Picture It

Sometime in the first year or two of my (apparently endless) PhD program, one of the children's lit professors offered a bit of advice culled from one of her own experiences on the job market. At an interview, she was asked to name three of her favorite current children's books - one picture book, one middle-grade, and one young adult. The advice she was offering was to stay current, or at least keep an eye on current trends.

I do a decent job of staying on top of what's happening in middle-grade and young adult fiction. I have a set of favorite authors who I follow, I discover new titles through the listserv and through a few select blogs (as well as the goodreads pages of some highly respected acquaintances and colleagues). I make a point of visiting the ALA awards pages, and I've been working my way through the Printz and Newbery honor lists, as well as a semi-random selection of other kinds of awards-winners.

But I realized a couple of weeks ago that I have fallen behind on picture books. When I worked at the bookstore, it was easy to keep up; the central display in the children's section was picture books, especially new and/or noteworthy picture books. I find that books, regardless of age or genre, act like breadcrumbs leading me to more books, and the picture book wall was no different: a book would lead me to look for others by that author, or by the illustrator - which in some cases, is even more fruitful, because most illustrators work on a variety of authors' books. I need to find some good picturebook blogs so I know what's happening; my other "idea" is to go wander the picture book section of the library, a section I both love and loathe - it's usually very noisy, and the shorter shelves mean that I end up crawling around the section on my knees to scan the shelves. This crawling - which I don't really mind in itself - attracts Looks from other patrons, though;  I suspect that the fact that I am conspicuously a grownup without a kid, literally on my knees in the children's picture book section, looks at least slightly odd. This makes me feel very sorry for any un-child'd guys who might want to examine the picturebooks - men around children, or children's stuff, is one of the few places where male privilege goes right out the window. [this is a topic for another post, but one I could discuss at length and feel strongly about].

Which leads me in a roundabout manner to the Exciting Discovery, a moment of serendipity, or maybe just coincidence. On my personal twitter account, I follow a variety of people of whom I am a fan; I made the personal account so I could fangirl out without crossing that particular nerdy stream with the bookish/academic nerdy stream. Anyway, Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick have a new christmas CD coming out, and they retweeted a photo of themselves with the CD and the illustrator of the cover.  I was curious, because I'm a fangirl, and clicked through, and discovered.....
Zack Rock!!**

He did the cover art for Coulton & Roderick's christmas album. AND - this is the exciting part - he's a children's book artist. Or intends to be. My opinion: should be, like immediately. Because I was immediately completely enchanted with his work.

Like this one, for instance, a commissioned piece that is cleverly tagged "cultured swine."

Look how warm and wonderful that bookshop is! Like you would walk in and unravel your scarf and pull off mittens in that lovely yellowy light, and it would have that Used Bookstore smell, and you could just daydream your way down the shelves while it got darker and colder outside. Maybe because of the pig, Zack Rock's work reminds me a bit of David Wiesner - that sort of dreamy watercolory look, I guess.

But there's also a not-exactly-surrealist-but-close thing going on with some of his work, which I also love. For instance, this image which combines two of my favorite things - hot-air balloons and windmills:

There's a nice little interview with him on Seven Impossible Things, which will tell you that he has an MA in Children's Book Illustration (a thing which I did not know existed), and that his MA thesis was about the other illustrator whose work Zack Rock's reminds me of: Shaun Tan). It's joyous to come across someone who very intentionally chooses to work in children's book illustration; so many artists seem to come to it by accident (happy accident or otherwise), and some, as with children's authors, still seem to need to distance themselves from being "merely" a children's book artist.

As I've mentioned - or at least implied - I'm not a picturebook specialist. I like them, I love some of them, and it's a genre that I am very happy to claim as one within my field.I have a small but respectable collection of picturebooks (highlights: Chris Van Allsburg, William Joyce, Maurice Sendak; I'm late to the Shaun Tan party but now that I'm there, I am there; I'm working on collecting his books). So while I don't have an arts degree, or even real picturebook expertise, I feel like I have enough knowledge and (I hope) taste to make a claim here and there about a picturebook or picturebook artist. And I will go right ahead and claim that Zack Rock's work is amazing - it's gorgeous and dreamy and evocative and clever and intelligent. It has that wonderful picturebook aesthetic that is as appealing on the page, in the context of a narrative, as it would be in a frame on the wall.

