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When I was a kid, one of my school teachers read from the book Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. I remember it vividly. The entire first grade class sat there on the floor in the classroom, entranced with this woman. Occasionally, she held up the book so we could see all the

While I’m still not ready to plunk down $500 for an iPad of my own (and will make do for the time being with my beloved iPhone and the iPads my school has), as a long-time techie, I am very, very interested in book apps. While many are rather limited and seem to be one-shot experiences for kids, others are innovative and exciting. Yet it can be hard to find them as the various app stores have yet to provide what the older sites provide — a relatively easy way to know what is what.

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My favorite books growing up, the ones I happily read over and over, were Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, a five-part mythological mystery adventure series set in post-war Britain and Wales, where a small troupe of plucky kids overcomes an ancient evil with the help of their Merlin-like great uncle. I would read all five books in order, savoring each one, then after spending a bit of time reading other books (to see if they were anywhere near as great), I would go back and read them again.
Having favorite books as children is important as we develop adult relationships, too. In college, one of the standard questions I asked new acquaintances was what their favorite books were growing

Let’s just say my long ago Sunday School lessons often went in one ear and out the other. But one passage from Matthew 6:3 always stuck with me, ” … When you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing … ”
I remember that saying confused me as a

Whenever I read about another effort to protect the young from historical nastiness (the latest being the new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn with “the pejorative racial labels” removed), I think of Roald Dahl’s Pig a very creepy story for adults. In it a child is raised in isolation as a vegetarian and has an epiphany as an adult when first encountering meat. Wanting to know more about this wonderful new food he goes to a slaughter house and….

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With the start of a new year how about a Book-A-Day Almanac? This new-kid-on-the-blog-block from children’s literature expert Anita Silvey is an elegant and informative site for anyone looking for smart children’s book recommendations with a little something extra. As befits an almanac Anita begins each post with an intriguing fact about the day, goes on to provide a concise and clear description of the featured book (and when applicable something about the authors or publishing history) along with a quote or image, and ends with recommendations of related books. For example, she introduced Wanda Gg’s Millions of Cats last month by noting that it was Cat Herding Day. I mean, who knew? As for the books themselves, they run a range from those recently published to old favorites. Picture books, nonfiction, books for a wide range of ages — Anita offers breadth and depth. A cleanly designed and easy-to-navigate environment, there is a sidebar with a few more tidbits about the day as well as various ways to search for books of particular interest.
Curious to know more about the project I asked Anita a few questions:
What gave you the idea for doing an almanac? It is a terrific structure, but challenging in that you have to post every day.
The Children’s Book-A-Day Almanac was entirely the brainchild of Simon Boughton of Roaring Brook Press. He was considering a very ambitious book proposal of mine and also looking at almanacs for children. It occurred to him that the two ideas could be combined. Simon suggested that I post my essays on line as I developed them. As any journalist or blogger knows, daily publication forces you to read, research, write, and edit every day — no time for indecision or dallying. To some degree all my reference books – Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, 100 Best Books for Children, and 500 Great Books for Teens – have demanded a rigorous schedule. But in the case of the Almanac, I must produce a coherent essay each day.
The daily facts are fascinating — where do you find them? Do you start with a particular book and then look for a daily fact to go with it or vice versa?
All kinds of data bases exist for holidays; as any good reference librarian can probably guess, I keep a copy of Chase’s Calendar of Events by my desk. Sometimes the events of a day or month suggest a book to me; I also have scores of titles that I want to work into the Almanac during the year.
I’m loving the range of books, especially those good and decent ones from not-that-long-ago that may be a bit overlooked today. Books like Andrew Clement’s Frindle. What is your thinking behind these book choices?
I always stress the classics because I don’t want children to miss them. But I am keeping my eye out for great titles of the last twenty years. I have already taught, lectured about, or written about many of my selections; however, sometimes my thoughts about a book appear for the first time on the website. My passion for these books remains the consistent factor; I love every one of them.
I’m interested in your definition of “children.” So far the books featured seem directed toward ages ten and younger. Any thought about also doing books for kids at a slightly older age, say that tricky “through fourteen” criteria that the Newbery award uses?
I am selecting books for infants through age 14. Each month I make sure that each age group – babies, preschool, elementary, and middle school — has suggestions for reading.
Is there anything you want to point out about the site for new visitors?
My mantra throughout my forty professional years has been Walter de la Mare’s quote, “only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young.” I just hope that readers of the website enjoy learning about these books and the amazing people who created them.

