Regional favoritism

I first heard of Nanci Kincaid when I was at library school in Tuscaloosa. They held some of her papers there, one of my classmates told me, and she used to teach there, having been married to one of the assistant football coaches. I read her novels and stories immediately and loved her work so much that I reviewed her next two novels for our local paper, but Eat, Drink, and Be From Mississippi languished on my wish list for quite a while. When I finally got a copy, I was guilt-riddled for having left it so long.

The book is about siblings who leave Mississippi for California for college, but cannot abandon the folkways of home. There is heady stuff about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, young men being maimed in Iraq, and gun violence in inner cities. Kincaid now divides her time between California and Hawaii, but it is the Mississippi scenes which sing. The passage where Truely's father watches his son's football practice from the sidelines will feel familiar to almost any Southerner. And there is the most accurate description of the concept of money in many people's lives in this part of the world, a perspective I fear few enjoy today:

"Before meeting Hastings, neither Truely nor Courtney had ever known anything at all about money or the people who had it. Like most Mississippi kids, they had dreamed dreams that had little or no significant financial dimensions to them. They thought of money the same as they did weather -- necessary in some form, unpredictable, volatile enought to wipe you off the map at any given time. Truely and Courttey has little interest in money, peoople with it, or ways to get it."

The later parts, the ones with Arnold, have some uncomfortable elements. Kincaid reminds me of Ellen Douglass in her ability to get at the complex relationships between people, particularly when clouded by race or issues of servility and civility. Truely and Courtney take in Arnold and look after him,but it's more a commentary about their empty California lives than his neediness, and it's nothing near as neat and self-congratulatory as The Help. I am still gaping at the number of otherwise reasonable adults who don't see anything wrong with that book.

I do take issue with the publisher's promotional materials, jacket copy, and the Publishers Weekly review. Arnold is NOT from Mississippi. He is from San Diego, and only knows of Yazoo City second-hand from his grandmother. Kincaid suggests a shared culture, but does not pursue it. This is California she is writing about, after all.

My life as a reader

This meme was too fun not to jump into... Melanie Holtsman from Jacksonville my fellow NYC '08 Google Certified Teacher, is starting a fall blogging challenge, and for the first week offered this prompt:

What is your life as a reader like? Do you read for work, pleasure, instructions or emails? What is your favorite author and/or genre? What is your favorite reading spot? What did you like to read when you were the age of your students? 

Reading has been a constant in my life since before I was school age. I read for work, constantly scanning feeds for resources I can share with my faculty or ideas for student projects. Most days, I read blogs and tweets and articles online and in print. I also read for pleasure, averaging about four or five books a week, more if we're on vacation. As a high school librarian, I read a lot of YA literature, but my favorite genre is that of British domestic fiction, classics like D.E. Stevenson and Barbara Pym and newer comfort reading like Maeve Binchy, Sophie Kinsella, and Joanna Trollope. I adore Agatha Christie. Phillip Roth is another of my favorites, he seldom disappoints. I have also discovered over the past few years that I have a bit of a taste for science fiction. I still have a hard time with "fantasy."

When I was in high school, I read most of what I came into contact with -- classics, lurid Jacqueline Susann and Judith Krantz novels, some YA. I liked the Sunfire historical romance series and Maggie Adams, Dancer and Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington and Marjorie Morningstar by Howard Wouk. I re-read Gone with the Wind and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn regularly. I read American Psycho in high school, and, pretentiously enough, Ezra Pound's Cantos. I loved Katherine Anne Porter and Sylvia Plath and Erica Jong and Rona Jaffe pretty equally. I thought Absalom, Absalom! was the best book I was required to read for school, with To the Lighthouse a close second.

Thanks, Melanie, for giving me license to think about this for a little bit. I'm not sure I'll be in every week, but I'm excited for the Book that Changed your Life...

 

School, in books

I suppose we all choose to return to places where we feel comfortable. I've been reading a lot about school lately.

