott award winning illustrator, Pinkney, presents the sweetest little kittens who lost their mittens.
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Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave, Laban Carrick Hill, illustrated by Bryan Collier, Little Brown. Ages 8 and up.
Very little is known about Dave the Potter. He could read and write, skills not common during a time when slaves were forced to be illiterate. He created huge well-crafted pots that survive to this day. The author weaves Dave’s own words in lyrical text that supported by Collier’s multi-media collage illustrations In this well-researched picture book biography
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Dust Devil, by Anne Isaacs, illustrated by Paul Zelinsky. Random House
Remember Swamp Angel? The heroine of that tall tale of the greatest Tennesse woodswoman has moved to Montana where she and her trusty steed Dust Devil find themselves up against the meanest bad guy ever.
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Bink and Gollie, By Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee, illustrated by Tony Fucile, Candlewick.
Two authors who are friends team up to write an easy-to-read chapter book about two very different best friends. One is tall, one is small. One is deliberate, one is enthusiastic. The retro-modern, luminous art perfectly matches the authors’ dry absurd humor, imagination and other-worldliness. Can’t wait for number two.
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Babymouse #13: Cupcake Tycoon, Jennifer L. Holm, Random House. Ages 7 and up
This series are graphic novels in the best sense; compelling, emotionally satisfying with three dimensional characters that we have grown to love. As a series it is remarkable because the most recently published in the is just as engaging as the first. which is not always the case.
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Alvin Ho: Allergic to Birthday Parties, Science Projects, and Other Man-made Catastrophe , by Lenore Look and LeUyen Pham,Schwartz and Wade. Ages 7 and up
I suspect the Alvin Ho series has not been as popular as it could be, so here’s my pitch. A transitional reader (Henry and Mudge but before Fudge) with a reading level similar to Junie B Jones, Judy Moody but with a boy main character who just happens to be Chinese. Alvin is quirky and funny and kids can relate to his trials and tribulations with school, teachers, friends and parents. Did I mention laugh-aloud funny?
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This Isn’t What It Looks Like (Secret Series) by Pseudonymous Bosch. Little Brown. Ages 8 and up.
I don’t know if these have taken off at your library, but at Bank Street, our kids can’t wait to get their hands on the 4th fourth in the series (the first was The Name of This Book is Secret).
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Guys Read: Funny Business edited by Jon Scieszka, Harper ages 10 and up.
Jon Scieszka IS my hero. The former ambassador of children’s literature tirelessly campaigns for children’s right to read — anything they want. Especially boys’ right to read fun, high-interest, adventurous, and sometimes grossly humourous books that the stereotypical female teacher might raise her eyebrows at as “Not appropriate.” Study after study has shown that self-selection is the magic key to life-long reading. Sieszka has gathered his writer buddies and convinced them to contribute this short story collection. Teachers are often scouring my library for short story collections and this one fits the bill. Kids will recognizer their favorite authors, Jeff (Wimpy Kid) Kinney, Adam (True Meaning of Smek Day) Rex, Mac (Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem) Barnett, Kate (Tale of Desperaux) Dicamillo, Eoin (Artemus Fowl) Colfer are among the contributors. Are some of the stories gross? Duh. Will some of the content make a grown-up squirm? You bet. Do the stories, engage, delight and provoke? Without a doubt. Just what the literacy specialist ordered. Thank you, Mr. Scieszka.
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The Search for WondLa, by Tony DiTerlizzi, Simon and Schuster. Ages 10 and up
This IS the big book. DiTerlizzi of Spiderwick fame opens this wide-ranging fantasy novel with a girl who lives underground and is raised by a robot named Mothr. My 4th and 5th graders couldn’t put it down and were begging for more.
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What Happened on Fox Street, by Tricia Springstubb, illustrated by Heather Ross, Balzar and Bray. Ages 9 and up
Mo loves her neighborhood and is looking forward to her best friend’s return for the summer. It would have been easy to overlook this sleeper, a seemingly quiet story of two long-time friends on a dead-end street, but Fox Street is much more than that. It is about change that happens even though we resist it. It’s about forces beyond our control. It’s about the pain of growing up as well as the everyday joys of friendship.
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Reckless, by Cornelia Funke, Little Brown. Ages 10 and up
Funke, the master of the richly imagined world populated with mystery and danger (Inkheart) presents a new series drawing on the dark side of traditional fairytales.
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Half Brother, by Kenneth Oppel, Scholastic. Ages 12 and up
What if your parents uproot your life and move you to a distant small town where you know no one? What if they bring a baby chimpanzee into the new house and try to raise him as your brother? What if they think they can teach him to speak in sign language , would that be okay with you?
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An ALA Shout and Share pick, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by well-regarded natural history writer John Vaillant looks at how Siberian tigers are faring amid climate change and a porous border with China. Publishers Weekly interviewed him, and praised the book as,
…a mighty elegy that leads readers into the lair of the tiger and into the heart of the Kremlin to explain how the Amur went from being worshipped to being poached.
Holds are edging up at libraries we checked.
The book is also in development for film by Random House Films, with a projected release date some time in 2011.
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Random House Audio; 9780307715074; $40.00
The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons by Richard Rhodes (Knopf) explores the role of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War and efforts to eradicate them. The LA Times reviews the final volume in the tetrology Rhodes calls The Making of the Nuclear Age, saying “some of this book’s most chilling passages . . . reflect the author’s acceptance of analysts’ opinions that nuclear terrorism may be much more technically feasible than generally admitted.”