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In the life of a reader–and by a reader I mean someone who has always read for pleasure–it is doubtful that any books have as much impact, in the end, as the ones we read as children. Though my memories of their plots and characters are foggy, the stunningly illustrated hardcover books by E. Nesbit that graced the shelves in my neighborhood library in Queens–The Enchanted Castle, The Bastables–contributed in some essential way to the person I was to become; and to this day I am heartbroken that soon after my family moved, the library sold these exquisite books for $2 each in their annual booksale in order to make room for more DVDs and books by R.L. Stine. (“No one reads E. Nesbit anymore,” a friend said to me in defense of the library, and that is probably true–how can anyone read E. Nesbit if she has vanished from the libraries?)
The dreamlike memories I have of those foundational, mythically important books resurfaced when I first began A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. The first 50 or so pages of the book were almost like therapy, transporting me back to the magic I thought had been irretrievably lost with childhood, and to the feelings associated with it–but this time, from an adult perspective, and with an awareness of the dark currents tugging just beneath the surface.
The story opens in a charming setting that evokes E. Nesbit’s books, and for a reason: much of the story revolves around the Edwardian children’s writer Olive Wellwood, a character very much inspired by E. Nesbit herself. The children, for whom the book is literally and ironically and metaphorically titled (that’s A.S. Byatt for you) are running wild in a paradise of a home with generous parents, a forest at their doorstep, and the freedom to imagine and create. We see this bountiful home through the eyes of Phillip, a homeless young pauper that the Wellwoods have taken in, on charitable impulse.
The kindness of the adults at the start of the book, in so readily opening their home to young Phillip and becoming concerned for his welfare, is in keeping with the atmosphere of a children’s book that pervades this novel’s beginning. Here people are kind, the woods are mysterious and inviting, and the end of each day is resolved with a warm bath and dinner with interested, intelligent parents. It seems altogether too innocent and childlike to be a Byatt novel, unless you notice the hints at the beginning that all is not quite as it seems. Even when Phillip is being bathed at the beginning by Olive’s capable sister Violet–who seems to embody the sort of selfless, bustling figure that children often find comforting–there is a subtle tremor of something being “off,” an undercurrent. A puppet show of Cinderella is dark and violent as Grimm’s fairy tale, mutilations and all. Political altercations hint at a threat to the security of Todefright, their fancifully named home, due to the social activism of Humphry Wellwood, Olive’s husband.
But these are truly only hints, and so while it is not entirely surprising when the book veers away from idyllic innocence and full-on into Byatt’s more accustomed territory–erotic secrets, twisted relationships, abuse–it is like a dash of cold water that leaves the reader gasping. There is a real sense of loss, for the reader as well as for the characters who are experiencing it. And there is also a thrill, that perverse thrill of a child listening at the door and hearing too much. We suspected the adults were fallible, that bad things lived in the dark. Now we know it for certain.
The Children’s Book is much more than the story of one family. Focusing on various, interlinking families, the book is an epic of England at the turn of the twentieth century, depicting the intense struggles of that time regarding economic disparities, international politics, and women’s suffrage, and culminating–as of course it must–with the apocalypse of the first World War.
One of the most potent themes of this book–which otherwise has many, many themes–is the dark and even destructive heart of creativity. Most of the artists such as Olive, the author Herbert Methley, and the potter Benedict Fludd, make use of other people, even destroy them, for the sake of their art. Of these, Olive is seemingly the most benign, and the most subtle, yet her actions have the most catastrophic consequences.
Olive writes a continuous story for each of her children, though it’s clear that she does this as much for herself as for them, to feed her addiction to writing stories. In fact, Olive’s only real maternal attachment is to her son Tom, and possibly to the youngest, Harry. Her relationship with Tom is all-encompassing for him, and his story, that of the hero “Tom Underground,” is the one she writes the most passionately.
Tom’s first contact with reality outside his home sends him into an emotional tailspin from which he never recovers. As the fictional “Tom Underground” journeys into dark places, makes discoveries, and conquers his fears, the real Tom retreats from reality, and from anything that might disturb his fragile equilibrium. The fictional Tom is on a quest for his shadow, which was stolen; that shadow is the real Tom, who refuses to be found.
The book is punctuated with stories written by Olive–bright children’s stories which cast dark shadows all along the length of the book, as their import becomes increasingly clear. “Words have their own life,” says a character in one of the stories–a quote characteristic of their luminous, mythic language–and for Olive, the boundary between words and life is particularly indistinct. In each of the stories recounted here, her most suppressed feelings and fears reveal themselves–and each prove to be prophetic in the most devastating of ways.
Olive’s story in this book is one thread in an intricate tapestry of stories, but perhaps the most interesting. The immense multiplicity of facets to this book are both awe-inspiring and a fatal flaw; stripped of much of its detail, some of the truly gem-like moments in the book would shine more brightly. Amid the lush descriptions of art exhibitions, puppet shows, and historical events, the most intriguing image of all might be an imaginary one: Olive’s image of herself walking “across the moor, in the wind, with the closed, calm parcel, containing the obscene things.” I would have happily read a novel that just followed this one woman in her journey across the moors–a woman whose true nature only emerges in her fiction for children, in ways unknown even to herself.

Follow Ilana Teitelbaum on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Among the many best books lists that come out at this time of the year, perhaps the most contentious are the children’s picks. Nonetheless, there is some agreement. The following are titles picked by 6 or more of nine major sources, from The Boston Globe to the Washington Post, plus one bonus selection, for a total of twelve.
‘One Crazy Summer’ by Rita Williams-Garcia
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‘One Crazy Summer’ by Rita Williams-Garcia
(HarperCollins/Amistad, Fiction, 10 & up)
6 Picks — BG, Kirkus, LVD, PW, SLJ, Wa Po
It was the summer of the Black Panthers, when three sisters are shipped west to spend time with the mother who abandoned them when the youngest was still an infant. Delphine, only eleven, is charged with being responsible for the younger two as their mother continues to neglect their care. Should she call her dad? Will her mother ever BE a mother?
– EarlyWord, Lisa Von Drasek,
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Sources:
Boston Globe, Top 10 Children’s Books = BG
Kirkus = Kirkus
Kirkus Childrens
Kirkus Teens
L.A. Times
LVD = Lisa Von Drasek, EarlyWord
NYT Ill. = NYT Book Review, Best Illustrated Books
NYT Not. = NYT Book Review, Notable Childrens Books
PW = Publishers Weekly
SLJ = School Library Journal
SLJ Fiction
SLJ Nonfiction
SLJ Picture Books
Wa Po = Washington Post (15)

