Well, this year was a first – when the ALA award-winning books were announced on Monday, there were a few that I did not know (including the Newbery winner and the two Caldecott honor books), and that I had not added to our collection. That’s never happened to me before. I’ll be very interested to read these books when they do arrive at the library – I’m anxious to see what I missed on the first go when reading reviews. Perhaps these award winners will blow me away!
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Snow Day!
It’s quite the stormy day out there – and the library is closed because of it. Yay!
That’s the plus side. The down side is that our snowblower really doesn’t work well, and Jim had to go to work early early this morning, before much snow had hit…so I have a heck of a lot of shovelling to do. And the eternal problem with our driveway is that there’s no place to PUT all that snow – house on one side of the driveway, privet hedge on the other. It’s going to be a long day.
Now that I think about it, I’d rather be at work.
Saturday Storytimes
For several years now we have had teen volunteers running weekly storytimes at the library on Saturday mornings. The teens are all excellent storytellers, brimming with joy and enthusiasm, and for most of those several years, there has been good attendance at the storytimes. And then this year, the year of the Unseen Preschooler, hit. My Thursday afternoon preschool storytime, formerly an in-demand event, has been so quiet that you can hear crickets – so quiet that I’ve gotten rid of this Thursday afternoon storytime and replaced it with a couple of preschool storytimes scattered through the month on various experimental days and times. And the Saturday Storytimes? No preschoolers have been showing up, not for a couple of months now, leaving the teen volunteers to read to each other.
So Jennifer had a great idea, which we instituted as of this month: one or two special themed Saturday Storytimes each month. This month, the teens will be doing a Dr. Seuss storytime on January 15, and a Princess storytime on January 29. I’ve printed out some colorful posters and mailed them to all the preschools and placed them all over the children’s room, and parents are noticing. I’ll be picking up some crowns for the teens to wear at the Princess storytime, and M. promises that she’ll wear her rainbow socks to read at the Dr. Seuss storytime – and if Lisa finds her Cat in the Hat hat, then one teen can wear that, too.
With any luck, we’ll have some excited listeners for these terrific teen readers on the 15th and 29th – if you’re reading this post and have a preschooler, please do come to one or both storytimes! And remember…someday your preschooler will be a teen, and that teen will be wanting an audience for their volunteer gig reading at the library…and you’ll be wishing that some preschoolers will show…it’s all cyclical, after all.
Mock stuff
I’ve been trying to figure out why I have zero interest in all those Mock Newbery and Mock Caldecott awards and their accompanying lists of contenders. Back when I was at Simmons studying children’s literature, I was hugely interested in all the Mock hype. In several of our classes we had intense discussions over which books might win, and I remember passionately supporting Holes by Louis Sachar over all other possible winners (and I was right, it won, which made me feel pretty special).
But now that I work in the “real” world as a children’s librarian – I don’t make predictions, nor do I care about or want to read the predictions made by others. I did listen to the live webcast last year, with great enthusiasm, and I even jumped up with joy when one of my favorite books of the year got a Newbery Honor (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin). I’ll be doing storytimes during the webcast this year, but if I weren’t, I would listen to the live feed again.
So why do I have no interest in the Mock lists and awards? I truly can’t figure it out. It’s not for lack of enthusiasm for the awards themselves, nor is it because I haven’t read many of the books, since I’ve usually read all of the ultimate winners and honor books. And it’s not because I don’t have strong opinions, because I do. Maybe I’m just too busy to be bothered? Or maybe the Mock hype stretches on for too long? It’s a mystery, a true mystery.
Despicable Me
I’m going to make this post short and sweet: I love, love, LOVE the movie Despicable Me. After Friday’s movie night showing at the library, I have now seen it two and a half times – and I love it even MORE than I did after the first time. I almost never buy DVDs for myself, but I’ve decided that I need to own this one.
And I’m not alone in loving this movie – the movie night crowd was the most attentive I’ve ever seen them. Ever. And there were some YOUNG kids in the crowd (two and three year olds) who lasted through the entire film without complaint or wiggles. Best of all, there were some real fans of the film in the audience, who called out lines like: “Lightbulb!!” and “He’s so FLUFFY!!!” It was a really, really fun time – the best possible way for me to see a favorite movie one half more time (I was on front-door-of-the-library-duty for the first half of the movie).