His website - because he is as yet unpublished (why? how? someone needs to change this) - displays an intelligence and wit that I really appreciate. I don't know about most people, but there's a cleverness that is right up my alley in, for instance, this description of Mel Goate and the Purple Velvet Tuxedo: "The tale of a musical young goat who yearns for the world's most sumptuous formalwear." Everything about that sentence delights me. I would read that book in a heartbeat.

Even more appealing to me is Homer Henry Hudson's Curio Museum, "brimming with mysterious artifacts and treasures, but its most curious inhabitant may prove to be its blind canine caretaker."  This painting (above), probably more than any other on his site, really caught and held my attention (and has kept it; I find my mind returning to the image and the idea at odd moments, like when I'm washing the dishes). I love the argyle socks and the plus-fours; I love the curiosities on display in the wall behind him; I love the filmy white eyes of the blind canine himself.  I have an intense curiosity to know what else is in that curio museum; I love a curio museum, fictional or factual, and this one looks especially good. I want this book to be made quite badly, because I want to see the museum.

This is good storytelling, and good art - on the strength of a single sentence and single image, I'm wondering about the rest of the story, and the rest of the pictures.

My incipient fangirling may be just because Zack Rock manages to hit all my aesthetic buttons - animals in clothes, windmills, hot-air balloons, books, Victorian curio museums, the cover of Coulton and Roderick's album - but I don't think so. I've read enough good picture books to feel semi-confident in my critical abilities, and I think Zack Rock's work is just flat-out good. I'm very keen to see what becomes of him and his fabulous art; I am hoping for very great things.

At the very least, he should be rewarded for using and spelling "piques" correctly on his website.


Postscript: Images posted/linked here are, of course, the sole and exclusive property of the artist, Zack Rock. But a few (too few!) prints by him are buyable through etsy. I think the Thoughtful Fox will be coming to my house before too much longer.






**For some reason, I seem unable to use anything but his two names at all times.

UPDATE: November is Picture Book Month!!!! How about that for synchronicity, or serendipity (which always sounds like the name of a sea monster), or coincidence?!  I'm slapping the Picture Book Month "ambassador" icon on the blog, not so much because I have passed the civil service exams and acquired diplomatic immunity, but because the icon is, um, really, really cute.
Now, go read some picture books. There are a ton of good ones out there.

The Letter Q

Publishers Weekly has a great write-up of The Letter Q, the anthology of letters to their younger selves by queer writers, editors, and publishers. I've been excited about this since I first heard of it; after reading the PW piece, I have to get my hands on a copy.
I'm been a fan of Armistead Maupin since forever - tenth grade? eleventh? who knows? - and in fact, when my high school somehow allowed us to choose new books to be purchased for the school library, I picked Tales of the City.
I also adore David Levithan, and quite like Jacqueline Woodson, and - well, I think this project is superneat-o, and I want to read and support it.
A good portion - half, I think - of royalties are going to the Trevor Project, which is awesome as well.

Should be great reading - I hope my library has it on the shelf!

Fairyland 2; ARC-fever and book excitement

Catherynne M. Valente has just posted pictures of the ARCs of the second volume in her Fairyland series, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There.


It's got an absolutely gorgeous cover in what look like melted-grape-popsicle shades of purple.

It has also inspired in me another outbreak of ARC-fever.  I lament that I am not important or influential enough to warrant ARCs. I don't so much want to be important for its own sake, but I wouldn't mind being book-influential; I have good taste in books.
But I'm sad about not being able to read advance copies.