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Wrap an app, e-book, art print or maybe even a book for holiday gift giving to your favorite kid. You may think that the holidays are for teens, tweens and tykes, but this season adults can connect with them through a variety of book related gifts that cross the generations. They range from traditional books by familiar adult authors like Adam Gopnik and Kathy Reichs, both of whom have made the transition to kid and teenage literature. Or you and the kids can try the revival of Gertrude Chandler Warner’s classic children’s book series, The Boxcar Children (Open Road Media) in electronic format.
Apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad based on children’s books lead the bestseller list and developers are racing to design a juice proof tablet that parents can share with the toddlers. In the meantime, parents are loading various children book applications from Oceanhouse Media and other producers on to their mobiles. Traditionalist should not fear, you can, for $49.99, have Clifford or Peter Rabbit as a framed piece of art to decorate your child’s room from Starry Story Art.
Whatever your budget or mode of reading, there is something that will pique your interest.
For the lovers of Fox series Bones
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Virals (Penguin, $17.99) is the book for teens and adults who love the Fox series, Bones. Adults who are familiar with Kathy Reichs, forensic anthropologist turned author of the popular Temperance Brennan book series, will enjoy sharing a book that features Temperance’s niece Tory as 21st century Nancy Drew. After reading this first of the series, your teens will be wanting a family trip to Charleston, SC.
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How much (or any) of their research should writers of fiction for children provide? That interesting question, posed by blogger Betsy Bird yesterday, provoked a fascinating conversation. The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that the text should speak for itself and that author notes are not necessary — ever. Yet I have to wonder, is all fiction the same in this regard? Or nonfiction for that matter? In fact, as a reader, critic, teacher of children, and author of a forthcoming work of fiction I find that line between fiction and nonfiction to be very porous, one that writers move between all the time. It happened to me. Feeling it was important that child readers know that it really happened, I tried to tell the true story of a child on the Amistad as straight nonfiction, but it turned out there wasn’t enough material to do that. And so I fictionalized the story using all the carefully researched facts from my nonfiction version. So now, although it is a fictionalized true story, I still plan on the same sort of author note I’d had in mind when it was nonfiction.
As I wrote to someone who commented on my post of yesterday on this topic, I’ve learned through many years in the classroom that kids want to know what is real and what isn’t. Heck, I want to know that too in fiction about real people and events. So to ease my frustration here’s a chart that roughly shows the continuum between nonfiction and fiction. It by no means is a comprehensive list of all the types of fiction or nonfiction, just a handful to show what seems to me the somewhat arbitrariness of insisting all fiction doesn’t need back matter while all nonfiction does.

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Childhood is under attack by the very people who should be protecting it: parents.
Two recent articles in The New York Times present dispatches from the front lines of the assault:
1) The article “Picture Books No Longer a Staple for Children” reports that publishers are releasing fewer storybooks in favor of young adult chapter books, largely because parents are pushing little children to read more complex work in preparation for standardized tests and the rigors of academia.
2) In “The Playground Gets Even Tougher,” bullying and peer pressure typically associated with teens — kids comparing who has the hottest clothes or technology, picking on those who are different, worrying about being cool and fitting in — are shown to be trickling down to children as young as five, status-conscious kindergartners encouraged or enabled by their parents to overachieve socially as well as academically.
Both show parents pushing their children to grow up fast and toughen up intellectually, fanatically trying to prepare them for the competitive world of the classroom and beyond.
In my Brooklyn neighborhood just a stone’s throw from Park Slope, whose army of stroller-pushing bourgeoisie make the suburban soccer mom look laid back, I see this attitude even among my son’s peers — and he’s 16 months old. I’m regularly asked what classes he’s enrolled in or when we plan on sending him to preschool.
I always thought preschool was something children attended the year before kindergarten, around the age of four or five, but I’ve learned that educational programs exist to serve toddlers. One mother explained to me, “It’s not like when we were growing up! Kids today don’t have the luxury of waiting so long to begin school; they need more stimulation.”
I don’t buy it. (Though what do I know? I’m a preschool dropout.)
Our culture is overstimulated and hyper-anxious. A pervasive sense of unease hangs over the upper class and rapidly shrinking middle class, a feeling of empire in decline. Parents worry that their kids aren’t going to have better lives than they did and hope that enlightened science — studies and reports that endorse this product or that technique, programs designed by Ph.D.s to give kids a leg up on their peers, books penned by “experts” each more qualified than the next — can produce fitter, smarter, better-adjusted kids than the instinct and tradition that their parents relied on.
And so they start their 18-month-olds on an educational treadmill that won’t stop for almost a quarter of a century, when they receive a master’s degree — which has become the new bachelor’s. As a result, many children of privilege lean on their parents into their mid and late twenties, either living at home or looking to Mommy and Daddy to foot the bill for rent or tuition, a phenomenon that the new York Times Magazine reported on in August.
With childhood truncated and independent adulthood put off, the worries and fears of the teenage years — what many of us consider some of the most challenging, depressing, awkward parts of our lives (seriously, would you want to be a teen again?) — are extended.
And some of the fundamental joys of not only childhood but of life are destroyed. If a kid can’t read the book that he or she wants to read, whether it’s illustrated or not, then reading becomes a chore, something done to achieve an end, as if there’s a measurable payoff as opposed to a lasting pleasure engaging with a book. I believe there can be both, but in my five years of teaching English, I rarely found a kid motivated to read voraciously if they didn’t love the act first.
And what happens when parents, like the ones in the Times article who encouraged their first graders’ cliquishness, push their kids not to make friends but to network, racking up connections with the right people, the ones with status who may not necessarily be the nicest or most fun to be with? It’s not nice; in fact it’s dehumanizing, building walls between children that lead to bullying and aggression and likely furthering our societal divisions as they grow older.
How does a parent combat these disheartening trends?
By keeping life simple. I’m with my son five days a week, and most of those are largely unstructured. We go for long (for a toddler) walks through the park, kicking leaves, gathering sticks, looking at doggies and airplanes. We visit playgrounds, have a play date or two, and sometimes spontaneously take the subway on a food adventure to Chinatown, say, or to Coney Island to see the ocean. What greater pleasure is there than ambling about town, talking about this and that or else daydreaming in shared silence, reading and drawing and playing games in the fresh air? (OK, so he’s not old enough for all of these things right now, but he’s getting there.)
I can’t see why I would want to deprive my son of these basic childhood, human joys by enrolling him in classes meant to “encourage his cognitive development” — shorthand for conforming to testable skills. Many of the most important skills are untestable — imagination, general optimism and lightness of heart, the capability to love another creature, to empathize and demonstrate compassion. These are things a child can’t bubble in on a Scantron sheet, and yet cultivating these attitudes matters more in determining how my son will exist in the world and what kind of contribution he’ll make with his time on Earth.
Being a kid means making friends without regard of status or difference; it means using our imaginations and playing without a goal. To do away with these things, to do away with childhood, is to pollute some of the most fundamentally beautiful attributes of being human. And that’s just silly.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