Not That Type of Girl by Siobhan Vivian. Natalie is an overachiever with her eyes firmly on the post-graduation prize, but she's susceptible to the charms of a bad boy...I especially enjoyed Natalie's conflicted relationship with Spencer, the girl she once babysat who is now running wild. It recreates a sense of high school competition rather faithfully. I think this will be popular.

You by Charles Benoit. Kyle is an sympathetic underdog who meets a Faustian newcomer out to exploit his weaknesses. This book starts strong, with a heady sense of adolescent obsession and a nice sense of sibling fidelity, but its ending was a little pat and did not really push the envelope. There will be inevitable comparisons to Cormier.

The Ivy by Lauren Kunze and Rina Onur. Set at Harvard, this book does a generally good job exploring the strange things that happen your first year away at college. Not terribly plot-heavy, and at moments strangely melancholy instead of frothy. Somehow, the characters seem younger than I felt at that age. First in a series.

Invisible Girl by Mary Hanlon Stone.  Not strictly a "school" book as it begins over the summer, but Stephanie's life with her abusive "bar slut" mother in Massachusetts is a crazy contrast with that of her prosperous family friends in California. They become suspicious of Stephanie after her insecurities cause her to misrepresent her life in Boston. Will appeal to the many teens who want to read stories of abuse and neglect.

Comfort reading

Last month, the wise and witty British novelist India Knight used Twitter to crowd-sourced an amazing collection of comfort reads.

I have long decried the lack of availability of Aga saga, imported or domestic, from American publishers and booksellers and am constantly looking for anything which bumps into the genre, so the list was absolute manna.

Okay, well, I HAD read most of the books. But there were a few I hadn't seen, which sent me scrambling to order:

Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson. I hadn't run up on any Stevenson in YEARS, adn never this one. This one is a fantasy we all hope will play out -- a quiet spinster pens an anonymous tell-all which sends ripples of speculation about its authorship throughout the community. This and the sequel (Miss Buncle, Married) both crossed the $25 limit for foxed and brittle paperbacks, but they were well worth it. If you are an aficionado of E.M. Delafield's Provincial Lady, these will enthrall you.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy. Dundy chronicles the European adventures of Sally Jay Gorse, living the expatriate dream in 1950s Paris, complete with DDT bombs for the bedbugs. I suppose it was the mild licentiousness which made this book the "cult" classic it appears to be. Vaguely reminiscent of Breakfast at Tiffany's, another book where a young woman's sexual activity is explored a decade before free love drew more attention. I particularly enjoyed Sally Jay's attempts to obtain a replacement for her lost passport, having had that experience at a foreign embassy myself.

Hens Dancing by Rafaella Barker. Two pages in, I was convinced I had read this book. Well, I had read one of Barker's books about a divorcee named Venetia with a baby daughter she called The Beauty. Turns out, I had read the second book, Summertime, published two years later as well as, I can now categorically say, the rest of Barker. Not sure how I missed this one. Maybe it was the image of poultry in terpsichorean splendor evoked by that title that put me off. But it's a gorgeous pastoral diary of a woman struggling with three children with a rather attractive builder disrupting the rural idyll. Fans of early Katie Fforde will love it.

The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates. I suppose this book attempts humor, but it's of a particularly coarse kind. When the fumbling tax assessor turns up, he's foisted upon Mariette, the oldest, already-pregnant daughter of a messy, hungry farming family. Give me the Grundys from the Archers any day. And there are four more of them, and a movie with Catherine Zeta-Jones.

But I thank India, and her more than 22,000 followers, for the exceptional effort, and know her My Life on a Plate would definitely make my own list of comfort reads any day.

Questing for books

The whole Mockingjay kerfluffle has made me think a lot about how getting books has changed in the past few decades.


As a young girl, I loved Nancy Drew. Before I knew the word completist, I was one. It was the yellow-spine era, and I spent a couple of years checking every bookstore I came across for any of the 56 hardbacks. Strange how the small bookstores that dotted our town and every other then seemed somehow to have more stock than the massive chains which have replaced them.


