The cake she baked

Simmons gal Susan Bloom made this delicious wedding cake for us, chocolate with praline frosting. YUM. While it is true that I am taller than Richard, I am represented by the little faux-Hummel guy in the bow tie (whose head fell off when we washed him; sorry Kitty) while the tall man is an Alias action figure of arch villain Arvin Sloane as played by Ron Rifkin, to whom Richard bears a startling resemblance.

Thank you Susan for the cake; Kitty for the faux-Hummel and all the Horn Bookers who made fruit salad, took pictures, danced, and held my hand.

Reader,

I married him.

Family Values

After twenty-odd years of living in sin, Richard and I are getting married this weekend (the pic above is from the lovely surprise shower thrown for me today by the Horn Book ladies) and tomorrow is the start of the preparatory madness. Music: check; lights: check; suits: check; vows, food, rings, cake, cleaning: not so much. See you all next week!

Southern Misschief

Back from Hattiesburg, off to Austin, where I'll be seeing many of the same people it seems. Those Hattiesburgers really know how to keep a speaker happy, I must say. Eric Tribunella, prof. in the English department, picked me up, drove me around, held my hand and gave me permission to have seconds of the monster pecan cobbler they served for dessert one night. The unflappable Karen Rowell ran everything with a light touch, and Ellen Ruffin of the deGrummond Collection gave us a great backstage tour, although I was little alarmed when she told us proudly about the new fire-extinguishment program, which would suck all of the oxygen out of the archive wherein we were standing in eight seconds.

I won't play favorites among my fellow speakers as they all probably now have more on me than I really should have allowed them. But I can give props to storyteller Carmen Agra Deedy because we didn't get more than a hi-nice-to-meet-you before she took to the podium to tell a hilarious story about her sixth-grade self and a fire alarm. Carmen was there to accept the 2011 Coleen Salley Storytelling Award, and I must say Coleen's spirit was everywhere those three days. When I recollected drinking bourbon with Coleen the last time I was at the Festival in 1998, somebody told me "you must have been off campus; do you know what we had to do just to get beer and wine in here?" While my imbibing this time was limited to good old Co'cola, I had a wonderful time. And did you know that the stately, sultry lawns of Southern Miss (no period, Eric informed me) house feral cats? We saw some hunting at dusk.

I got some articles out of it, too. deGrummond Medalist T.A. Barron (who told a tragicomic tale about how he met Madeleine L'Engle) is going to write about the necessity of making the Hero's Journey an economical one (i.e., unpadded) and Ellen Ruffin is going to work with Our Martha on something to commemorate next year's fiftieth anniversary of The Snowy Day. My Keats Lecture, about what Harry Potter did for/to children's trade hardcover publishing in this country, will also show up sometime.

But now--laundry! Packing!  Hope to see some of you at TLA.

Where we make your dreams come true

It was thanks to the Horn Book that Lisa Yee got to meet her childhood favorite writer. And how does she thank me? Lisa tells me that in honor of my legendary enthusiasm for the American Girl company, she named a character "Rachel Sutton" in her American Girls book Aloha, Kanani, set in contemporary Hawai'i. What she didn't tell me is that Rachel Sutton is the heroine's whiny little bitch cousin from the mainland who wrinkles her nose at all the riches of the Aloha State.

Thanks, Lisa. Next time could I just get a date with Danno?

Even if he is only three feet tall.

Grandchildren are important

if only for the way that, posed correctly, they can take thirty pounds off a guy.

photo by Richard Asch

First stops on the world tour

A Family of Readers is coming out this month and already there has been some nice talk about it. BCCB found it "informative and entertaining," PW called it "indispensable" in a boxed review, and blogger Natasha Maw has been underlining her favorite quotes via Twitter and the hashtag #familyofreaders. You should see in the right border here a widget that will allow you to see the cover and read some of it; you can buy it (if you like it) via the widget or through all the usual suspects, from Amazon.com to your favorite indie. On-sale date is September 29th.