As I've mentioned ad nauseum, I can't afford to buy new books very often, especially not hardcover new releases. I do my book buying from goodwill and library used book sales and yard sales. New books are rare, exquisite treats for me, and since my perilously small income is under threat of becoming nonexistent in the fall semester, new-book-buying needs to come to a halt.
Except!
There are a handful of books coming out that I am dying to read; they're in the category I maintain (mentally, anyway) of Books I Will Buy New.  Diana Wynne Jones lived in this category by herself for quite awhile, but I've had to make expansions.
So what's coming up that I can't live without?
Railsea by China Miéville, due out in May. It's his young adult novel, and it sounds dreamy, and since I love his books and have an intense book-crush on him, I NEED to own this one as soon as possible.

This is not a test by Courtney Summers. I really, really like her books; this one is a zombie novel, and I'm very curious about what she'll do.  This one should be out in mid-June; I can make do with a library copy, but the library doesn't always have new releases in a very timely fashion.


Who Could That Be At This Hour? by Lemony Snicket. It's the first book in his new series (All the wrong questions), coming out in October. I don't think I need to say much about how badly I need to have this one.


And of course, Catherynne Valente's second Fairyland book, out in October as well.

It's not just my excitement/love/curiosity that drives wanting ARCs; it's that I now know, at least online, quite a number of people who do receive ARCs regularly, and post about them. It's frustrating and sad to be left out of those conversations, even if they're just little bits and burbles on twitter. It puts me behind the times, conversationally speaking, sometimes by months. By the time I've read the new book, a number of the people with whom I want to talk about it have moved on to the next ARC. They've had weeks or months to mull the book over, or their memories aren't as sharp or emotions as fresh as when they just finished it.

Reading and talking about books with other people has been my primary life goal since forever. This is partly why teaching makes me so happy (provided students do the reading). Reading and talking about children's and YA books is what I most want to be doing, more than almost anything else, and to feel belated and excluded from the very conversations I most want to be in is not very enjoyable.

I suppose the instantaneous availability of ebooks makes a difference, or would if I had - or could afford - an ebook reader other than my laptop. I've had to read lengthy texts on my computer before, and it's very uncomfortable; I don't like reading on a screen and I don't retain information as well at all. So that's not much of an option, really.

I'm also still smarting from the unavailable-in-the-US-ness of the third Spud book by John van de Ruit, and of more books by Simmone Howell and Gabrielle Williams and probably a million Australian YA authors who I can't/won't discover because it's too bloody expensive to order them from over here in the states.

On occasion, something joyous will occur, as when I received the glorious Sea hearts from my amazing online friend in Australia.
But other than that extraordinary kind of event, I suppose I just have to accept my belatedness.

Doesn't that Fairyland cover look delicious?  I cannot wait to read it.

...coming soon....

Marcelo in the Real World.

There's been rather a lot of chatter about this one on the listserv, and - to my happy surprise, because Cheryl Klein is a person I like, respect and admire (and owe an infinite debt of gratitude to) - the book turned up on a year-end Best of YA list on NPR.

At the bookstore, I insisted they order in a number of copies, and now I have one in my possession. Tonight I will begin reading, and I am very, very excited. I'm hoping I can pace myself and not just spend all of tonight reading it, since I have a number of other things I need/want to accomplish (not least, reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe again for teaching on Tuesday).

I love the anticipation of a new book, especially a new book I've heard great things about, and which I've had to wait for.

i continue to consume the book-crack

Lately, I've been absolutely addicted to reading, more so than usual. I cannot get enough - I'm just devouring book after book after book. I'm hitting almost all new titles, too, and branching into "adult" fiction (books for grownups), two things that do not happen very often, not with this kind of frequency or intensity.