In 1963, Sergio Aragons published his debut comic in MAD Magazine: “A MAD Look At The US Space Effort,” which spoofed the space race craze, while also capturing what would become the artist’s trademark style of relating everyday people and common situations through goofy humor. Since then, Aragons has produced thousands of drawings for MAD and has become one of America’s most revered cartoonists. The artist has won numerous awards, including the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award, the Will Eisner Hall of Fame Award and the Comic Art Professional Society’s Sergio Award, an award named in his honor, and the new book, “MAD’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragons: Five Decades of His Finest Works” has become the first comprehensive retrospective of his work. He spoke to The Huffington Post last week — scroll down for a slide show of Aragons’s comics.
HuffPost: Tell me a little about the book. How did you go about choosing which cartoons to include?
It was going to be very difficult because there were so many. The cartoons are like a son — I couldn’t choose or say yes to this one or that one …
Would you say you’re equally as proud of each cartoon, then?
Of course, of course. If you look at it, it looks like one book, but its really months and months of research and lots of working that goes into the material. Every joke is hours of thinking — I’m proud of all of them!
What’s your working process like?
Half of the day is thinking of jokes and the other half is drawing them. I sit with a piece of paper and start thinking and drawing. So, when people ask, ‘Do I get writers block?’ I say ‘no’! I just say one word, like giraffe, and I start drawing little things until I find something silly.
How do you develop THE SHADOW KNOWS features?
In the beginning, I was doing a couple of things. I was trying to make a regular joke. Then, the shadow would be what he was really thinking. It’s storytelling. With a shadow, it’s a great solution for a pantomime.
If you were to draw a self-portrait in a THE SHADOW KNOWS feature, what would your shadow be doing?
There would be a big party and then my shadow would just be at the desk drawing a cartoon!
In many of your comics, you seem to delight in others’ misery? Do you believe that to be true?
When they asked me to do a MAD look at racism, I said, ‘WOW, that’s a strong one.’ But, would you want to do it? Well, of course. Now, you are making fun of things that are not funny. Those are a challenge for me.
We’re making fun of this guy because this happened to him. But then you say, ‘Wait — that could be me.’ Even though you make fun of something, you make fun of something that’s wrong or something that’s been abused … If it wasn’t so funny, I would be crying. If you look at it from a certain angle, you realize it’s a satire. But it’s telling you to be careful!
I’m always surprised by how funny your cartoons are when I re-read them …
Thank you. I see something I drew 40 years ago and I don’t remember it — it’s like someone told me a new cartoon!
This interview has been excerpted and edited from its entirety to appear on this page. “MAD’s Greatest Artists: Sergio Aragones: Five Decades of His Finest Works” by Sergio Aragons is available now from Running Press.
A MAD Look At The US Space Effort
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I often lament that new picture books don’t get read because the classics hold up so well. It’s a ridiculous complaint because, um, the classics hold up so well. Am I really all up in arms about there being excellent books in existence? Hmm, better revise.
Instead of trying to introduce you all to new titles (and authors!), I thought this week it might be fun to settle down with the old familiars. I get asked a lot what books I recommend for a nursery, home library, etc., and I always tell parents to start with what they loved as children, what they want to share, and broaden out from there. I talk a big, current game but the truth is, the classics are important. They are what made us fall in love with books to begin with. So, after much thought and deliberation (and a fair bit of hair-pulling) I give you my top 10 classic children’s books. Yes, just 10.
A few caveats, before we begin:
In order for it to be deemed a “classic,” the book had be published at least 40 years ago.
I included picture books in the list, but not Young Adult novels. That’s another list, for another time. Hint: it probably involves a lot of Judy Blume.
These are all books I loved as a child.
I didn’t make the narrowing process too easy on myself, as you can see.
Enjoy! And please share your favorite classics in the comments section.
“From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” by E. L. Konigsburg
Who could forget Claudia and Jamie Kinkaid and their adventures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? I re-read this one this year for the first time in over a decade, and it was just as funny, smart and engaging as I remembered.
“The Runaway Bunny” by Margaret Wise Brown
I realized that I did not have this book in my childhood collection anymore and bought it for my mother this past Christmas. We both bawled like babies when we read it again. No other author has topped what Brown does so well: capturing the pure, unconditional love of a mother for her child.
“Eloise” by Kay Thompson
The little girl at the Plaza still delights readers right along with “Fancy Nancy.” I love that she hasn’t lost her shine on the bookshelf. My favorite “Eloise” book is probably “Eloise in Paris.” I bought it at the infamous Shakespeare and Company on a trip to the city of lights a few years ago, and I think it’s one of Thompson’s best.
“The Story of Babar” by Jean de Brunhoff
One of the things I love about “Babar” is how increasingly complicated the story got the older I became (that’s actually one of the things I love about most children’s literature). The little elephant as a platform for French colonialism? Perhaps.
This article by Adam Gopnik is one of the best critiques I’ve come across and is definitely worth reading.
And here is an interesting link courtesy of Betsy Bird from the Babar exhibit at the Morgan Library.
“The Boxcar Children” by Gertrude Chandler Warner
These were the first books I remember being really, totally, flashlight-under-the-covers hooked on, but what made them really special was that I read them with my dad. There are 19 originals written by Warner and over 100 others based on the story about four children who, after the death of their parents, run away and begin an independent life in an old, abandoned boxcar.
“Frog and Toad” by Arnold Lobel
This was the book I learned to read on and what foreshadowed my eventual love of “The Wind in the Willows.” Frog and his friend Toad’s simple, thoughtful adventures provide a wonderful foundation for any beginning reader.
“The Tale of Peter Rabbit” by Beatrix Potter
I was lucky enough to visit Potter’s home in the lake district of England a few years ago, and it was all I could do not to get back on the plane with a Peter Rabbit monogrammed suitcase. I love this book and everything that has come from it. Readers continue to be delighted by Potter’s rendition of the child — mischievous, explorative and just a little bit naughty.
“The Borrowers” by Mary Norton
I, appropriately, borrowed this book from my best friend in the first grade and never gave it back. Bethany, if you’re reading this, I have your copy! “The Borrowers” is the story of tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of houses and borrow from the occupants. I may have tried to pull up a plank or two because of it.
“The Secret Garden” by Frances Hodgson Burnett
It’s impossible to have a list of classic children’s literature and not include Burnett’s masterpiece. There are eight million things I could say about this book (I once wrote a thesis on it, actually — the garden as the metaphor for childhood, deep stuff) but it’s a brilliant work that I hope generations of readers continue to fall in love with.
(Because my list could only spotlight ten books [who was it who said that a man may break rules but a great man breaks all rules but his own?], I must include “A Little Princess” under Frances Hodgson Burnett’s name. It’s still one I read regularly.)
“Amelia Bedilia” by Peggy Parish, Illustrated by Fritz Seibel
I can remember my best friend’s mother reading “Amelia” out loud to us in an exaggerated British accent. These books made me laugh. They made me roll on the floor laughing. I shared an Amelia Bedilia book with a group of students a few weeks ago, and it had the same effect (British accent was brought along, obviously). I find the new ones by Herman Parish to be lacking something, but it could just be that I’m a sucker for the originals.
Well, that’s it, folks. I plan to do a top-ten picture books list as well as a top-ten young adult novels list over the coming weeks, so stay tuned. There are, of course, many more classics, and I’d love to hear what you all loved as children. Comment away!