When I had all but three of the yellow Nancys, I was allowed to use the form at the back of the book to order the copies to round out my set. My parents wrote a check to the Strathmore Syndicate. It took six to eight weeks for delivery. It was magical when those three books arrived.


Aside from this, which now seems a rather Herculean effort, I always read what was around. At home, it was wildly age-inappropriate things scavenged from my mother and grandmothers. My senior year of high school, I had an after-school job in a used bookstore which did a brisk trade in mass market paperbacks, and I read my way through anything in their stock that looked interesting.


In college, I had ample access to almost anything I wanted to read via the trifecta of an Ivy League college library, an excellent independent bookstore (now, sadly, a Barnes and Noble), and a well-supported public library. I DO remember going to the Strand in 1991, looking for a biography of Gilles de Rai that appeared in the NYT without luck, but most of my bookquesting was fulfilled for a while.


After college, left the vagaries of used book stores and underfunded public libraries, I became a much more eclectic reader, borrowing anything anyone recommended or was new, but always with crumpled pieces of paper in the bottom of my purse listing books I was looking for, questing for, in every bookstore I passed…then everything changed.


In 1997, I was taking a class on Irish literature for my first master’s, and saw a review of The Dower House by Annabell Goff Davis, which manifested the Irish history we had been reading about in fiction, in the New York Times. That was just after I had read about Amazon in the NYT (and that was when we got the NYT by mail, the next day). And then, for the cost of shipping, just about any book in the world could be mine. When I consider all my reading over the last decade – deep forays into Angela Thirkell, Barbara Pym, and Margaret Forester – it overwhelmingly represents things I would never have been able to find locally.


I don’t read many bestsellers, so most of what I’m after is definite long-tail stuff, but I think the Internet has actually tripped me up on Mockingjay. Had I gone to Barnes and Noble, I could have read it Tuesday, but I preordered, Apple’s preorders having spoiled me. I didn’t want the Kindle version, because I wanted to share it with my students before our library copies arrived. So I didn’t get my Mockingjay until Thursday, and was left with that deep dissatisfaction which occurs when you miss the opening weekend of a movie everyone else was buzzing about… and a reminder that there are other, more expedient ways to get those popular books, rather than online.

Recent reading, and social networks

After reading Lauren Barnholt's One Night that Changes Everything with its shrugged-off cyberbullying, I've been thinking a lot about depictions of social networking technology in YA lit. My favorite iterations are those where the author creates their own nuanced social networks. Over the weekend, I read Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney, and was terribly bothered by the cycle of these women's frailty at the hands of men as perpetuated by the cell phone with tracking capabilities that Ariel's boyfriend urges her to take. She eventually discards the device, but it was such a negative and menacing symbol, I'm definitely going to track some of these appearance of social networks and mobile technologies and see how they track with larger trends. Somewhat ironically, my next read was Stephen Davies' fun parkour-and-cryptography lark Hacking Timbuktu, which presents facebook as the terrorism-abetting group-dynamic-riddled communication mechanism that could well be.

Speaking of social networks, there's nothing like the social experience of reading. When I opened up my browser, I was thrilled to see book bloggers discussing three of my favorite recent reads. Angie Manfredi takes on teen Kody Keplinger's debut, The DUFF, at her blog Fat Girl, Reading. At GuysLitWire, bookchic focuses on Martin Wilson's debut What They Always Tell Us. And at Becky's Book Reviews, Becky reviews the lyrical historical Leaving Gee's Bend by another first-time Alabama author, Irene Latham.

The ARC & the agony...

Another post-ALA note. My friend Laura was surprised I didn't mention our whirl around the exhibits Friday night. Cathy Nelson writes about learning about the seats at the back of the Newbery Caldecott banquet... Laura taught me that Friday night is the definitive time to visit the exhibits, in terms of ARC aquisition.

I probably didn't mention it because I feel quite ambivalently about ARCs, the advance reader copies that publishers use to promote upcoming titles and distribute to review outlets. Thanks to the work of  Liz Burns, I know they are more expensive to produce than trade editions. I first started running across them as a book review writer for the newspaper, in another era. But I do think they are an important tool for librarians as well as reviewers. I do think we need to know about the new books to help generate buzz. But I am NOT about getting ARCS of every title, especially when I can tell at a glance I would never read them. It's hard to plan what you get at the exhibits, and while I scored The Duff by Kody Keplinger, I left without Matched, the Ally Condie dystopian, and Forget-Her-Nots, on the language of flowers by the delightful Amy Brencount White. I have found ARCs seem most abundant for sophmore efforts.

But it seems like there are some better options to carrying these weird, unsellable, uncollectable volumes across the country evolving. I think NetGalley is the most brilliant concept ever. Even though I have to read them as .pdfs on my Kindle, it's still well work the dollar or two to convert a book for your own hardware. It was through NetGalley I found Sources of Light by Margaret McMullan, my favorite YA read of the year. But with eGalleys, I won't have a parent chase me down a year later to tell me how terrific her daughter thought it was that I brought her the Pendragon prequel, "a book that wasn't even published yet." And that will be a parent who will always support the libraries.

"Faking Nice," and the Allure of the Mean Friend

If you haven't read Sarah McCarry's Huffington Post piece "Faking Nice in the Biblioblogosphere," you might not want to. It is, as Colleen Mondor and others in the illustrious kidlitosphere has discerned, it looks like evidence of the worst sort of girl-on-girl negativity:

Is it just me, or is there some undercurrent in McCarry's post suggesting women can't support other women without an ulterior motive?

I keep running into references to "mean girl culture." I suppose this is shorthand for the kind of preteen backstabbing that has been around since time immemorium, not incarnated in which Gossip Girl and The Clique, but in my day it was SVH and Canby Hall. And as far as the meanness goes, well, it works. About a year ago, I listened to This American Life episode called Allure of the Mean Friend. In a scientific experiment, mean waitresses get better tips than obliging ones. Like the mean waitress, I'd rather be feared than liked, but not at anyone else's expense.

Liz Burns at Teacozy did an excellent job dissecting every nuance of McCarry's allegations, which seems to have a really superficial understanding of the bookblogging universe.

And though I'm not writing those types of reviews, I do get books that I don't know what to do with. My strategy: I just don't review those. It's easier for me to find something to write about which I really liked rather than to put negativity out into the universe.

I thought Liz Burns had the stellar tweet of the exchange:

 "...not all bloggers want 2 b critics, OK to blog abt books in other ways."

I think writing about reading, like reading itself, is a strange combination of the intensely personal and the sometimes social. McCarry's confusion of interpersonal dynamics and the public aspect of book blogging does ignore those with altogether different motives for sharing. How much of bookblogging is about documenting the experience of reading, preserving it in amber? Remember reading log journals? Well, how much cooler is that when invested with the audience and interactivity of the read/write web? I have just read Jessica Hefland's Scrapbooks: An American History (see associated website), and I keep coming back to bookblogging as a 21st century extension of that unique and personal process of squirrelling away what is important to us.

Regional reading, post-ALLA

I sat in a on a few classes of something called Recommender Systems at Michigan's iSchool, before it became glaringly obvious, with all the talk of algorithms and databases, that predicting whether someone would like something based on the other things that they liked was a bit beyond me. And Recommender Systems cannot take into account the heady effect of being in the same room with the writer. It has almost been enough to convince me to read Lisa Scottoline, but not quite.

Right now, my place is cluttered up with books from writers I heard about at the Alabama Library Association a couple of weeks ago. I heard Susan Gregg Gilmore at the Southern Writer's Lunch. Of course her debut, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen is brilliant and incredibly sweet, Gilmore had Lee Smith as her grade-school teacher. What an advantage! Extra points for Davidson's department store as mecca for rural Southerners.

It was looking at The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, Gilmore's forthcoming title which wil be featured in Southern Living in Amazonia, that I found Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch. In a story too familiar to be comfortable, Tiny moves North and is unhappy. Score one for Recommender Systems.

I heard former school teacher Ginger Rue at the Young Adult Services Roud Table/Children's and School Library Division's breakfast, where I won a signed copy of Brand-New Emily a PR-laden mean girls romp. I thought it was cute, but I'm not sure it strikes the right tone. "I would never sell a diamond bracelet," one of my teens said solemnly, when I book-talked it. Emily's issues may be more typical of middle school.

The Alabama Author Awards introduced me to Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us, better than but similar to one of my favorites from last year, Vast Fields of Ordinary. Anyone who has ever spent time in Tuscaloosa will appreciate the fidelity of the locale.

Still on order: Ace Atkins' Wicked City. Because I have grappled with cultural issues related to Phenix City myself.

Yes, School Libraries Need Books

Yesterday's New York Times piece has some interesting and balanced takes on the relevance of print in schools, including news about an upcoming book-length version of William Powers' 2006 piece "Hamlet's Blackberry". But I think they define school libraries too narrowly. While my colleagues in school libraries across the country argue about which professional titles best positions school librarians as part of the pedagogical fabric of the school, I wholeheartedly believe promoting reading for pleasure is every bit as important as information literacy instruction or curricular support. This is especially school in a rural school like mine, where many students don't come from print-rich homes. Three-quarters of my circulation is fiction, and the fraction of that is curricular in nature is so small as to be imperceptible.

In my library, I frequently suggest eBook versions of public domain works when the print editions are checked out. For every student I have who is thrilled to be able to access Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on her cell phone, I have another tell me they don't like to read things in electronic formats. As more and more course content is being pushed online, I think students will experience even more screen-time fatigue. Not to mention the fact that bits and books have very different ownership models. At the YALSA 3.0 Institute at ALA Midwinter, Cory Doctorow used "sharecropping" to describe our relationships with eBooks, which I think is apt.

I LOVE computing, it has made my life richer in myriad ways. I'm creating tags for my students to scan with their smartphones in my library to launch webpages and instructional videos, so I am no technophobe. But I think we forget that technology is not always there. Almost a month ago, a tornado went through the town where I live. Bad weather hadn't been predicted, and the moment emergency sirens went off, so did the power. I did not realize how dependent I had been on computer technology until I literally had no mechanism to monitor the weather, which damaged houses and uprooted trees throughout my neighborhood. I happen to live very close to a hospital, so our section of the power grid almost never goes out. That afternoon, I instinctively turned on my laptop, forgetting that my wireless router (and all those in the neighborhood to which I might connect) would be down. The phone networks was overloaded, so my iPhone was pretty worthless. I did remember that the iPod nano has a built-in radio, but it took some scrambling to change the tuner to a station covering the event. Though on a daily basis I had moved away from radio in favor of more network-dependent forms of music and information, it took a crisis to reveal how short-sighted that happened to be.

And I do keep thinking about the chorus of upcountry librarians from Vermont and New Hampshire at that same YALSA preconference challenging the ubiquity of cell phone data and Internet access presented there. I went to stay with friends just after Midwinter, who told me they live on the only street in central Vermont with broadband access. You cannot get a cell signal there, either. Until the government is willing to see online connectivity as a fundamental civil right, I really lament the ideological isolation of pundits who think print is irrelevant and everything is digital.

Is realistic YA fiction just too sad?

  

I love to recommend books to teens. But I've been having a tough time moving much of the excellent recent YA fiction. I've been listening to the words teens use to describe realistic fiction and "problem novels" like Jumping Off Swings and Speak. Depressing. Sad. I actually tried to persuade a group of girls that Speak was a landmark work, "important," thus deserving props, if not affection. When you try to persuade readers after-the-fact of a book's worth, something is wrong.

While I have never been a fan of adult misery memoirs, the YA novels are gritty and realistic might just be "too much like life" for my readers. In the words of Women's Studies survey courses everywhere, I come at books from a position of privilege, both age and income related.  I like to peek into the lives of teens when I read, while my teens might want to read for diversion from their own realitites. Something for reviewers and prize juries everywhere to bear in mind, and quite possibly the reason full-fledged fantasy and its analogs in the genres, like the Simon Pulse imprint, are so popular at my school.