And the moral of this post is: if you haven’t seen Despicable Me yet, you need to. If you’ve already seen it, then you need to watch it again.
The Capture
As I write this, Pippa is sleeping on the ottoman by the woodstove, so totally and completely asleep that her mouth is hanging open a bit and her whiskers are twitching. Ah, to be a cat who lives in a house with a woodstove…
Which, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the book The Capture by Kathryn Lasky. As I mentioned in a past post, we discussed The Capture at last Tuesday’s Teen Book Group meeting, and I wasn’t too thrilled about having to read the book (I may have even used the word “procrastinating”). But I did read the whole book before the book group meeting, and I really don’t have any problems with it. It’s not my favorite genre – as Jennifer says, talking animal books get old pretty fast – but for its chosen genre of animal fantasy, it is fairly well done. Lasky is a very competent writer, and I was pleased that there weren’t glaring grammatical errors as I’ve seen in some other recently read children’s books. I appreciate that the pace of her prose is smooth and clean, though I would agree with one of the teens in the group that character development is minimal, which is a serious flaw of the book.
(Pippa just woke up, suddenly, with glazed and confused eyes and a tiny bit of relaxed drool on her bottom lip. Ah, woodstoves.)
As for the book group’s discussion on Tuesday – there wasn’t much to be said. I had fears of this when the group voted nearly unanimously to read this book for the January meeting, but I thought that perhaps my fears were misplaced. They weren’t. The teen book group is made up of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders, and The Capture has an intended (and actual) readership of third and fourth graders. Meaning that the older kids really couldn’t find much to discuss in this book. I had suspected that we’d have a hard time filling the one hour book group meeting, so I had the DVD player set up and played the first twenty minutes of the recently released movie Legends of the Guardians at the start of our meeting, hoping that the compare/contrast between movie and book would help to fill our allotted time. It did, somewhat, but conversation was definitely waning long before the group meeting was over. As we were cleaning up at the end, three of the girls and I talked together about how difficult it was to find anything to discuss in this book. And we did all agree that it was just plain too young for them, in this book group context.
Next month’s book should be much more conducive to discussion, though: we’ll be reading Demons of the Ocean, first in the Vampirates series, by Justin Somper. Vampire pirates? How totally cool. And I have absolute faith in this book choice for the group, since it was suggested by a group member who has consistently made excellent choices for us. She’s got great taste, and we all trust her!!
And Pippa is wide awake now, basking contentedly in the bright morning sun that is now coming through the window – double bliss, sunshine and woodstove.
Books I’m Reading…
These are the books on my to-be-read pile:
Beautiful Jim Key: The Lost History of a Horse and a Man Who Changed the World by Mim Eichler Rivas ~ Wonder Horse by Emily Arnold McCully just came in to the library, and I got totally intrigued by this story of a black man in the late 1800’s who trained his horse – Jim Key – to do all sorts of things like read, do math, make change, etc. Wonder Horse is a great book, but it’s a picture book, and I wanted to know more, so I tracked down this adult nonfiction book which the library happily owns. I’ve read a few pages, and pored over the photographs, and can’t wait to find a little more time to read more.
The Capture by Kathryn Lasky ~ I need to read this one, the first in the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, before Tuesday’s Teen Book Group. Guess I better get on that, huh? (Can you tell I’m not too enthusiastic?)
Origami Art: 15 Exquisite Folded Paper Designs from the Origamido Studio by Michael LaFosse ~ Michael came to the library and did a fabulous program in October of 2008, just before he and Richard Alexander moved the Origamido Studio from Hopkinton, MA to Hawaii. I’ve periodically borrowed his 2003 children’s book on origami from the library (and just bought myself a copy, finally), and thought it would be fun to get one of his sophisticated, adult-oriented books on origami. Who knows if I’ll be able to do any of the projects, but it’s fun to imagine that I can…
And those are my top three books-to-read at the moment. I’d love to hear what you’re reading at the start of this new year…
Happy New Year!!!
Here’s to a fabulous 2011!!
And my blog resolution, as always, is to be more faithful with substantive and frequent posts – starting tomorrow… 🙂