Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope that all of you who came to the controlled chaos that was last week’s Create a Valentine workshop are sharing your beautiful creations with someone special.Â
Meanwhile, I’m still finding bits of glitter glue on the floor…and contemplating mixing up my own glitter glue for next year’s workshop…hmmmmm…
Hugh came to the library a couple of weeks ago, to a packed hall full of Hugh fans (young and not as young), in a fabulous antidote to the mid-winter blues. For those of you who don’t know Hugh Hanley, he’s a former preschool teacher turned musician and performer who tailors his interactive programs to the under-7 crowd. As a former teacher, he pays close attention to the dynamics of the crowd, and alternates as necessary between the quiet songs and fingerplays and the active, stand-up, gross motor songs. He also has a wonderfully subtle way of requesting that parents stop talking with each other, as he instructs the children to tap on the shoulders of adults who are talking during the show.Â
Hugh is masterful, and clearly a large Hugh-fan club is forming in town, so after the show I asked him whether we could just make this a yearly event. I also had to apologize profusely for the too-large audience (the limit was 75, but a LOT of people came who were not on my list – how do you turn away an eager three-year-old?), and I promised that next January we’ll go for Hugh’s large audience deal with the sound system.Â
If you ever get a chance to see Hugh perform, or to bring Hugh to your own library, go for it. He’s terrific. Thanks, Hugh!
As I mentioned yesterday, the teen book group discussion of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass took place last Tuesday. Though only three teens attended, we had a great conversation about the book, and all of us walked away with a far better understanding of this contemporary classic.
It’s a tough book, so deep and intricate that the reader really needs to work hard to understand it. Add to that the current controversy about Pullman’s religious beliefs, and there is a lot to digest when reading The Golden Compass. I had questions about Dust, the alethiometer, and daemons coming into Tuesday’s discussion, and the fact that I had these questions really irked me. I like to know and really understand a book before sitting down at a book group meeting – I like to have a definitive lock on my own opinions before sharing with others.Â
It turned out that the teens at the meeting had similar questions, though, and so we together teased out a deeper understanding of the book. At various points in the discussion, one or all of us had “a-ha!” moments: for me, my biggest “a-ha!” was about the daemons; for B., it was to do with the ending of the trilogy (she’s the only one of us who had read all three books, and had initially said that the trilogy’s finale didn’t make sense to her); for K. and I., the “a-ha!” was to do with Dust and the church/book controversy.
I wish I’d had a tape recorder running to capture our conclusions, and thus to share them here, but I’ll have to rely on my memory to sum up our thoughts: Dust is the residue of original sin, and a human cannot live without some amount of sin in them. The daemons are an outward manifestation of the human soul, and the two have a sort of yin and yang relationship; separate the human from his daemon, and there is no Dust – no sin – but the human will die. As for the controversy, we decided a couple of things: younger readers won’t “get” the layers of meaning within the text, and most likely will read the book for the fantasy and not the theology; and, though Pullman obviously possesses some amount of bitterness towards the Catholic church, he’s also presenting a theoretical church, one in an alternate universe, one that has no Pope, one that has become corrupt. Does he hate God? Based upon the first book alone, we couldn’t determine that. Nor did it seem relevant to our discussion. It’s an intelligent book, not a hateful one, and masterfully written. It raises questions, certainly, but it doesn’t brainwash its readers.Â
Without a doubt, this was the best book group yet, since we all left the meeting with new thoughts and a better understanding of a complex text. In fact, I personally like the book much more after our discussion than I did before, and feel inspired to delve a bit deeper into the controversy that surrounds it, and to read its two sequels.Â
At the teen book group meeting last Tuesday, about mid-way through our conversation on Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, I said to the girls attending, “So, did you guys hear which book won the award for best young adult book of the year?” Then I indulged in a big, mischievous grin, and they collectively gasped and said, “Ack! Not that Antarctica book!!!!” When I nodded, all three girls (the three who posted their thoughts on The White Darkness here a few months ago) burst into unrestrained laughter.
I still love the book, though. 🙂
Though I’m a political animal, I’ve never talked (written?) politics before on this blog. But this post by Julius Lester on his excellent blog, “A Commmonplace Book,” caught my attention and I thought I’d share it. I still didn’t vote on Super Tuesday, and there isn’t a bumper sticker on my car yet, but Lester makes a good point in this intelligent piece.
For those of you who have not yet discovered Lester’s blog, to my mind it’s the most thoughtful, wise, and well-written blog out there.Â
I’m pre-writing this entry on Sunday, prior to the teen book group’s Tuesday discussion of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass. While in graduate school, I had to read The Golden Compass, and totally hated it; the hatred was probably mostly driven by my unadulterated hatred of the professor of my fantasy and science fiction class, but perhaps also partly by the book, too. Because, lazy little reader that I’ve become, I’m struggling with this book once again. It’s such hard work. It makes me think. And thinking makes me cranky.
