Senor Parrot's Perch

Over at One-Minute Book Reviews, Janice Harayda wonders ” Did the crucifixion of a rabbit keep her from winning another Newbery Medal? “� She is talking about Kate DiCamillo’s excellent book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. I don’t think so myself, but�Janice Harayda�does point out a lot of Christian symbolism and allegorical references that are in the book.

Now the�illustration and description in the text of the rabbit tied to a cross as a scarecrow was really direct, and I caught that right away. However, she also points to a lot of evidence that this is a story where “Edward Tulane is a symbol of Christ, his story is a Passion narrative, and this novel is an allegory of Christian faith and resurrection.”

I’m reading this aloud at night with my family right now, and I have to admit that almost every argument she makes that this book is allegorical whooshed right by me. I think I may be convinced she is right. I suggest browsing over there to read what she has to say.

�The reason I don’t think that this book won the Newberry is primarily because, as good as it is,� I still don’t think that this book is up to the quality of DiCamillo’s best known books, “Because of Winn Dixie” or “The Tale of Despereaux“. Also, I’m not sure snubbing was deliberate; it was selected by the Midwest Bookseller’s Association for its top honor last fall, though they are probably less negative to Christian references than I suspect are ALA, the group that bestows the Newberry Awards. However, there may be other evidence that the ALA rejected the book on the basis of its overt Christian symbolism.

I have to say, based only on descriptions and reviews of this year’s winner,�The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, I don’t have any strong desire to run out and read it. I’ll give it a try, but nothing I’ve read about it generates any real expectation of anything finding anything great. Of course, I hope I’m wrong.

Over on The Book Blog�at ReadersRead.com, they give a list of the top 10 books that people in Britain are most inclined to say they have read, but never had. Apparently, these folks think they’re liable to lose face if they can’t enter the conversation about the books.

Well, here’s our chance to root them out, or, here’s our chance to help them out.

• When one of these comes up in conversation, ask about that person’s favorite details from the book, or what they thought of the ending.
• Ask about characters that didn’t really exist in the story, or tell about your favorite part involving your made-up character.
• Say that really, you only read the Cliff’s Notes� and that you think that the righting writing (Oops!) was better in Cliff’s notes than in the original text.
• Say that only feeble minded people still read books. You listened to the podcast while you sailed the Mediterranean last summer.

Or to encourage them to actually read, if you suspect that they don’t, you might steer the conversation toward

• how great books are so much more satisfying than TV
• how reading books restores your mind rather than deadening it like those marketing driven, manipulative, dreck-filled patched-together images created simply to drive you into the store so you too can feed at the trough of the gods of commerce.
• how reading stimulates your ability to solve problems at work
• how reading helps you understand other person’s points of view
• how hard it is to put down a good book, especially compared to how hard it is to find a good TV show while you’re flipping through the channels
  �

Elizabeth Kennedy, over on childrensbooks.about.com , has a great website devoted to children’s books. She covers book news and offers a free newsletter, provides shopping guides, reviews some of the best new kid’s books, lists some of the better children’s lit blogs, and provides lots of resources for learning about and selecting some great books for your kids. Its definitely worth the bookmark and regular visits.

This just in from the ALA, via the American Booksellers Association: the announcement of this years winners of the Newberry and Caldecott awards are:

Newbery Medal
The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, illustrated by Matt Phelan (Simon & Schuster/Richard Jackson)

Newbery Honor Books
Penny From Heaven by Jennifer L. Holm (Random House)
Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson (Delacorte)
Rules by Cynthia Lord (Scholastic)

Caldecott Medal
Flotsam by David Wiesner (Clarion)

Caldecott Honor Books
Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet by David McLimans (Walker)
Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom, illustrated by Kadir Nelson, written by Carole Boston Weatherford (Hyperion/Jump at the Sun)

The full and brief announcement is here:

(more…)

Yesterday I mentioned a story about a local bookstore in danger of closing. Today, I see more news about Independent Bookstores that continue to close across the country. Here�is another story about Coliseum Books, a famous independent bookstore in Manhatten, closing down recently. They site competition from big bookstores like Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Amazon have changed the face of bookselling.

What most people don’t also know is that huge book distributors such as Ingrams and Baker & Taylor are also key players in this trend. Online booksellers funnel many of their orders through these distributors to their buyers and the buyers never know it has happened. Baker & Taylor licenses access to their databases of book descriptions and images for thousands of dollars per year. I suppose Ingram charges similar rates, but I haven’t seen what these are.

There seems to be no way to be small and sell books solely online. Members of the American Booksellers Association�that have a Brick and Mortar store can get access to online catalog data for a much, much smaller fee, but it’s still a significant amount for a small bookstore.

Bad news on the local bookselling front. Here in the Madison, WI area, the Capital Times reported on a struggling bookstore . Opening a bookstore is a dream of my own, and the news is discouraging. Its discouraging, not just because the news for independent booksellers in general, is disheartening, but also because of what it says about reading.� Hope that things improve for this store.

When I taught, I could sense whether students were readers, either of books or papers and magazines. They new more and they had a context within which they could place new knowledge and it had meaning and value for them. They put things together: 2 plus 2 was 4 for them, not “whatever.”

We need to encourage reading. Its better than dull, repetitive TV. Its better than dull, repetitive video games. Of course, if you want to get rich, you can depend on the folks who thrive on the dull and repetitive to buy your stuff. Getting rich is great, but it’s not the same as getting ahead.

I see I haven’t written since I left El Paso over Christmas Break. I wasn’t able to do any reading or really any writing or even thinking over the break and now I feel like I’ve got a hard crust covering my head that I need to break through.

It’s not likely that I’ll be writing much, either. I need to rehabilitate my homepage. I can do better than that, but I’m working through a book to learn web authoring using CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. I also am teaching myself dynamic programming with PHP and MySQL. Its very difficult finding the time to do this, right now. I’m so interested in this, though, that I keep working on it even if its only for a few minutes.

In the mean time, I’ve seen one good family movie, Charlotte’s Web, and found a few good blogs that I want to track. I also want to add some themes to the mix that don’t have anything to do with Kids Books per se, but do warrant some attention by parents. These are trends in college and school financial issues, such as student loans and 529 savings programs, and in Education News that affects children and parents.

