The problem with this Fusenews feature is that if I don’t do them regularly then the news out there builds up, builds up, builds up, until there’s so much of it out there that I’m almost embarrassed to do anything with it. Such is the case today! And, as per usual, I’ll say that I’m just going to type these pieces up very fast, when in truth it’s pretty much going to be the same kind of thing I always do. Truth! Let’s do it.
- I highly recommend that each and every last one of you guys move to Illinois. The people here are so freakishly nice it’s amazing! Case in point, SCBWI-IL and The Center of Teaching Through Children’s Books are pairing up to have me talk to a whole bunch o’ folks on the evening of October 7th. Isn’t that kind of them? If you live in the area, please come by. I like to blather and while doing it in my own head is fine, it’s much nicer when there’s a healthy number of other people out there to absorb the blow.
In case you missed it the National Book Awards Longlist for Young People’s Literature was released last week. A very YA-centric list indeed with only two clear cut books for kids. Yet look in other categories and you’ll find that children’s authors do not relegate themselves solely to the children’s category. For example, in the adult nonfiction section you’ll see that our beloved Sy Montgomery has been nominated for The Soul of an Octopus.
- New Blog Alert: Reading While White. You might argue that that is the unspoken title of most children’s literature blogs, but in this case they’re acknowledging the fact freely and commenting on what that means all the while. There are some fascinating pieces on there already, so if you’re anything like me you’re checking it daily. Ooo, I just love folks that aren’t afraid to touch on potentially controversial topics for the sake of making the conversation at large a richer experience.
- In a particularly unfunny move, The Roald Dahl Estate has closed down the beloved Roald Dahl Funny Prize that was the brainchild of Michael Rosen. Why? There are hems and haws to sort through here but I think the key lies in the part where they say that in conjunction with next year’s centenary celebration, “the estate would be focusing on a new children’s book prize to be launched in the US.” So clearly they didn’t want two Roald Dahl prizes out there. One wonders if this mysterious prize in the US will also be for humor. I suspect not, but I’d be awfully interested if any of you have further details on the mater.
- If you were once again faithfully checking your Iowa Review this season (ho ho) you might have seen three interesting things. #1 – It contains a “portfolio” all about children’s books this month. #2 – The cover is by Shaun Tan. #3 – Phil Nel’s piece A Manifesto of Children’s Literature; or Reading Harold as a Teenager is free for viewing online. I should note that the actual issue also has pieces by Jeanne Birdsall (yay!), Mr. Tan, and Kevin Brockmeier, so get thee to an academic library! Stat!
- I don’t do much in the way of Instagram myself, but even without knowing it I can acknowledge that this Buzzfeed piece on what would happen if Hogwarts characters had it was rather inspired. Thanks to Travis Jonker for the link.
You ever hear the one about the bookseller who would get artists to draw their best beloved picture book characters on her arms and then she’d tattoo them there? Yes? Well, I hadn’t heard about her for a couple of years so I decided to check in. And lo and behold, one of my new neighbors here in the Chicago area, Eric Rohmann, was the creator of her latest tat.
- If someone asked you to suggest a children’s book that they hadn’t read but should, what would you choose? It helps if the person asking is British and wasn’t practically required by law, like those of us here in the States, to read certain books in the U.S. kidlit cannon. My suggestion was actually Half Magic by Edward Eager. See some of the others here.
- Wowzer. Children’s authors have power. Don’t believe me? See what Marc Tyler Nobleman pulled off with DC Entertainment. Well done, sir!
- Speaking of superheroes, two years ago Ingrid Sundberg drew a whole host of children’s and YA authors as spandex-wearing, high-flying, incredibles. It’s still fun to look at today here.
- Me Stuff (Part Deux): It’s a little old but I was interviewed by Joanna Marple not too long ago. There’s some good stuff there, like shots of the dream office I aspire towards (hat tip to Junko Yokota, though).