I find myself, lately, drawn to books for grown-ups about children, or about childhood. And books about books, which have been some of my favorites ever since the term "metafiction" entered my life circa 1998. In the grown-up books about books AND children category, two standouts: The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly, and The Boy Detective Fails, by Joe Meno. Connolly's book is a dreamy, WWII-era fantasy of a boy, David, who loses his mother to cancer, and - too soon after this loss - acquires a stepmother and half brother. David's love of stories - especially fairy-tales, fantasies of knights and steeds and deeds and half-seen monsters - leads him into (?) stories, books, a fantasy world itself. Pursued by the uncommonly creepy Crooked Man, David must cross this strange book-landscape to find the weak and dying king, whose Book of Lost Things will provide all the answers David seeks. It's a chilling, dreamy book - the Crooked Man is terrifying, the presence of archetypes - The Woodsman, the knight - are both reassuring and unsettling, and Connolly injects a few thoroughly crushing, fantastical details of his own (like the identity of the lost king) that make this book more than just a meditation on the Power of Story, or a reworking of old fairy stories.


The Boy Detective Fails is a horse of another color altogether.
I was attracted by its cover, with its retro-looking illustration of a Boy Detective. Meno has taken familiar tropes - the mid-century child sleuth story (there is an explicit reference to the Hardy Boys) - and mixed in a bit of 1960s comic-book flair, then twisted it all into a heartbreaking modern story of loss, isolation, love and madness. I loved the plot of this book; I loved the characters; I even loved the absolutely crushing final revelations that explain the unsolved mystery of the boy detective's sister's suicide at age 16. But above these, I loved Meno's prose. He writes beautifully, one notch above simply - he has turns of poetic language, a kind of dreaminess that matches the tone of a trope (the boy detective) displaced onto a 30-year-old man living in a contemporary city. Throughout, Billy Argo (the boy detective himself) is most often simply referred to as "the boy detective," despite his age and situation (age:30; situation: living in a kind of halfway home for those moving out of a mental institution, working a peculiar job as a telephone salesman of wigs and false hairpieces [including mustaches] for men and women). A small, seemingly plain little book, The Boy Detective Fails had far, far more in its story than I ever expected.


Not about children, but about books: Pandora in the Congo, by Albert Sanchez Pinol. This one is complex, funny, sad, perplexing - a multitude of books heaped upon itself, a palimpsest of ghost-written stories. The narrator, Tommy Thomson, has undertaken to ghostwrite the story of one Marcus Garvey, manservant, awaiting trial for murder of the two men, brothers, who employed him on their colonial adventure into the Congo. Garvey's story intertwines with Tommy's until - as Tommy himself notes - they are nearly inseparable. Garvey's tale - in that heart of darkness - is a hideous mix of British colonialist arrogance, cruelty, foolishness, native loyalty and fear, British heroism and - oddly - a thoroughly unlikely but wholly convincing science-fiction narrative of a species from under the earth. Set during the first world war, in the final glory years of the British Empire, the book excavates story upon story, coming up, finally, with both Tommy's book, and the book we are holding, and an earlier book, alluded to briefly early in the narrative, all of them Pandora in the Congo.

Finally, today, I tore through THE BOOK THIEF. I had a few reservations about this one, due primarily to its popularity and its prevalence on the summer reading tables in the bookstore. After reading Zusak's I AM THE MESSENGER, I felt reassured about The Book Thief, even though I am wary of world war two stories involving children.

Zusak's prose is unlike any other. He is masterful, able to keep the narrative moving fluidly while at the same time poking - stabbing, at times - the reader with short, sudden profundity. The Book Thief has the distinction of being narrated by Death, in the first person (and Death's voice, at times, reminded me distinctly of the voice of Bartimaeus, from Jonathan Stroud's trilogy of the same name). The importance of books, of words, is central to the book, but so too is simple love of many kinds, of many complexities. Interspersed with Death's narrative are a couple of short, hand-crafted stories, with illustrations, by one of the book's characters (a hidden Jew) - these gems are almost stand-alone quality, though they take on more resonance with contextualization from the book. Stylistically, Zusak does interesting, clever things; likewise structurally. It's clear he is a man who loves books and words, and moreover, knows how to use them to best advantage. Death interrupts his own narrative flow repeatedly, with short, asterisk-delineated "notes" that usually convey some sort of devastating revelation.
Though this is a book set during - and very concerned with - the second world war (it takes place in Germany, and a hidden Jew and Mein Kampf are two very important aspects of the plot), this is not a book *about* the holocaust. It's a book about love, really, but not smothering or incredibly romantic love. It is love for family, for friends, for kind neighbors, for odd assistance in unlikely places, love of danger and triumph, love of beauty, love of truth, love of words and stories and books - finally, really, love of life.

