How to use this Page

Thanks for sharing! My Home Library is new to me- I can’t wait to visit.

My Home Library seems like a wonderful site. Imagine being able to print out such wonderful artwork and use it. A already has some great craft ideas for them.
I’ve shared this link with my Saffrontree yahoo group.

Hi Stacey, Sandhya,
I think My Home Library is a gem of a site – just perfect for book lovers! I’m always surprised it isn’t better known. Hope you have lots of fun with it.

Constance Greene is one–when I first became a librarian back in the 80’s, the same children who read all of Judy Bloom read Constance Green. And Marilyn Sachs is another–I think both these good authors could use new covers. Danziger’s P.S. Longer Letter Later book (written with Ann Martin) is still extremely popular, along with its sequel–children who read P.S. sometimes go on to Danziger’s other books.

E.L. Konigsburg – Mixed up Files still circulates somewhat, but not much else, including her latest.
Zylpha Keatley Snyder – Fifth and sixth graders love The Egypt Game, but do not check out other titles.

bk

Constance Greene, check. We’ve a fair amount of her on the shelves. Snyder, heck yes. The Egyptian Game, The Gypsy Game, The Headless Cupid, and anything with a new cover does okay. That said, the older stuff sits and sits. And Konigsburg, yes. Though we’ve had luck with the Jennifer, Hecate, etc. book in its new cover, and A View from Saturday does well on Summer Reading Lists.

Konigsburg? Say it isn’t so!

We’re weeding our juvenile fiction collection as well. I’ve asked the other librarians who are weeding to collect the books that never checked out or have really old and dated covers. I’ve scanned the cover and collected the circulation info and put them on a posterous blog. It’s really interesting to see. The Isis Pedlar by Monica hughes is my favorite. We’re trying to draw conclusions from our weeding, so far it’s too random. I’m writing this at home so I don’t remember some names, but I remember: Betsy Byars, particularly Bingo Brown. Diana Wynne Jones and Kathleen Karr

I’m trying to put one book out a day, so visit more than once on your trip down children’s lit memory lane

I’m curious whether you all think it’s because the writing gets dated, the jackets get dated, or whether the frontlist-loaded publishing model is pushing backlist aside. I do know from the publishing side that perennial backlist classics, things that have sold well for decades, are now in precipitous decline and it’s not clear why.

Lois Lowry’s books remain popular in our library, except for the Anastasia Krupnik series. I don’t know if the covers have been updated, but we still have the original covers. I recently reread the first one and I still love it. I remember reading them when I was a child, but they don’t seem to circulate as much as her other books do.

Check out Thomas Memorial Library’s (Cape Elizabeth, ME) Lonely Books Club. They won an EBSCO Award for this program. Children read books from the Lonely Books Club display (of books that don’t circulate frequently) and fill ou reviews for chances to win prizes. If you do a search (library’s name + “Lonely Books Club), you can find out more (including downloads if you want to start a club). I haven’t done this yet, but it’s been on my agenda ever since I read about it.

Oh, I see that we were supposed to include writers that aren’t as active as they used to be, so that leaves out Lowry. Well, I loved Barthe DeClements’s books when I was a kid, but I don’t think hers go out as much.

Semi-off-topic, does all this weeding mean that there’s a big library book sale coming up? I do love me a chance to buy large stacks of worn library-bound books…

Kristen: book jackets can be replaced, I think it’s the literature trends that push titles. Harry Potter brought fantasy to a new level and I think children became sophisticated readers. thick books have become a whole genre in our library. as in What would you like to read? A thick book… they don’t seem to care what the genre is, they want the story to last a long time… look at Tumtum and Nutmeg it’s 504 pages long for third and fourth graders.

Anyway, fantasy ruled the land for almost a decade which has sort of morphed to SF and horror (we’re doing a werewolves, vampires and zombies staff reading assignment this month). So with these trends, great books like bingo brown and anastasia krupnik faded (but Beezus and Ramona and Judy Blume still get read….) Maybe mama’s who read Lowry and Byars and Konigsburg will gently remind their offspring of these good books.