Martha Parravano and I will be making a few appearances starting next month to promote the book. On October 6 at 7:00 PM, we'll be signing at Porter Square Books; on the 27th, we will be speaking at the Foundation for Children's Books; the evening of November 2nd brings us to the Cambridge Public Library. I'll provide more details as I know them and hope to meet some of you at one or another of these events.

Calling out the Twi-moms

Personally, I'm Team DCS Foyle, but you know who you are.

We have liftoff

and I'll be signing at BEA if you're in the neighborhood.

My Day Out

I had a wonderful sort of field trip on Friday, observing books in the wild. Breakfast with Candlewick, who showed off some highlights from their fall list including--wait, is it too soon for me to start flogging this horse? NO--Martha and my A Family of Readers: The Book Lover's Guide to Children's and Young Adult Literature, out in September. Our editor Hilary Van Dusen (who worked on the book alongside Marc Aronson, himself opining in the NYT this weekend about the very topic that consumed most of our discussions, permissions) said nice things about the book and the food was good.

Then I went over to Porter Square Books for the first time and spent more money than I had and less than I wanted to. The trick is to pick out four books and then virtuously put one back. I bought Ha Jin's Waiting for Richard, Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea for me, and Michael Gruber's Night of the Jaguar for both of us. (Has anyone read Gruber's mystery trilogy starting with Tropic of Night? Set in steamy Miami, it's great warm-weather reading.)

Then lunch, with Barefoot Books marketing man John Bigay. Their office looks just like their books, all greeny purply jungly batiky, so the shrimp and grilled pineapple salad I had (at the restaurant downstairs; why is MY office in the middle of a food desert?) seemed just right. Like overgrown geeks everywhere that day, we mostly talked about the iPad, which I won't buy until I can see it as something other than an oversized iPod Touch, which I adore for the way it makes me feel like I can hold my brain in my hand.

To "see like a child": all it's cracked up to be?

Back on the discussion of long book reviews, Maluose commented that "those of you who think kids are naturally great reviewers have never had to endure any of their blow-by-blow plot summaries. They make most bloggers sound positively terse." Too true. The "book reviews" kids would deliver when I ran a summer reading club a hundred years ago were painful. And those "a kid's review" posts on Amazon might be shorter but they are not very illuminating. (Does anyone know how that tag gets there? I can't imagine a child using it of his or her own volition.)

I was thinking about children's taste on Saturday when I met a friend and his little kids at a local tot lot. The place is incredibly popular because there are lots of toys--scooters, trikes, a play stove, a little house--all made out of that child-safe but phenomenally ugly molded plastic that, my friend tells me, is very expensive. The colors on this stuff manage to be both flat and garish, and the plastic picks up dirt like a magnet. Whoever thought kids had a natural instinct for beauty probably didn't get out much.

Of course, kids with style are a nightmare all their own.

I hope it isn't ALL Ben & Jerry's

Going to Vermont for a few days; hoping to see Katherine Paterson and HB reviewer Joanna Rudge Long (who lives not near but ON the Appalachian Trail) but otherwise just r&r, Roger and Richard, and Buster, who at twenty is too old for any trailwalking but we hope will enjoy the fireplace. Lots of reading planned--Richard gave me the latest Arthur Phillips for my birthday and I've got the second book about the tattooed lady (as well as the new Vanity Fair which promises a hatchet job on same by Christopher Hitchens) and the new Isabel Dalhousie "mystery" on audio. All that and a hot tub!

And look for the new Notes from the Horn Book later today, where I interview Jim Murphy about his new book about the Christmas Truce--appropriate for Veterans' Day, yes?

More Meta

In Betsy Bird's SLJ article "This Blog's for You" (and I thank her for including Read Roger in the list of "Ten Blogs You Can't Live Without"), she asks a bunch of swell questions:

Do kids' lit bloggers influence publishing decisions? Are library systems basing their purchasing decisions on our recommendations? Should they? And to what extent is a blog about literature for youth a reliable source of information?