YA in the real world

I read children's books. I say this confessionally, because I am so accustomed to being the only fully grown-up person around reading this stuff. So it is slightly surreal to attend the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents , in a ballroom ranked with hundreds of other people who get my literary allusions, arrayed to receive the more than sixty authors who spoke for as little as five minutes. But it was another YA author event in Philadelphia that literally shifted my perspective on what it is these people are doing.

Children's Book World in Haverford hosted a benefit signing for the Philadelphia Free Library last Sunday. Like the best indie book store experiences, CBW requires a cognitive shift to a place where bookstores contained books you actually wanted to buy. And last week you could have a conversation, immediately afterwards, with the author, in an environment devoid of the press and grab of the exhibit floor. And these were the authors: Laurie Halse Anderson, T.A. Barron, Sarah Dessen, Steven Kluger, Justine Larbalestier, David Levithan, Lauren Myracle, Scott Westerfeld, and Jacqueline Woodson. Wow, huh? (Westerfeld & Myracle above) But seeing these rather august individuals compelled to mill about with their readers make me think there is something to the industry quite apart from writing.

Perhaps its because of NaNoWriMo , and the extremely workmanlike advice I have seen distributed over the course of the month, but I began to see the process of working at this sort of writing for young people as distinct from sitting in a garret, waiting on the muse. It is more like content creation, crafting tools which will engage young people and push them forward on a path to full literacy and democratic participation. And we are like wholesalers for this work, connecting it with the end consumers, quite apart from any sense of literary merit. And I began to wonder about readership of YA outside of institutional settings, and how my own fangirl enthusiasm can help serve my students when I am too star-struck to attempt conversation. Meanwhile, the close proximity to these amazing authors will give me something to sigh about while shelving.

Prediction: As chain bookstores stock an increasingly limited range of materials, professional development opportunities connecting school librarians with noteworthy fiction will be more important than ever.

From deep within the 11th Circuit

My Google News alert started popping up yesterday morning. The Supreme Court was not going to hear the ACLU's case surrounding the removal of Vamos a Cuba from Miami-area school libraries. I am no legal scholar, but that refusal leaves the ruling -- that individuals can call for the removal of material they personally deem factually inaccurate from school library collections -- standing in the 11th Circuit Court, which includes Alabama and Georgia as well as Florida.

I don't even want to get into the claims on the part of the self-described former political prisoner who lodged the complaint against a picture book. I went to Cuba in 2004 and have pictures of Cuban children laughing and smiling, much like those pictures on the cover. But that is a story for another day.

Until yesterday,  I had been confident in my laboratory for intellectual freedom, as Justice Brennan described it, feeling that Board of Education of Island Trees versus Pico had once and for all established that school boards should not bow to community pressure to remove "objectionable" materials from the shelves. So the high court allowing this decision to stand chills me to the marrow, for the same reason I have never wanted our library's catalog online for home access. I want to preserve our students' right to intellectual freedom, which means preserving their ability to a receive diversity of opinions. Meanwhile, in region where selection is often muddied with censorship, it will be interesting to see how this will be played out next. Will it be the books on non-Christian religions? From authors affiliated with left-wing political causes? Or will it merely offer a mechanism for blanket protest against those lists of books, the ones we hear are disseminated at some of the churches?

I got a phone call last spring.
"Do you have 'My Daddy Has a Roommate'?" said the caller, who did not bother to identify himself.
"No," I said, not bothering to correct him on the title or share that, as a high school library, our number of picture books is small and almost all curricular.
"Do you have the Bible?"
"Yes," I said.
"Good." he said, and hung up.

I don't know who preached about homosexual lifestyles seeping into the school via the library collection. But next time, it might be question about a book I hold, and if it comes at the behest of a community member, not a parent whose student has selected that book from our collection, I might have to begin to think about another sort of laboratory altogether.