There was also this very telling comment in the Guardian article, from a teacher : 'Before I Die is apparently about a teenager who does lots of things like have sex with various people because she knows she is about to die.'

Apparently? So she's prepared to condemn a book without having read it?

Great post Gillian and I agree completely about 'manhood'. Will now never be able to read it without imagining the little cape.

Hear, hear! We're both prone to a little violence :-) I find there's more hostility to injury and death. Maybe because we don't have to see the suffering of the victim for long. (Latest editorial comment - 'why don't they just kill him'?) That's going the sanitisation route, I feel - and we justify the violence we write by NOT sanitising. It has to have nasty consequences which we confront head on.

It is horrendous that people will condemn books without reading them. Keren's example is rather chilling.

So shall we deduce that this whole sorry state of affairs is down to one person who has now written a couple of dubious 'quotation' articles for the Guardian? Or is there more?

I'm too busy blogging about it to complain to the Guardian. is anyone actually complaining officially?

Maybe we don't need to get worked up. Maybe no one said any of these things?

And then we can go into detail with what does happen, or not, in Before I Die. Like, yes she did have sex with more than one person, but on the list was simply to have sex. (Teachers don't read books, much, so will need to guess at what apparently happens in lots of them.)

Something I find most amusing is that sex is more taboo than violence and murder. You can have blood and guts galore in a book for 10 year olds, but sex is off limits. That says a lot about what's wrong with us as a society, or as a species - I'm not sure which.

In my first book, I had cruelty to animals, domestic violence, child imprisonment and vivisection, and murder (well, nearly), and my agent didn't flinch. In my second book I have an oblique reference to abortion, and my agent got uneasy. As they say in the US, 'Go figure...'

I find this astonishing. Before I Die is an exquisite book about humanity, heart-breaking and joyous, full of life in the shadow of death. Crossing the Line is an honest book about the devastating effects of violent crime - even the structure says 'this is a book about what happens when....' It must address the reasons why violence happens, and it does, with blunt honesty - anything less would be deceptive. It's like telling kids 'don't take drugs, they're bad for you'. The first question any astute kid will ask is 'why do people do it then' and you better be ready to answer because our kids aren't stupid.

It's all very well for people to take the moral high ground - meanwhile, in real life, our kids are having sex, drinking too much and brushing with violence ALL THE TIME. Wake up Guardian - writers aren't encouraging this - they are responding to it.

Completely agree, Gillian. A very common topic of conversation in school libraries - why we can or can't have a certian book on our shelves. But it's most often because they're very understandably worried about "what parents will say" because parents so often do. And I guess whether a librarian can face dealing with that will depend on how supportive management are. I had a librarian saying she couldn't have Monday are Red "because of the swearing" - there's PISS OFF (nothing worse!) but she happened to have opened it at that page and she thought parents would complain. God. Better keep kids out of the playground then.

And the idea that a story that features knife-crime/drugs/sex/murder is therefore going to encourage those activities is so absurd and utterly depends on the story and context. Gah.

But it's true! Books have a pernicious effect!

For instance, I read Lord of the Flies recently, and next thing I knew, I'd abandoned my children on a desert island with a fat kid and a boys' choir.

Then I read Oliver Twist, and found myself inspired to entice orphans off the street and train them into a gang of pickpockets.

And then I read A Clockwork Orange, and was gripped with an irresistible desire to listen to some classical music.

And you don't want to know what happened after I read Watership Down...

I suspect Alison Waller may have been quoted out of context. She has also said, 'In a society that worries about its own infantilism there is a general atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding the concept of adolescence. These anxieties are crucial to understanding modern subjectivity and they result in extreme - often nostalgic - attempts to fix adolescence as a separate state' (Constructing Adolescence In Fantastic Realism).

Alison Waller has been quoted out of context. As has Anne Fine. And yes, it is much too much to ask teachers and librarians to read books before they comment, because something like 20,000 YA books are published every year. I figure if we have the right to write what we like (which we do), librarians or parents have the right to disapprove with whatever prejudice they can bother to dredge up. It won't necessarily make a blind bit of difference in terms of what their kids read in any case.

I do sometimes wish YA authors (and I'm not particularly singling you out, Gillian, promise) would direct their outrage at something slightly more socially useful than so called restrictions on what they/we write.

It's an open marketplace -- as long as you can find someone to publish and read your books, you can do and say whatever you like. Which is more than you can say for the vast number of countries in which extreme censorship is the standard.

It's reasonable to expect thazt they won't comment on one particular book if they haven't read it, surely? No one's expecting them to comment on or read 20,000, just to limit their opinions to things they've read.

>I'd abandoned my children on a desert island with a fat kid and a boys' choir. ... Then I read Oliver Twist, and found myself inspired to entice orphans off the street and train them into a gang of pickpockets.


John, you'd better hope that the CRB haven't worked out how to surf the internet yet, or it's no more school visits for you.


And Meg's right I suppose - we can write more or less what we like. We have that right, in this country, and we can always get around so-called restrictions by a few cunning disguises. 'Piss off!' is in Watership Down, incidentally - but no-one notices because a seagull says it.

"John, you'd better hope that the CRB haven't worked out how to surf the internet yet, or it's no more school visits for you."

EEEEK! Ed, it's satire, honest! I didn't really!

And, Kehaar! Yes! I remember being taken aback by that 'Piss off!' because, I think, it had never occurred to me before that you could put a 'rude word' in a book. I suppose I'd always imagined that 'they' would stop you.

It didn't turn me into a foul-mouthed little urchin, though.

First off, chaps, nothing in my post is about Anne Fine - she was mentioned in passing in a quote I used. That quote may well be out of context (or indeed misreported - nothing in the Guardian would surprise me now), but if it IS accurate, the context is rather beside the point. Alison Waller, if she (a) said and (b) means what is reported in this quote, is being unfair and pretty insulting.

Meg, I hope you noticed that I used the word 'denounce', not 'ban'. Everybody's shelf space is limited and everybody can choose what they put on it. What I have a right (indeed an obligation) to complain about is being accused of 'encouraging knife crime'. It's absurd, it's untrue, and it's based, presumably, on looking at a book cover. No teacher or librarian has a right to accuse me of that, any more than anyone would have a right to accuse you of encouraging incestuous underage sex. Seriously, do these people understand the meaning of fiction? And how are they defining it to children?

Besides, I can direct my anger and energies in many directions at once (I often do). It's like walking and chewing gum - not that hard. I must say I find it an odd argument that because there's censorship in other countries, we should be timidly grateful for whatever state of affairs exists here...

John, you shock me. You haven't started burrowing, have you? Overdoing the silflay?

Not yet, but I have lost the ability to count past four.

Gillian, well said that wummin. Fascinating what goes through your head. As for the wee cape...did you not know that we are issued with them at birth?

Good answer, G - I also felt that the main point of your indignation was being accused of encouraging knife crime just because your novel told a story in which it featured. I still haven't read C the L (on my pile ...) so I'm only ASUMMING (slap on wrist) but I'm assuming you didn't say your readers should go and knife people. If you did, you're a very bad person indeed.

I too can get indignant about many things simultaneously.

Out of interest I wonder how one WOULD glamorise knife crime in a work of fiction?

I suppose 'A Clockwork Orange' comes closest. But the weird thing is, no matter how much we sympathise with Alex, we still instinctively know that what he does is wrong.

I don't think anyone sensitive or empathic enough to get involved in a work of fiction would seriously start to think that knives were a Good Thing just because a sympathetic character uses them. We're capable of that doublethink, of liking the character while deploring them - the 'Magnificent Bastard' type. (Am I allowed to write that?).

Excellent post Gillian and I'm with Nick on this. I get the same weirdness in complaints from parents about the youth theatre I produce. We once wanted to feature a paedophile. Complaints, complaints. But when we turned the character into a murderer that was OK. ??? And then in 'Fur' my editor got very worried because my female lead's dad noticed that she wasn't a little girl any more when she was wearing her swimsuit - she thought he was having incestuous thoughts!!! But in 'Piper' my male lead set fire to someone and small children were enslaved - no problem! It's all bonkers!

Nice robot design Rayford.