Books-A-Plenty (I Hope)

12/31/11 Update — In case you hadn't already guessed, we did not win again this year. I still think this is a great contest and will probably participate again next year. Congratulations to winner Jennifer Miller of Where the Best Books Are. I'm green with envy, but happy to have found this great blog about children's books. You should check it out.

There are two kinds of people in the world — those who write blog posts that could win big prizes, and those who comment on blog posts and could also win big prizes.

This holiday season, I'm teaming up again with Chronicle Books for their 2nd Annual Happy Haul-idays Giveaway. I could win, you could win, and a charity of my choice could win.

That's win-win-win.

Win #1
First I get to make a wish list of Chronicle Books up to $500 dollars in value. I've sorted my list (sort of):

Animal and/or Picture Books
Amazing Animals: Parrots $5.99

Creepy Creatures: Scorpions $4.99
Creature — by Andrew Zuckerman $60.00

Creature ABC — by Andrew Zuckerman $19.99
Dog is a Dog — by Stephan Shaskan $14.99

Duck! Rabbit! – by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld $16.99

Happy Hamster — by Mathijs van der Paauw $9.95

The Lonesome Puppy — by Yoshitomo Nara $17.99

Press Here — by Hervè Tullet $14.99

Walk the Dog — A Parade of Pooches from A-Z by Bob Barner $9.99
What Puppies Do Best — by Laura Numeroff $14.99

Word and/or Writing Books
Creative, Inc. — The Ultimate Guide to Running a Successful Freelance Business by Meg Mateo Ilasco and Joy Deangdeelert Cho $16.95
L is for Lollygag — Quirky Words for the Clever Tongue $12.99
No Plot? No Problem! A Low-stress, High-velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days — by Chris Baty $14.95
Show and Tell — