Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction

Jan11

Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic Press) is the winner of the 2008 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.

I read someone’s review of the book comparing it to The Great Brain series (sorry, I don’t remember who), and the book does begin with that flavor. Elijah is an eleven year old boy living in a settlement for free (escaped or bought out of slavery) Negroes in Canada just across the border from Detroit, Michigan. The year is 1860, and the name of the settlement is Buxton.”

Go here to read the rest of the Semicolon review of Elijah of Buxton.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 10th

Jan10

Today, according to my handy, dandy Booklover’s Day Book, is Lord Acton’s birthday, b. 1834. I had heard of him, but couldn’t place him. It turns out that he’s the one said this:

“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end…liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition…The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern…Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I had never heard the part about “every class is unfit to govern.” I like that. We are unfit to rule over others for an indefinite period of time. After a while, we do get power-mad. We enjoy playing God. According to Wikipedia, “Most people who quote Lord Acton’s Dictum are unaware that it refers to Papal power and was made by a Catholic, albeit not an unquestioning one.”

Acton was a historian and also a book-lover. I read somewhere that he owned over 60.000 books when he died, and many of them had passages marked that he thought were significant. I thought I had a lot of books!

Have Books, Need Bookshelves #2

Jan9

Closet door bookshelves. I SO want these all over my house. If you saw all the bookshelves that are already in my house, you would say, “Enough, already!” But I’m a biblioaddict; I can’t help myself.

Here are some pictures of absolutely beautiful libraries. I don’t think mine will ever be up to these standards.

Ladder bookshelves from Mother Earth Living via The Common Room. Or else the ladder actually becomes a hanging bookshelf.

Here’s the first in this what-I-hope-will-be an ongoing series of posts about cool bookshelves.

New in 2008

Jan8

Two of my favorite mystery writers, P.D. James and Elizabeth George, each have a new book being published in 2008. George’s is titled Careless in Red.

Hilary McKay’s last book in the Casson family series that began with Saffy’s Angel will be available on this side of the water in March or April. It’s called Forever Rose.

The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall, a sequel to The Penderwicks, is coming out in April.

Mitali Perkins’ new Sameera Righton book, First Daughter: White House Rules (Dutton), will be available January 24, 2008, just in time for all those primaries and caucuses. (Some of those political caucuses and conventions are pretty boring, perfect time to get in some good reading. I know; I’ve been there.)

Athol Dickson’s new novel, Winter Haven, comes out this spring. Teaser from Mr. Dickson’s website: “Boys who never age, giants lost in time, mist that never rises, questions never asked…on the most remote of islands off the coast of Maine, history haunts the present and Vera Gamble wrestles with a past that will not yield. Will she find refuge there, or will her ghosts prevail on…Winter Haven?

Lief Enger has a new novel also, due out in May, called So Brave, Young, and Handsome. I’m going to reserve this one at Amazon.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel, according to BuzzGirl: “Unlike anything Le Guin has done before, this is an imagining of Lavinia, the king’s daughter in Vergil’s Aeneid, with whom Aeneas was destined to found an empire.”

Coming in February 2008: Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear, the fifth Maisie Dobbs mystery. I still haven’t read the first one yet, but I hear from many reliable sources that it’s a great series if you like historical mystery fiction.

Out of the Wild is the sequel to Into the Wild by Sarah Beth Durst, coming out in June 2008. Here’s a summary, with spoilers if you haven’t read Into the Wild yet, of Ms. Durst’s second book.

Then, there’s the Class of 2K8, 28 Middle Grade and Young Adult novels by 28 debut authors. Check out their website.

These are a few of the pleasures I’m looking forward to in 2008. How about you?

The Gender Gap in Middle Grade Fiction Nominees for the Cybil Award

Jan7

Books whose main character is a boy: 22

Books whose main character is a girl: 43

Books with both a boy and a girl as main characters: 6 Isle of Swords by Thomas Wayne Batson, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies, If a Tree Falls at Lunch Period by Gennifer Choldenko, Ms. Zephyr’s Notebook by K.C. Dyer, Regarding the Bees by Kate Klise.

Unclassified: 3 The Cat on the Mat Is Flat, Annie: The Mysterious Morgan Horse, Cork and Fuzz.

One interesting thing is that several of the books attempt middle school romance, usually disastrous, while others go for BFF relationships between a fifth or sixth grade boy and a girl. No Talking by Andrew Clements is more realistic about this age group, I think, as the boys and the girls compete in a no talking contest, and Clements still portrays the underlying interest in the opposite sex without pretending that boys and girls as best buddies is typical in elementary school. Even in seventh or eighth grade, the girls are much more interested than the guys usually are.

In an earlier post, I listed all the Cybils nominees in which there was what I called “an ambiguously platonic friendship” between a middle school aged boy and girl: The Social Experiments of Dorie Dilts: Dumped by Popular Demand by P.G. Kain, The Queen of 33rd Street and the Broken Bike Boy by Sharon Flake, Perch, Mrs. Sackets, and Crow’s Nest by Karen Pavlicin, The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy, Reaching for Sun by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, Ms. Zephyr’s Notebook by K.C. Dyer, Leap of Faith by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate, Lucy Rose: Working Myself to Bits and Pieces by Katy Kelley, Qwikpick Adventure Society by Sam Riddleburger, The Middle of Somewhere by J.B. Cheaney, Way Down Deep by Ruth White, A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban, Celeste’s Harlem Renaissance by Eleanora Tate, Isle of Swords by Wayne Thomas Batson.

Of course, some of the friendships were more ambiguous than others. In some of the books with seventh and eighth grade protagonists, it was obvious that the boy and the girl were more than “just friends” or wanted to be more than just friends. In books with younger characters, the girl and the boy were often portrayed as simply friends with no complications stemming from gender or romance. Two of the more realistic situations were:

The Middle of Somewhere in which twelve year old Ronnie meets thirteen (?) year old Howard, the two become friends and work together to find Ronnie’s lost little brother. It’s obvious in the book that Ronnie and Howard are interested in one another romantically, but taking it slow as behooves young teenagers.

Lucy Rose: Working Myself to Bits and Pieces by Katy Kelley, in which Lucy Rose is teased unmercifully by the class bully about her friendship with Melonhead and a central element in the book is Lucy Rose’s attempt to keep her friendship with Melonhead intact while avoiding the stigma of “being in love”.

And in all of this “gender gap” stuff, it’s the boys who lose out. More books are written for girls, fewer for boys. The ratio is 22:43, girls win. And I think it gets worse as we move into young adult fiction. See this post at Chasing Ray for a much more articulate discussion of this phenomenon.

What I’m trying to say, poorly but trying, is that just sticking a guy in the book as the girl protagonist’s “best friend” or “latent romantic interest” won’t work to make boys want to read the books. Karate Kid, my ten year old boy, reads books with both male and female main characters, but the books have to have something else, usually action and lots of it, to hold his interest. He’s not much interested in fictional romance, and I really doubt he will be anytime soon, maybe never. Brown Bear Daughter, age 13, reads mostly books about girls, but one of her favorites from the Cybils list was The Mysterious Benedict Society, a book with a group of children at the center, two boys and two girls. She likes mystery, spies, and a touch of romance.

Girls and boys both read Harry Potter and love it. So, what does it take to get the typical middle grade or high school boy interested in reading a book? And whatever it takes, should publishers and authors be producing more of it?

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: A New Year

Jan4

A New Year by Susan Coolidge

Yesterday is a part of forever
Bound up in a sheaf which God holds tight,
With glad days and sad days and bad days, which never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Let them go, since we cannot relive them —
Cannot undo and cannot atone;
God in his mercy, receive, forgive them;
Only the new days are our own—
Today is ours, and today alone.

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain:
And spite of old sorrow and old sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.

Prodigal Son in the Tavern (Rembrandt and Saskia)




Prodigal Son in the Tavern (Rembrandt and Saskia)

Giclee Print

Rembrandt van…


Buy at AllPosters.com

I looked at several depictions of the story of the prodigal son, mostly pictures showing the return of the prodigal to his Father, but I chose this painting by Rembrandt as the most interesting of the lot. They don’t really look very happy, do they? They look rather like people who are desperately trying to celebrate the new year, but instead of looking forward or at each other, they’re looking back at the artist. (Nowadays, they’d be posing for the camera.)

And the glass is already half empty. I get the idea that their “prodigal” days are numbered. Farm work will make short work of that hat and fine coat, and the sword will be less than useless among the pigs. It’s really a sad sort of picture even if they are smiling.

To This Great Stage of Fools: Born January 3rd

Jan3

I got busy today and almost forgot to recognize Tolkien’s birthday (just like last year)! We’ve been enjoying the products of Tolkien’s inventive mind around here for many years, and lately has been no exception. I’m planning to read the old/new Tolkien book, Children of Hurin, just as soon as I finish the book I’m working on now. And this book is on my TBR list.

Here are a few nice tributes to Professor Tolkien:

Fantasy Author L.B. Graham: “J.R.R. Tolkien is the fantasy writer that changed my life. I’d never encountered anything like Middle Earth before, and even as an avid reader, his work set my imagination on fire.”

Mental Multivitamin: “Have you, like Family M-mv, found yourself referring back to the text (over and over again) only to realize that as grand as Peter Jackson’s vision is (and it is, really; we do love it), the story is most fully realized as text?”

Past celebrations of Tolkien at Semicolon:

Happy Birthday, Professor Tolkien!
Thoughts on The Silmarillion
Yesterday Was Tolkien’s Birthday
On Seeing the Movie Version of Return of the King

Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz

Jan3

I read another book by Dean Koontz once upon a time. I found it disturbing and violent. Odd Thomas is also disturbing and unnecessarily violent, but I liked it anyway.

Odd Thomas is odd, not because of his name but because he sees ghosts, spirits that are for some reason or another unable or unwilling to “cross over” because something has been left undone or unfinished here in this world. He also sees some other, invisible to the rest of us, beings which he calls “bodachs” and I would call demons. These bodach demons make an appearance in force in Odd’s small town of Pico Mundo (which being loosely translated is Small World, nice touch), and their activity is an indication to Odd Thomas of looming disaster. It seems that wherever there are bodachs, death and violence are not far away.

Odd’s day job is a fry cook for an unassuming cafe, but by night or whenever he can get the time off, he’s an investigator, avenger, and bringer of justice. His task in this book is to find out why there are so many bodachs hanging about and try to head off the tragedy that they’re anticipating.

There’s romance, violence, suspense, and mystery in this page-turner. Maybe a little too much violence, but I’m thinking after reading Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, nonfiction, maybe I just don’t realize what a violent place the world is. Maybe I don’t want to be disillusioned. I may or may not read the other books in this series.

Madeleine L’Engle Project

Jan3

My Madeleine L’Engle reading project, with a goal of reading or re-reading her complete oeuvre, is ongoing. It started out as a project for January 2007, but I quickly saw that I’d need more time to read all of the books. Last year I posted an annotated bibliography of all Ms. L’Engle’s works. And I read and posted reviews for the following books:

The Small Rain

A Winter’s Love

Camilla, also published as Camilla Dickinson

I also read And Both Were Young and re-read A Wrinkle in Time, but I didn’t write about either of them here at Semicolon. I didn’t like the former very much, and I didn’t feel as if I had anything new to say about the latter.

This year I hope to read or re-read the following:

Meet the Austins, 1960
The Moon By Night, 1963
The Arm of the Starfish, 1965
The Love Letters, 1966
The Young Unicorns, 1968
A Ring of Endless Light, 1980.

As you can see if you’re familiar with Ms. L’Engle’s books, I’m concentrating on the Austin family stories this year. If I get all these read, I may try to get to a few more before the end of the year.

P.S. Suzanne has joined in on the project and is inviting others to do the same. You can sign up at her blog or here, and as she says, “Maybe someone could make a button?” Pretty please, because I don’t have any of that graphics talent stuff.