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The master-of-the-macabre suggests that:
Great idea, I say. And since there are plenty of well-known books for kids-who-love-to-be-scared out there, I figured I’d suggest a few recently published books that may be less familiar. By all means add your own suggestions, old and new, in the comments.
Jim, Who Ran Away From His Nurse, and Was Eaten By a Lion by Hilaire Belloc is a delightfully deadpan parody of a cautionary tale, amusingly illustrated (with flaps and such) by the clever Mini Gray.
Calef Brown’s Hallowilloween, also a picture book for older kids, is filled with silly poems that are as likely to produce giggles as shivers.
A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz, on the other hand, has some truly spine-chilling moments leavened by wit and compassion. An utterly original take on the Grimm fairy tales, I’m reading it aloud right now to my 4th grade class and they are loving it. More from me about it here.
In The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall Mary Downing Hahn mixes together a Victorian waif, a forbidding manor, an accidental (or was it?) death of a child, and a graveyard with a deliciously spooky story as the result.
A haunted house is also central to the first of Jacqueline West’s Books of Elsewhere series, The Shadows, along with magical objects, talking animals, a variety of ghosts, and an alternate world entered through paintings, making it a compelling read.
The Boneshaker by Kate Milford is an atmospheric and eerie story featuring a machine-loving girl, Dr. Jake Limberleg’s Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show, and the Devil.
And finally, for teens, there is Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown’s Picture the Dead. Set during the Civil War when spiritualism, spirit photography in particular, was in vogue, Jennie Lovell tells her chilling story through text and the pages of her scrapbook.
Also at educating alice.