Yunte Huang’s examination of Charlie Chan, the Chinese detective that was featured in 40 movies beginning in 1934, has caught the attention of many reviewers. On NPR’s Fresh Air, critic Maureen Corrigan says Huang reveals that Chan was not always considered an outrageous stereotype. In his time, he was celebrated in China as the only positive portrayal of a Chinese character in American film.
The book is also featured in the current issue of Time magazine (Watching the Detective), was reviewed by Charles McGrath in the NY Times (Charlie Chan: A Stereotype and a Hero) and in today’s B&N Review (The Legacy of Charlie Chan).
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Among the names that appear on lists of “What To Read After You Finish Larsson” are Henning Mankel, Jo Nesbo and Karin Fossum.
The Washington Post reviews Fossum’s latest, a “haunting psychological suspense novel,” which alternates chapters from the author’s point of view thus, “having some fun…with the old saw that, during the writing of a book, a novelist’s characters will take on lives of their own.”
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A sure sign that it’s back to school season; USA Today looks at four books that give “updated advice on navigating college.”
Writing about the book with the most up-to-date sounding title, The iConnected Parent: Staying Close to Your Kids in College (and Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up(Free Press), review editor Deirdre Donahue asks, “Are cellphones, Facebook and e-mail morphing into the campus equivalents of baby monitors? “
On the Today Show, Stephanie Dolgoff mourns former hotness, but tries to say the message of her book, My Formerly Hot Life, is to not fear aging. It rose to #80 on Amazon.
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Jennifer Arnold charmed viewers of Good Morning America when she showed off her training techniques with her dog, Butch. Arnold is against the idea that people need to be dominating “alphas” to their dogs; “they try so hard to please us that I find it very sad that we would ever use anything other than kindness to work with them.”
Her book, Through a Dog’s Eyes, rose to #165 on Amazon’s sales rankings, from #6,547.
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OverDrive; WMA & MP3 Audiobook
Books On Tape; UNABR; 9780307737199; #30
We’re not surprised when we see Gawker making fun of Rhonda Byrne’s book The Power, the followup to her super successful The Secret, releasing today, but USA Today? The newspaper’s book review editor Dierdre Donahue finds Byrne’s ideas pretty flimsy, and ends with this zinger, “With The Secret, Byrne made a fortune off the delusional bliss of magical thinking. Let’s not give her any more power.”
The Wall Street Journal, naturally, take a more businesslike approach to the whole thing, calling its publication a “bright spot” in a struggling business. Publisher Atria tells the WSJ that they have pre-orders for 924,000 copies, “the largest in its history.”
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S&S Audio; Read by: Rhonda Byrne; September 2010; ISBN-13: 9781442337961; $29.95
Both NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and Fresh Air featured The Murder Room, about Philadelphia’s Vidocq Society, which meets monthly to try to solve some of America’s cold cases.
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S&S Audio; Read by: Adam Grupper; 12 disks; 9780743532648; $39.99
Large Print; Thorndike;11/1/2010; 9781410430960; $31.99
A feature in Parade Magazine brought attention to The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick’s Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption, coming out next month, and sent it to #47 on Amazon sales rankings.
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Talk about advance publicity; Jonathan Franzen’s new book Freedom won’t be out until the end of the month, yet he is featured on the cover of the new issue of Time magazine on newsstands today. As every news source has breathlessly pointed out (it must have been in the press release), this is the first time in a decade that a living author has appeared on the cover (is that a good thing?) since Stephen King in 2000. Other writers Time has featured include Toni Morrison, John Irving, John Updike, Mario Puzo, John Le Carré, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf, but this is the first time they’ve used the label “Great American Novelist,” (in the story, Lev Grossman is a bit less grandiose, calling him “one of the best” living American novelists).
NPR was even earlier, with a review by Alan Cheuse on the 8/5 All Things Considered; not exactly a rave,
…despite the brilliance, or maybe even because of it, I found the novel quite unappealing, maybe because every line, every insight, seems covered with a light film of disdain. Franzen seems never to have met a normal, decent, struggling human being whom he didnt want to make us feel ever so slightly superior to. His book just has too much brightness and not enough color.
Franzen is also profiled in New York magazine this week and the September issue of Vogue.
Meanwhile, in most libraries, holds are light.
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Macmillan Audio; UNABR; 8/31/2010; 9781427210494, $59.99
Critics have gotten a look the first episodes of HBO’s new series, Boardwalk Empire, based on the book by Nelson Johnson about Atlantic City during Prohibition (and, appropriately, published by a New Jersey publisher, Plexus Publishing). The reaction, according to the Washington Post, is a “love fest.”
The series begins September 19, with a season of twelve episodes.
Based on this trailer, there may be a new catch phrase in the making.
Official Web site: HBO.com/Boardwalk-Empire
Based on: Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City, Nelson Johnson
Tie-in:
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USA Today joins the growing trend of writing about “one of the fastest-growing genres in romance publishing,” novels with Amish settings (Business Week, The Wall Street Journal and the AP have all written about the phenomenon).
Several new and forthcoming titles are cited, including the launch of a new series, from “the queen of the genre,” Beverly Lewis.
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Three titles from Harlequin’s Stepple Hill imprint:
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Larger Print; pbk; 9780373815029; $5.00
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Amish-themed mysteries are also being released, including the first in a series originally published by Ohio University Press and being reissued by Plume.
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On NPR’s Fresh Air last night, Gary Shteyngart explained that his book, Super Sad True Love Story, is set in the future because, in today’s world, that’s where we all are living. About new technology he says, “If anything, we are now always connected but we don’t know what we’re connected to. It’s just an endless stream of information.”
The book rose to #11 on Amazon sales rankings.
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Audio: Recorded Books
