Gene Luen Yang

some resources:

Graphic novels portray bicultural America -- a new booklist for me to read.  Gene Luen Yang and (American Born Chinese; MacArthur fellow; National Ambassador for Young People's Literature) Dan Santat (Caldecott Medalist for Beekle) are quoted in it, and every single book looks like I'd enjoy learning about those characters.

Reading Without Walls challenge: 1) read about someone who doesn't look or live like the reader, 2) read a book about an unfamiliar topic, 3) read a book in an unfamiliar format.

All this is sourced from his reddit AMA in which he also mentioned he'd love to do a Wonder Twins reboot where the twins weren't aliens, just Asian-Americans who pretend to be aliens in order to be accepted.

Tangentially, there is a NY Times video hashtagged ThisIs2016 about systemic racism.  It makes me sad, and not just because I've received compliments on my English.


Not too big a stretch to think that the Wonder Twins would be more easily accepted as aliens than as Asian-Americans.

Butterfly in the sky...

Happy 31st birthday, Reading Rainbow!

Reading Rainbow blogged some "31 years ago today" photos, such as this one of mustachioed LeVar:

I was the perfect demographic to watch Reading Rainbow through all my formative years, and as LeVar recently said, it wasn't intended to teach the reading/phonics skills (if it did, it would have had the words onscreen for all its readalouds!) so much as to nurture a love of reading. And I was and remain a voracious reader. I'm delighted that my nieces have always been bookworms and that my godson now will sit with me when I read to his younger sister. For a long time our library visits were me picking books for them to take home while they played with the many toys, games, and activities at Fredricksen Library. Lately he's been open to choosing a topic to look for more information on, such as dinosaurs, or lizards, etc.

We've certainly backed the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter, and are excited to see Reading Rainbow hit its $5m stretch goal to bring the app to all platforms, not just the web, but also to expand its iOS app to Android and to gaming platforms. After hitting the original $1m goal in 11h, the total continues to steadily tick upwards.

(I told our children's library staff they need to add a butterfly.)

100 top children's books of the last 100 years, New York Public Library list

I am delighted to find that I remember reading 64 of these books on the New York Public Library's list

Which others would you add? 
I think Caddie Woodlawn should make the list, and I'm surprised not to see more Shel Silverstein. 

I wish Sandra Boynton were represented and Suzanne Bloom.

Frog Trouble

Sandra Boynton's newest book-and-album released this week!¹ And with Big Frog's and my penchant for (plush) frog collecting and his love for country music, Frog Trouble was an obvious purchase for us.² It is both adorable and delightful. My favorite tracks are the title song, sung by Mark Lanegan and the Falls Mountain Cowboys and Broken Piano, sung by Ben Folds. Oh, and Alligator Stroll, a line dance for littles!, sung by Josh Turner.

¹ It currently is "#1 best seller in Children's Frog and Toad books", which seems to me an oddly specific and Arnold Lobel-like category.
² We do not yet have the corresponding plush cowboy frog named Zeke, so if anyone finds the Boynton cowboy-hat-wearing critter, please let us know!


source: Sandra Boynton's Youtube channel

Boynton also was interviewed at length by Tracy Smith of CBS Sunday Morning. Evidently the Boynton farm has the only hippopotamus weathervane in New England. Who knew?


(We actually know Tracy personally as she was the one who did the piece on Vicki's Tap Pups last year. (I collated the Tap Pups piece and its related teasers and put them on YouTube here.)

---

(9/13/2013)
PS Sandra Boynton posted that plush cowboy friends, Willie, Zeke, and their brothers, will be available at Cracker Barrel starting 10/10/2013.

TIL E.B. White went by "Andy"

Which put me in mind of Andy from Toy Story.

Letters of Note published a letter he wrote to his editor on why he wrote Charlotte's Web. Well, kind of why. I also am delighted by the idea that he took Charlotte's egg sac home with him and let her kids make webs on his dresser. And I admit that in practice I would have been kind of freaked out. EB White: A book is a sneeze

What is the FIRST book you remember?

FIRST is what makes this a tough question for me. I simply don't remember not reading! That's a good thing. I grew up at the library, Howard County Central Branch, with mom volunteering all the time, cutting out projects for storytime and shelving, shelving, shelving.

But first book? I'm going with Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things that Go. I remember looking for Goldbug on every page and identifying the curiously specific vehicles, in the vein of the Kissmobile we saw at the airport open house. Mom says my first word was "truck". What does that say about me?

Mrs Starks, who lived across the street, says she remembers me on the front lawn reading and wearing a Pampers. I went to kindergarten reading and writing, print and cursive. Part of that also stems from being in a neighborhood with a lot of kids of all ages, so just about everyone had to strive to keep up with the "big kids".

Some other books I remember from really young are:

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle¹
• When I was 5, our babysitter gave our family a copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends. I wanted it for my very own so instead of putting it on the family bookshelves, I hid it under my bed and read it by flashlight. I've never actually grown out of keeping books under the bed.
• All my elementary school teachers read aloud to us. Mrs Sandler introduced me to The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie (Andrews) Edwards.
• Reading Rainbow was the BEST kids' program! Mom recently gave me a bag of books we bought because we heard about them from LeVar Burton^2,3, including but not limited to:
  • Bea and Mr Jones, about a kindergartener swapping positions for a day with her dad. Not swapping bodies a la Freaky Friday, just the 5yo going to work and the corporate adult going to kindergarten.
  • Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport, about not wanting to move, especially from familiar NYC to such a foreign environment as Texas. This was also my first exposure to "you pronounce it like an "H"".
  • A Chair for My Mother
  • A Pocket for Corduroy, which I have always preferred to Corduroy.
  • Gregory, the Terrible Eater
• Mom also dug out my copy of How we are Born, How we Grow, How our Bodies Work, and How we Learn, which is the first encyclopedic science-y book I remember really working through. It was not just a fact or two per page but loads of pictures surrounded by different sized type for how much you wanted to/were able to dig into the material.

¹ More recently, I introduced The Very Hungry Caterpillar to my friend C. She was perhaps 3 then? And she had the memory to remember-read (or perhaps picture-read) the book after my reading it to her just once. A few days later she was feeling kinda blah, so I suggested a slice of watermelon, a cupcake, a sausage, etc, "like the Very Hungry Caterpillar", which she was very excited about. Her mom, by contrast, suggested a green leaf. Less-happy C protested, "I'm not a caterpillar, I'm a girl!" Her mom replied, "So you were only a caterpillar for junk food."
² But you don't have to take MY word for it.
³ I know you're "supposed" to recognize him from Star Trek. But to me he'll always be the guy from Reading Rainbow. Actually, we recently found him on Perception on TNT as a recurring character. He plays the department chair over the lead, Eric McCormack (Will Truman from Will & Grace)'s character. I'm very much enjoying the show.

It makes me sad that kids' books have such a short shelf life! They get loved hard and wear out. I heard once that most kid lit gets a 6mo print run and then on to the next. Some of these fabulous titles I bet you could still find, but others have come and gone. Fortunately new authors and illustrators are cropping up every year! A few recent favorites include:

• Patricia Polacco
• Kevin Henkes
• Mo Willems (My favorite of his is Hooray for Amanda and Her Alligator, although I also like Knuffle Bunny. Less fond of the pigeon, but I know he has his followers)
• Suzanne Bloom (A Splendid Friend Indeed and its three-that-I-know-of sequels)

And longtime authors and illustrators:

• Sandra Boynton (my mom's favorite illustrator ever)
• Rosemary Wells (Max & Ruby)
• Tomie dePaolo (Strega Nona)
• Steven Kellogg (who illustrated for a number of other authors as well)

So... what was your FIRST?

PS I wonder, if I asked my mom and my dad what they remember as my first book, what they would say?

Caldecott 2013

source: Medallic Art

GeekMom's post on 2013 Caldecott Books.  I am dismayed that I have not read a single one of these, but I am, as ever, delighted to have a new list of to-reads.  Particularly intrigued by the one about yarn bombing.

source: Amazon.com

2013 Caldecott winner: This is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen
Caldecott honors: Creepy Carrots, illus by Peter Brown; Extra Yarn, illus by Jon Klassen; Green, by Laura Vaccaro Seeger; One Cool Friend, illus by David Small; Sleep Like a Tiger, illus by Pamela Zagarenski

Other Lisa Yee

Novelist Other Lisa Yee, my not-quite alter ego¹, made it to a Top 10 list!: Top 10 Chinese American Children's Books, age 2-14. Yaaaaaay! Go Millicent Min!

¹ Does that make me Clark Kent? Not at all. It's someone entirely different who writes novels. But she and I have the same name, so I claim them as "my" books.

I highly recommend Other Lisa Yee's books, and I loan my copies out frequently. Her Millicent, Emily, Stanford, and Marley, her Ivy, and her Bobby are fabulous characters. Their families are great too.² It is great to have strong, nonstereotypical Asians in kid lit!

² Maybe is my favorite of Other Lisa Yee's characters so far, but she's not in the least Asian. Although her mom once taught people to be "ethnical".

Other Lisa Yee is also a prolific blogger, and just as friendly in person as she comes across on paper. She also travels with Peepy, who loves getting photographed in exotic locales and with famous people. I should have gotten my photo taken with Peepy when she was in town; it would make Kevin Bacon games so much easier for me. But I did get my photo taken with "me".

This particular list puts Other Lisa Yee in great company. I've read about half these titles and very much enjoyed them. I commend to you specifically In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord³, and Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin⁴.

³ Bette Bao Lord also wrote Spring Moon, an adult novel which spans five generations of Chinese history. One of my favorite books.
⁴ I also call Grace Lin "Other Ah-Ma", because my nieces' and nephew's grandmother shares her name.