Follow Monica Edinger on Twitter:
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Psst —wanna see some actual illustrations from this year’s crop of picture books? If so, get on over to New York City’s Society of Illustrators for “The Original Art: Celebrating the Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration.” An annual event started by Dilys Evans thirty years ago, this year’s show features the original art from 129 books selected by a jury of illustrators, art directors, and editors out of a pool of 554 entries. Additionally, a gold medal was awarded to Renata Liwska for her illustrations in The Quiet Book while silver medals were given to Carson Ellis for Dillweed’s Revenge: A Deadly Dose of Magic and Dan Santat for Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World). Eric Carle and Alice and Martin Provensen were honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards and Hyewon Yum received the Founders Award for There Are No Scary Wolves. Here’s a taste of some of the work honored, but I recommend seeing the whole exhibit as there is nothing like seeing the actual art. It is spectacular.
Gold Medal Winner Renata Liwska’s The Quiet Book
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AV Club’s ‘My Year Of Flops’: 15 Notorious Cinematic Failures Worth Revisiting
Mother Goose Meet ‘Other Goose’: 7 Classic Nursery Rhymes Re-Imagined (PHOTOS)
Grammar Pet Peeves: Readers’ Picks Of The 7 Most Irritating Language Mistakes (PHOTOS)
Cover for The Quiet Book. Copyright 2010 by Renata Liwska. Used by permission Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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A nursery school teacher from Riverdale and a high school special education teacher from Hudson, New York recently found themselves amid the glitz and glamour of a society event supporting the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Bea Jackson and Karen Engel were chosen by the museum to be their educator guests and to mix and mingle among the glitterati of children’s books.
They were among hundreds who gathered in New York City beneath the arches of the Queensboro Bridge (The 59th Street Bridge for all you Simon & Garfunkel fans) at Guastavino’s to celebrate the 2010 Carle Honors. The awards are given in recognition of individuals and organizations for long-term dedication to the art of the picture book. Caldecott winning artists Paul Zelinsky, Chris Van Allsburg and Leo and Diane Dillon joined museum founder and the creator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar (World, 1969), Eric Carle, to honor artist, David Macaulay, for his body of work. His books, including The Way Things Work (Houghton Mifflin, 1988), have sold over three million copies. Other honorees included Nancy Schon, renowned sculptor, whose Make Way for the Duckling statues grace the Boston Public Garden commemorating Robert McCloskey’s book of the same name.
Teachers Jackson and Engel were both overwhelmed by the celebrity and glamour of the $450 a person event that had table centerpieces inspired by Macaulay’s books and an art auction that included works by Art Spiegelman, Uri Shulevitz and Quentin Blake that raised $40,000 for the museum. They rubbed elbows and chatted with persons whose names they knew only from books. Jarrett J. Krosoczka. whose Lunch Lady books will be made into a film starring Amy Poehler, answered questions from them and librarians Carol Kern and Zigrida Eberhardt from Western Pocono Community Library.
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is a special place for Karen Engel. She and her family have had many experiences at the Carle Museum that had a profound effect on them. They had the opportunity to meet many talented and well-known authors and illustrators and as a special education teacher she has able to share her love of children’s literature with her students. Bea Jackson’s connection with book illustrators goes back to her days at Colby-Sawyer College in New London, NH where her fellow student was famed illustrator Tomie dePaola.
The museum is entering its eighth year and is located in Amherst, MA.
Noted Art Collectors Honored
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Third World America: Is Living a Normal Life a Political Statement?
Mother Goose Meet ‘Other Goose’: 7 Classic Nursery Rhymes Re-Imagined (PHOTOS)
National Book Award 2010: 20 Finalists Announced
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Eric Carle with Kendra and Allan Daniel, noted art collectors and recipients of the 2010 Carle Honor in the Angel category for their generous financial support which makes picture book art exhibitions, education programs, and related projects a reality.
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Dolls. These real-life avatars can charm, creep, and fascinate. Perhaps no more so than Barbie. Born in the 60s, reviled by many in the 70s, this toy with the permanent tiptoe feet seems to bounce back appealing to one generation after another. While plenty of ink has been spilled about her for adults perhaps not so much has been written for those who are just done playing with her — young people, that is. And so how terrific that Tanya Lee Stone has filled this gap with The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie, giving readers a clear-headed view of the life of her creator, Ruth Handler (and thus also her company Mattel); her unique appeal to children; how she fits into social and cultural history of her time; the art (yes, there is quite a bit of Barbie-inspired art it seems); and more. Filled with color and black and white images, plenty of them of Barbie and her pals, and loads of firsthand comments from those who both loved and hated her as children and later, the book is a fascinating look at a unique piece of recent American history.
Wanting to know more about how she went about researching and writing about this icon, I went to Tanya Lee Stone herself and posed a few questions.
As you note in the author’s note, “I don’t recall having strong feelings about her one way or the other…” So what then got you so interested in writing a book about Barbie? Was there a triggering event or situation?
I started thinking about icons one day-what they mean to us and why, and how they come to be icons in the first place. In terms of pop culture, Barbie is at the top of that list and I found that fascinating. I knew there had to be more to the story than the often-quipped remarks of Barbie being some evil corporate plot to make girls feel bad about themselves. I wanted to find out the origin of the idea to create Barbie in the first place. I wanted to know the back story of the person who invented her. What I found was remarkably different than the pre-conceived notions I had heard in the past.
I loved the way you showed how Barbie and everything around the doll reflected the cultural and social history of our times. Was that in your mind from the start?
Yes, absolutely. I’m a big fan of context. I think it’s imperative to understand what is going on at any given time in our social history in order to fully discuss one aspect of that culture. You have to know what the societal ideas and norms of the day are to understand how a product of that culture’s time fits.
You certainly have a lot of balls in the air — Ruth Handler’s biography, the development of Mattel, the doll’s evolution, history, play, and so much more — how did you manage to balance them all? Did you start out featuring one more than the other? Or had you in mind to do it all from the start? It is a feat that you managed to get it all in effectively in a relatively short book!
I definitely had two main goals-one was to provide the history of the inventor and the invention to put Barbie in context for the reader. And the other was to really examine some of the themes I wanted to get into-body image, racial diversity, role-playing and development. I also had a strong desire to “let the people speak,” as you only need to mention the word Barbie to get fast and furious opinions on both sides of the table! Of course, there are things that wouldn’t fit and tangents I found fascinating that I had to make decisions about-but that’s par for the course. Eventually, the task is to assimilate all of that information for myself and choose a focus that stays true to the story I’m telling. I hope I did that.
As I read the book I was struck by an interesting conundrum — on the one hand Barbie from the start was an idealized doll and the early concern was that girls not see her as something to emulate. Handler created her as a fashion doll — one for girls who were playing with paper dolls with a focus on clothes. And so with the rise of feminism there was concern that girls not see her body and looks as something to wish to be. At the same time you write about efforts to diversify Barbie — ethnic Barbies, African-American Barbies, etc — and quote those who felt they were not represented in these dolls. And so I’m fascinated by this doll being something you both want to see yourself in and never see yourself in. Do you have any thoughts about this dichotomy?
I would modify that conundrum just a bit to say that Ruth Handler absolutely wanted little girls to see her as something to emulate-but what she wanted them to emulate had little to do with body type. She wanted girls to believe they could put themselves in any shoes at all-be anything they wanted. It was about clothes, yes, but what those clothes represented, also. Independence, in many cases. Ruth was a fiercely independent woman. So I think really, at least for me, the form she happened to embody-which was in part a product of Ruth’s time and place; Hollywood in the 50s- Let’s not forget to also factor in that Barbie taking off like it did had something to do with the body type not changing. Who’s going to mess with that kind of success? But one of the most interesting comments I came across was from Ruth’s granddaughter Stacey Handler, who suggested that if Ruth had stayed in a role of power longer, she may indeed have made some changes to the body type as time changed and societal norms shifted.
In regards to the diversity issue, I think it is nearly impossible to please everyone. I see all sides to the arguments and think, in the end, it’s a toy and a toy company we’re talking about. It’s not a self-esteem organization or a nonprofit organization. Ultimately, a toy company has its own mission to fulfill. Their attempts to address issues are appreciated, and can never fully satisfy. That is its own conundrum.
You describe a range of Barbie play in the book. As a teacher I’ve done a lot of observing of kids’ play over the years and am very intrigued by the changes. For example, I bought my own Barbie (as my parents like many refused to buy me one) when I was around nine in the 60s yet she now seems to be more appealing to much younger children. And while my friends and I had one Barbie and were eager to acquire clothes and objects for her, for some time now it seems more common for children to have many Barbies. In your research for the book did you notice any of these sorts of changes or others related to changing play patterns?
Anecdotally, I would venture a guess that the change has less to do with play patterns and more to do with societal changes regarding things like consumerism and materialism. I think earlier generations simply had less and that was the norm. Expectations can be quite different these days.
I’m curious about how you attracted the many young people you quoted in the book. How did you find them? How broad a demographic is it? Particularly the boys!
As I said, mention Barbie and people start talking! The response to my invitation to participate in the research for the book was overwhelming. Social media and email played a huge part in the success of the effort to reach out to people. I sent emails to teachers, librarians, writers, parents-and it went viral very quickly. I pored over hundreds of emails and started sorting responses into the natural categories that developed. The boys, almost entirely, were the result of teachers asking students if they wanted to respond. It was extremely interesting stuff!
Is there anything you found in your research that you were dying to include and then had to sadly leave out?
No, not really. I mean, I found many aspects of the family’s history fascinating, but as you know there are choices to be made and a focus to be kept for juvenile nonfiction, so I’m happy with where I ended.
Also at educating alice.