new books, old books

I'm excited that Forever Rose is out. I'm patiently waiting to purchase my copy for reasons which I decline to go into here (they have to do with a new job, and potential discounts). In honor of Forever Rose, I re-read Caddy Ever After, which I found semi-disappointing after the first three Casson family books. The first-person narration puts me off. But on the re-read, I dealt with it okay. I still found it lacking; I especially don't like Rose's first-person narration, but I'll live with it.

The second volume of Octavian Nothing is due out on 14 October. Again - new job, discounts, and I'm excited. I really, really like The Pox Party, and I'm keen to read the next installment. Judith Plotz gave a phenomenal talk about the book, and Rousseau, at the 2007 ChLA conference, and I get all intellectually wound up when I think about it. That excitement carries into reading the book, of course, and so I'm anticipating the second book quite, quite eagerly.

I happened to be in a bookstore over the weekend, and as always, I checked out the children's/YA sections. And was floored to see a stand-alone cardboard display featuring Ellen Emerson White's novel The President's Daughter.
Reasons I was floored:
1) I read The President's Daughter when I was probably 11 or 12, so early 90s. I got it from the library used book sale. I always liked it a lot as a young reader, and when I re-read it sometime within 2008, I was happy at how well it held up. But I always assumed it was out of print, or something - it's from 1985, semi-topical, and though a really terrific read, not the kind of book that libraries are scrambling to stock NOW.
2) There's a SERIES. There are FOUR titles! FOUR! poking around online, I see that they were brought back in print in 2008 (election tie-in, hurray!). I'm skeptical about the quality, since they sound pretty freaking melodramatic, but White's writing in The President's Daughter is tight and witty and highly, highly enjoyable. I'm scheming now to get my hands on all three subsequent books, and cannot WAIT to read them.

I felt a bit sad, actually, realizing that White's premise - the teenage daughter of the first woman elected President - will be fiction for - well, probably quite some years. And recalling the scenes when Meg, the eponymous heroine, attends a NOW speech given by her mother, and sees how overwhelmed with happiness - joy/tears - that a woman is President - reading that as a younger reader, I never quite got it. But having seen Senator Clinton's campaign - and worse, or more - seen the hideous way the media has responded to the selection of Governor Palin as VP candidate - then, I understood why a group of feminists would cry with happiness at the election of one of their own (Meg's mother is quite clearly a liberal and feminist).

on the Old Books front: I dipped into Stephen King! re-read "The Langoliers" and "Umney's Last Case," which lead me to a very tattery copy of a Raymond Chandler book of short stories, which I've been reading rather delightedly this evening.

I've been struggling, a lot, in the last couple of weeks, with balancing my teaching with my politics. Teaching is activism, in my book, and normally I have no problems making that happen, but I feel like I'm not doing ENOUGH. I want to sit down with my class and read articles from the Times and the Post and wherever else media happens. I want to talk, at length, about what the hell is REALLY going on. I want to make feminism a real, meaningful, necessary force in the world, not just a weird group of man-hating lesbian bra-burning feminazis, which, alas, is what my group this summer believed feminists were. even my smart, liberal students had been tricked by this heinous Limbaughesque rhetoric.
I love children's literature for a lot of reasons, but a big one is because every issue that's important to me politically surfaces (as it does in most texts), and because - more for my students than for myself - these texts are formative for children's personal beliefs. I care about that, surely, but I'm more interested in shattering the beliefs of my students, or at least making them examine their own beliefs. But I'm feeling limited by rollicking adventure stories, by the choices I made for my syllabus.