Clearly, Pullman is brilliant, and has an amazing creative vision for this book and its sequels. It’s not a book to try to skim quickly on Super Bowl Sunday before heading to a friend’s house for the game, though that’s what I’m trying to do. And the depth of the fantasy in the text reminds me that I’m not really a fantasy reader – I struggle with many of the fantasy conventions and with things like daemons and Dust and althiometers. So while I recognize Pullman’s genius, I can’t say that I’m engaged in the text. I’d rather be reading the book for the older teen book group: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Delicate observations on humanity, gentle romance, and an ultimately optimistic view of the world and its people: that’s the kind of book that I like to read, not fantasy.Â
While buying groceries two weeks ago, I picked up two blue hyacinths for $3.99 each – a nice splurge, I thought, one for home, one for my desk at work.
I had forgotten that hyacinths have an overwhelmingly powerful scent, and worried that I’d have complaints from patrons at work, especially after I came into the children’s room one morning and the whole room reeked of hyacinth.
But the hyacinth has been a HUGE hit. Patrons come into the room, lift their noses up a bit and sniff, and then wistful, wonderfully happy smiles burst across their faces as they say, “Oh, that flower smells so GOOD! It’s like spring is here!” And to a one, each patron comes over to the hyacinth, lifts its heavy flower stalk, and breathes in deep. Children get lifted up by their parents to smell the flower. And everyone is happy.
Well, ok, not everyone. Lisa and Mary admit to hating the smell of hyacinth, and stay on the far side of the children’s room desk when they need to talk to me about something. And the first night that our home hyacinth was in flower, Jim greeted me with, “Is this flower new or something? It STINKS!” So, with Mary and Lisa in mind, the next bunch of forced bulbs that are working to flower on my desk are some yellow narcissus – the ones that look like daffodils, and, to the best of my memory, don’t smell like much. And at home, for Jim’s sake, we’ll be sticking to gerber daisies.Â
But meanwhile, it’s been great fun bringing smiles to so many faces in the library.Â
This past Tuesday, the 6th grade book group met to discuss Magyk by Angie Sage. This group, which used to be thriving, is definitely suffering from various middle school “things”: the girls have drifted towards realistic fiction that addresses issues that are important to them, while the boys have wholly shifted to a preference for action, adventure, and fantasy; each of the kids has a much more demanding extracurricular schedule now, so all nine group members never attend at the same time (this last meeting only four could attend); and there is a lot more homework in 6th grade, meaning some of the kids simply can’t finish the book group books, and thus have little to discuss at our meetings.
With that in mind, our discussion was ok, but not great. One of the four attendees hadn’t read more than the first page of the book, since he thought the first page was boring (this really surprised me, because I had predicted to myself that this particular boy would love Magyk), and one other boy hadn’t been able to finish the book, leaving just two kids and me to really discuss it. Luckily, the two kids who had read the book in its entirety are both huge Angie Sage fans, and have read the entire trilogy, so they had a lot to say and intrigued the rest of us with previews of the other two books, Flyte and Physik.Â
But I left the meeting thinking that perhaps I need to create a “Guys Read” book group for the middle school boys. I really, really hate to separate the boys from the girls, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that by the middle of 6th grade the tastes of each group are completely opposite. It is beyond difficult for me to pick books for the 6th grade group and for the 7th – 9th grade teen group that will appeal to both the boys and the girls. I end up alternating genres from one month to the next, losing the interest of the boys one month, and of the girls the next month. And then there’s the issue of attendance: inevitably there are months in which there is only one girl attending or only one boy attending book group, and that one boy or one girl feels very awkward and uncomfortable.Â
What to do? Should I create a “Guys Read” group? Or is better to keep the groups as is, and emphasize that being a member of a book group entails reading books that one wouldn’t normally pick for oneself? I’m leaning towards the latter option, but would love input from others.
At the last 5th grade book group meeting, we discussed E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It. Without a doubt, this was our best book discussion ever, and I give all the credit for that to the kids in the group.Â
About half of our discussion progressed in the usual way, sharing what each of us liked and disliked about the book, trying to figure out anything that puzzled us along the way, and such. But then one of the kids reminded me that I had mentioned that J.K. Rowling specifically talks about E. Nesbit as being one of the authors who has influenced her the most. “Why is that?” asked all of the kids.
So I read aloud a quote I had found from J.K. Rowling, which states that Rowling feels more connection with Nesbit than with any other author. As a group, we tried to figure out why Rowling would say that. One kid suggested that they both write fantasy, and we all agreed that was true, but that there must be more of a connection between the two writers for Rowling to say what she did.Â
Eventually, we teased out that Nesbit’s fantasy takes place in the real world, and is experienced by only a few chosen characters, and that Rowling’s wizards coexist with unknowing muggles in a world that is real aside from the fantasical elements. Everyone was fully involved in this discussion, and it was engaging, quick-paced, and certainly opened my eyes to an aspect of both Nesbit’s and Rowling’s books that I had never consciously thought about before.
Midway through this conversation, M. exclaimed loudly, “This is SO cool!! I wish our book groups at school could be like this!!!!”Â
Which was so cool for me – because I love these book group discussions, and it’s so rewarding to know that the kids do, too.