Follow Monica Edinger on Twitter:
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Anyone who spends time with avid kid readers knows how much they like to talk about books. Wanting to give those in our middle school an audience beyond their immediate world, my Dalton School colleagues Roxanne Feldman, Ellen Nickles, and I started an after-school book blogging club. Every week these literary enthusiasts come to my room; sift through my books and advance reader copies; choose to read whatever catches their fancy; and, after reading them, write blog reviews about them. Here are a few recent ones:
AE has some thoughts about I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure.
JY considered Donna Jo Napoli’s The Wager.
VS has a review of Loretta Ellsworth’s In a Heartbeat.
AL read and reviewed the forthcoming Wish by Joseph Monniger.
Fantasy buff AI read another soon-to-publish book, Jonathan Stroud’s The Ring of Solomon. Here’s what she thought.
RG took on Poop Happens: A History of the World from the Bottom Up by Sarah Albee and …well, go here to get his take on it.
Also at educating alice.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

An Introduction from the ‘Other Goose,’ the author of “Other Goose” …
Let it be said that it is difficult for me to gather my thoughts in any other form than rhyme. But as this volume of altered classics may be shelved among “Mother Goose” books, a few words of explanation may be in order.
First, let me tell you a little secret about Mother Goose. SHE IS NOT A GOOSE! She is actually a person. And while I certainly compliment her rhymes, some of them have grown quite dusty over time. I mean, what good is a pocket full of rye anymore, I ask you?
That is why I am here.
I am actually a goose.
And I know how to rhyme.
I have taken Mother Goose’s rhymes and, let us say, re-nurseried them. I have made them more modern, more fresh, and well… more Goosian. I have also found an illustrator named J.otto Seibold (who is not a goose) to create pictures for my rhymes. I find a rhyme is rather lonely without a picture.
Rhymes are important, you see. Before there were books, important thoughts were passed down by way of rhyme. Why rhymes? Because they get stuck in your head! That’s just how rhymes are. Especially Goosian rhymes. They are Extremely Memorable Words.
So, without further ado, I present a sampling of my collection, recorded as I remember them best: the Other Goose book of nursery rhymes.
– Other Goose
Blah Blah Black Sheep
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Writer Wednesday: The Best ‘Writing Rituals’ (PHOTOS)
Other Goose 2010 By J.otto Seibold. Used with permission of Chronicle Books, San Francisco.
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So says Rick Riordan about The Lost Hero, the first book in his new Heroes of Olympus series and today millions of eager young fans will be able to see for themselves if his kids, editor, and agent are right. For those who don’t yet know, kids really, really, REALLY love Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. Many of them have already checked out the book’s website, read the first two chapters, are planning to see Rick on his book tour, and attend one of today’s webcasts (in which Rick promises to reveal some big news).
At a virtual press conference last week Rick told us that the story takes place right after the close of the previous series and we will be seeing Percy and friends again. Evidently Hera is going to make trouble and Festus may too. There are three new main characters who will be telling the story together — three narrative strands similar to the two Rick employed in The Red Pyramid. Here are a few more tidbits from that press conference:
—
I know the series is often touted as a series for reluctant reader boys. And that’s great because I have reluctant reader boys at home and I’m perfectly satisfied to have the series promoted that way.
But when people say it’s a series for boys I know that a lot of my female readers get very annoyed with that because there are a lot of them and they’re quick to say this is not just a boy’s series. And you see that right away if you go to one of my events I mean invariably the audience is exactly 50/50 boys and girls.
—
It [Roman Mythology] is something that’s addressed much more in the new series, The Heroes of Olympus and it allowed me to explore this idea that is first put forth in “The Lightning Thief” that the gods follows civilization around. They’ve jumped from Greece to Rome to Europe to the United States.
With The Kane Chronicles and this new series the man has his hands full, committed to writing two new books a year. Can he pull it off? Given his track record I’m very hopeful. As an adult fan of both series I must admit I too can’t wait to begin reading The Lost Hero.
Also at educating alice.

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The recent New York Times article, “Picture Books no Longer a Staple for Children” set off understandable ripples of concern, angry, worry, and dismay. But I have to say it didn’t bother me because what I see in my little corner of the reading world has me certain that the picture book is alive and well. What I do see as changing is a broadening (not narrowing) of the age of the audience and a wonderful extending of the concept and form of the book itself.
First the good news about age. I’ve been teaching fourth grade for over twenty years and I have definitely seen a shift in what children have read before they come to my classroom. Yes, as was noted in the article, kids are reading longer books younger. Many of the books that were staples of my classroom twenty years ago are now staples in first, second, and third grade classrooms.
The most dramatic change was after the fourth Harry Potter book came out. The media frenzy had been enormous and kids of all reading levels and tastes came into my fourth grade classroom that fall lugging the monster book along with them, insisting they loved it and wanted to read the whole thing. Knowing that it wasn’t for everyone (whatever the media said) I repeatedly assured them that they could read whatever they wanted to. After a few weeks when they saw there was nothing to prove, those whose taste ran to other sorts of books quietly abandoned Mr. Potter and picked up the books they really wanted to read. In the following years kids came in having already read the Harry Potter books and other large works of fantasy (Tolkien was big when the Lord of the Rings movies were coming out) and the reading landscape of my classroom permanently shifted.
So, yeah, I think there is a trend for kids to read longer books younger, at least in the sort of community I teach in. But I don’t get the sense that this causes them to abandon picture books earlier. Rather, they read both. In my classroom today I’ve loads of picture books and the kids love for me to read them and to read them again and again on their own. Twenty years ago I focused pretty much exclusively on chapter books. So while kids seem to be reading chapter books younger they are also enjoying picture books when they are older. Good news, I’d say.
Now the good news about form. It may be that traditional picture books are a harder sell these days, but how about those in new forms? I understand the anxiety associated with e-books, but I also am intrigued by what folks are doing digitally. The Ipad seems to have gotten some creators very excited about new ways of presenting text and art together for children. I’m excited about graphic novels and am thrilled to see more being created for younger kids. Kids love novelty books, the kind with flaps, things to move, pop-ups, and such. I’m delighted that there are more of these than ever.
I’m excited about where books of all kind are going these days whether they are the kind made of paper or something else. Good news all around, I say.
Also at educating alice.