My short answers to the first three are not a lot, ditto, and no. As to reliability: while I don't see a lot of misinformation on children's lit blogs and am in fact impressed by the care which with bloggers source their facts, we first need to ask what we mean by information--and it's the answer to this question that tells us why blogs are not, generally, as useful to librarians as Betsy's first three questions would have them be. The glory and the bane of book blogging is its variety. Glory because lots of talented people are saying lots of different things about different topics in different ways to different audiences. Bane because this same riotous abandon confounds any but the most limited usefulness. While an individual can pick up the odd book-buying tip from reading the blogs, a library can't--it needs more systematic information than the blogosphere provides. A library collection based upon blog recommendations would be a mess.

If somebody needs a master's thesis, I wish he or she would take a look at whether or not there is such a thing as a blog-friendly book. We've had lots of discussions about bloggers all pushing the same books at the same time (a phenomenon exacerbated by blog tours) but I wonder if this is less a result of publishers pushing certain titles than it is that some books more than others will appeal to people who like to blog about children's books. Many bloggers are emphatic about their desire to write about books they personally love (and again, if a youth services librarian built a collection on the basis of what he or she loved, the library would be useless to the actual kids allegedly being served). There's a whole sub-genre of children's literature that has found its best audience among the adults who serve children (The Wednesday Wars, for example); does the same thing go on among bloggers?

The Magic School Bus Visits the Bowels of the Unconscious

The Horn Book offices will be closed this afternoon as the staff is making a field trip to see Where the Wild Things Are.

See Baby Miles. See Baby Miles Read.

(I take it as a mark of long-delayed maturity that I now find holding a baby more rewarding than playing with a puppy.)

From Cape Cod to Christmas

My mini-break at the Cape was lovely for all kinds of reasons, most notably the best ice cream I've had in a long time, at Four Seas in Centerville. I tried the chocolate, peppermint, peach and butter crunch--all sublime. Closes September 13th for the winter so hurry on down. Richard and I stayed just a block away at the Long Dell Inn, which went a long way in alleviating my suspicions of the term bed and breakfast. Nice bed, great breakfast, friendly innkeepers. Kept myself occupied each morning at the beach with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo while Richard one-upped me with Midnight's Children.

Oh yes, work: the writers' conference afforded me (and the attendees, I hope) a great six-hour discussion with Mary Lee Donovan, Debbie Kovacs, Alison Morris, Nancy Werlin and Martin Sandler about contemporary children's publishing, from the nitty-gritty of getting an agent to larger questions about the future of the market. Everybody seemed to think that we were not seeing enough picture books (the form, Mary Lee suggested, most likely to survive as printed book) and perhaps too much YA. Nancy wisely advised the audience to cover its ears when we moaned about the current depressing economic situation--since you need to write the book you need to write anyway, she said, discouraging words can only harm.

And I finally got to meet Mitali Perkins. Yup, she's tall.

Now the Christmas books are calling--I have to go write a review of Jim Murphy's forthcoming Truce, about the sadly ephemeral Christmas peace on the Western Front in 1914, for our Holiday Books feature. Ho-ho-ho.

Some enchanted evening . . .

"Once you have found him, never let him go. Once you have found him . . . "

Who would YOU like to meet?

Thanks to the Horn Book, Lisa Yee finally got to meet her favorite author.

Happy New Year

With our best girls Charlene and Lori at Lorraine's in Provincetown last night. Ptown was hit by a blizzard yesterday so it was something of a haul getting to the restaurant but the streets sure looked pretty with the Christmas lights twinkling against the snow. I've discovered a problem with bringing lots of books on vacation--it's hard to settle on one. Currently I'm dividing my time between an audiobook of My Cousin Rachel, an ebook of an old Lisa Scottoline favorite (on my new iPod Touch--thank you honey) and Tana French's The Likeness. Hope you all are having an equally relaxing week.

Practicing for grandchildren

Mads seemed content and Julia politely waiting until we got to something with princesses in it.