- I feel a bit sad that I never read Lois Lowry’s Anastasia books when I was a kid. I think I would have related to them (or at least to her glasses which originally rivaled mine in terms of width and girth). How I missed these books I’ll never know. Now I’m reading all about the changes being made to the newly re-released series. Some make sense but others (changing Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst to Anastasia Off Her Rocker) don’t make a lick of sense. I get that “analyst” is not a common term these days. I care not. The term “off your rocker” is, after all, no less dated.
There are fans and then there are fans. And best beloved is the author or illustrator who meets a fan who knows, really knows, how to quilt. Ms. Sibby Elizabeth Falk showed this to Jane Yolen recently. It’s Owl Moon like you’ve never seen it before:
A couple of weeks ago,
a post by Clementine Beauvais set the cat among the pigeons here on ABBA by questioning whether reading a bad book is always better than reading no book at all. The debate that followed veered at times into a related but slightly different topic, one always likely to be sensitive with authors. What, if anything, makes a book a “bad book” in the first place? The arguments divided commenters into two broad and messily intersecting camps. The first group wished to apply their preferred canons of taste and quality: was the book formulaic, clichéd, incoherent? The second prioritised utility: even a book that was “bad” by other criteria it might still be good for a particular reader at a particular time. By that rule, there was no such thing as an intrinsically “bad” book.
I don't think we can do without either of these approaches entirely – but rather than reopen the argument about poor quality books I’d like to think about how these ideas apply at the other end of spectrum, when we’re singling books out not for opprobrium but for praise. How do we decide whether a book deserves a literary prize?
Children’s books are in strange position here. Adults, aware that they are not children’s literature’s primary audience, can feel quite uncomfortable about choosing books “over children’s heads.” When adults honour a book with a prize, is it because they deem it the “best” by the measures of literary quality they would apply to books written for people like themselves, or are they trying to ventriloquize the judgements of children – whose criteria for a good book may be quite different?
Different prizes deal with this problem in different ways. At one extreme we have the Costa Children’s Book Award, which is chosen by a panel of three adult judges, with – as far as I know – no child input at all. At the other, the Red House Children’s Book Award sells itself in part on the claim that it is “the only national book award voted for entirely by children.” Somewhere in the middle sits the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, in which the votes of hundreds of children are put into the mix, but the final decision is made by an adult panel. Of course, these prizes (and others) are doing slightly different things, but the variety of methods for choosing the “best” book suggests some confusion, even discomfort.
The sense that there are systematic differences between adults’ and children’s tastes is one factor in play here, but there are others. For example, there is the opposition between the technocratic idea that there exist expert readers who by virtue of their expertise (as writers, teachers, librarians, booksellers, etc.) are more qualified than other people to arbitrate quality, and the democratic idea that the way to choose the “best” of anything is by means of a popular vote. The authority of the Red House prize derives not just from the fact that the judges are children but also from the numbers involved.
All of this informs our original dilemma. Are there certain qualities, such as vivid writing, original plot and characterization, etc., that make a book “good”? Or is the quality of a book always to be judged in relation to the circumstances of its reading, so that a book that’s bad for one reader may be good for another, and the best book is the one that does the most good for the most people? In philosophy that would be called a utilitarian position; others may call it rule by lowest common denominator, although for them the question remains – who nominates the denominators? (And who are you calling common?)
Of course, there are other criteria in the selection of literary prize winners besides the ones I’ve mentioned. One is sales. In the United States, the children’s book world was surprised in recent weeks to discover that the right-wing “shock jock” Rush Limbaugh had been nominated as “Author of the Year” by the respected Children’s Book Council. It turns out that
the CBC’s criteria for nomination are entirely determined by an author’s sales rather than by anyone’s literary judgement, child or adult. If you are a millionaire celebrity author who can afford to buy thousands of copies of your own book you can thus guarantee not only “bestseller” status but also a nomination for a major literary award. Nor is this a new phenomenon. For years, it was an open secret that the “recommendations” of a major UK book chain could be purchased by publishers wishing to promote their books.