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Sharon Dogar’s Annexed has been testing me personally. A work of historical fiction, Dogar sensitively and thoughtfully imagines what Peter Van Pels, the boy in Anne Frank’s final hidden home, felt and thought and did. The reviews have been glowing and I appreciate them all as I do her artistic right to write the book. Yet I found the book an impossible one to read fairly. I tried and tried, but as I read it I was unable to let go in Dogar’s imagined world. My family, my childhood connection to Anne’s diary, and my feelings about writing fiction about real people all kept getting in the way.
My problem begins with my own history. While my grandmother and father may have left Frankfurt, Germany in 1936, our family history remains —- say my great-grandfather’s Edinger Institut or the street named after my great grandmother. My grandfather didn’t leave and was killed, but my father didn’t hold a grudge against his homeland. He became a specialist in Germany politics and I spent big chunks of my childhood in Germany.
And then there is the diary. Before we left for a year in Germany when I was eleven, my grandmother gave me The Diary of Anne Frank and a blank-but-old-looking diary. A few months later at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam I realized that mine was very similar to Anne’s, brought by my grandmother from Germany close to when Anne was writing hers. Because of that, because I was so close to Anne’s age then, because I could identify with her assimilated German Jewish background, because she was clever and funny and a great writer … Anne’s diary became a touchstone book for me.
And so while I was intrigued by the idea of giving voice to Peter Van Pels, taking someone whom we only know about through Anne and make him his own person, when it came to actually reading Dogar’s imagining of his voice, I struggled. It made me enormously uncomfortable to read the fictional Peter’s very intimate thoughts and experiences. It felt intrusive. He was a real person and we don’t know, can’t know, what he thought and felt. I thought of my father. He hated it when academics speculated about his family in articles and books so I can only imagine his response to a fictional speculation about someone like Peter.
Would I feel this way about a real person that didn’t mean so much to me personally? Good question. It so happens that I’ve been working on the story of another real person — Sarah Margu Kinson, a child on the Amistad. Feeling that I had no business imagining how she felt I tried for years to tell her story as nonfiction, but it didn’t work — there wasn’t enough about her to do it. So I finally, gingerly, moved into fiction. I went from third person to first person. I fictionalized a true story. Using everything I could find to help me, I made-up some of her thoughts and feelings. I wrote historical fiction. And since I’ve done this I absolutely respect others who do so too.
Sharon Dogar wanted to give Peter Van Pels a voice of his own and created a work of fiction that is powerful, heartfelt and well written. That I can’t read it without squirming is my problem not hers.
Also at educating alice

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Roald Dahl died 20 years ago. His life was filled with adventure, tragedy and incident. He was born in Wales in 1916, the only son of two Norwegian emigrs. After a conventional private education, he went to East Africa to work for Shell Oil and joined the Royal Air Force to train as a pilot when war broke out in 1939. He saw action in Greece and Palestine, before injuries sustained in a plane crash, caused him to be invalided out of active service.
Dahl often maintained that it was this “monumental bash on the head” that led to his becoming a writer. Initially he wrote stories about his experiences as a wartime flyer, then he became famous for tightly-wrought short stories with a dramatic twist at the end. His publishers dubbed him the Master of the Macabre. In his late 40s, he started writing for children. Many of his books, most notably “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “James and the Giant Peach” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” are now acknowledged as timeless classics of the genre. He was married for more than 25 years to the actress Patricia Neal who died earlier this year.
Pat, Olivia, Roald and Tessa on Holiday in Norway, 1958
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Dahl was very proud of his Norwegian ancestry and took his young family to the land of his ancestors every summer, where he recreated the holidays he had himself experienced there as a child. He later described these vacations as “totally idyllic … The mere mention of them used to send shivers of joy rippling all over my skin.”
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The children book creator David Macaulay is a genius. Really. A recipient of one of the coveted MacArthur Fellowships, the so-called Genius Awards, he was honored for being one of those “talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” Certainly it was perfect for this energetic artist who is always exploring, experimenting, and playing with new and different ideas.
One recent way David did so was as a scholar-in-residence last year at New York City’s Dalton School where I teach. For The Year of the Sketchbook every single person in the school was given a sketchbook and they were used in a myriad of ways. Urging us all to use sketching as a form of thinking, David worked with high school students, history teachers, kids of all ages doing all sorts of things. My fourth graders, for instance, sketched with David in assemblies and in more intimate settings, but they also used their sketchbooks on their own, say while listening to me read aloud, filling them up with ideas and drawings of all kinds. Additionally, David spoke to our community about a current project of his — re-illustrating his iconic series of books City, Castle, Cathedral, and Mosque. It was truly a wonderful year. At the end, having made his mark on so many of us, David was invited to literally make his mark on the school.
And so he did — spending several days this summer creating a remarkable mural that covers every surface of the hallway outside our library. It is a quite extraordinary mural, one that you can truly study for long periods or simply glance at as you head on into the library. Either way, you can’t miss it! Here are a few photos to give you a taste, but for a better feel of the whole mural check-out this slide show.
Also at educating alice.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com