This approach goes beyond populism – rather, it is money masquerading as popular taste (in the case of the millionaire) or as elite taste (in the case of the UK chain) and trying to create a market in the process. Wordsworth once remarked that that “every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.” Had Wordsworth read Fredric Jameson he might have added that what is true of great and original writers is even more so of trite and derivative ones. But the methods, arguably, vary.
Daylight Saving (not “Savings” I just learned) has arrived and you know what that means? It means babies have a terrible sense of telling time. Just awful. And that, in turn, means I’d better crank out a lickety-split Fusenews before I hear the telltale sound of little eyelids opening.
First up, The New York Times Best Illustrated Books of 2011 were announced. I like to keep a tally of what I managed to review in time vs. what got missed. The winners were:
- “Along a Long Road,” written and illustrated by Frank Viva (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
- “A Ball for Daisy,” written and illustrated by Chris Raschka (Schwartz & Wade)
- “Brother Sun, Sister Moon: Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures,” written by Katherine Paterson, illustrated by Pamela Dalton (Chronicle Books)
- “Grandpa Green,” written and illustrated by Lane Smith (Roaring Brook Press)
- “Ice,” written and illustrated by Arthur Geisert (Enchanted Lion Books)
- “Me … Jane,” written and illustrated by Patrick McDonnell (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
- “Migrant,” written by Maxine Trottier, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault (Groundwood Books);
- “A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis,” written by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Kadir Nelson (Dial)
- “A New Year’s Reunion,” written by Yu Li-Qiong, illustrated by Zhu Cheng-Liang (Candlewick Press)
Well, three out of ten ain’t . . uh . . . ain’t all that hot, come to think of it. Next year I shall vow to do better! I liked Travis at 100 Scopes Notes and his reaction too.
- Amazon has just put out their list of the Best of 2011 too. I’ve read eight out of ten and reviewed five of those. Much better.
- While I’m thinking of it, there was announcement of the Carnegie Medal and Kate Greenaway Medal nominees over in Jolly Old England. The Carnegie (their version of the Newbery) nominees include a couple Americans, a couple titles we’ve seen stateside, and a lot of surprises. I’ll be rooting for Tall Story by Candy Gourlay, The Cardturner by Louis Sachar, and The Crowfield Curse by Pat Walsh. On the Greenaway (their Caldecott) nominee side I’ll
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Glad to hear that the Anastasia books are being refreshed, but I agree that changing it to “off her rocker” is silly.
Thanks for the kind word, BB. It was, of course, a group effort. With Batman on your side, how can you lose?
I thought the exact same thing about changing “ask your analyst” to “off your rocker”! i bought new copies solely for the intro by the author to the first two in the series. They are HYSTERICAL. Also, I kind of like the new covers. It’s pretty clear to me that they are caricatures, not fetishizing anorexia or something.
“It helps if the person asking is British and wasn’t practically required by law, like those of us here in the States, to read certain books in the U.S. kidlit cannon.”
While admitting that commenting on spelling errors by a World Famous Librarian Person can lead to nothing but grief, I gotta say I love the image of a large cannon into which we can load kidlit books we’re not fond of and shooting them at our enemies.
He he! It always feels a bit like Christmas if I have a brush with Fuse News! Thanks
Though I wish I had that quilt….
HA! I love the image of a large physical cannon. I think the only grief to be suffered here is on my part. I will, however, take my editor to task (my editor being my mother who usually catches these errors at 5 a.m., thereby sparing my readers).
I’m super pleased that Anastasia is getting a reprint but I was surprised…did they make her blonde? And I confess, as much as I loved Anastasia, I ADORED Sam.
Whoops. — Mom
The Owl Moon quilt is amazing in person. I happened to be there at the picture book boot camp where Sibby presented it to Jane. It was such a touching moment.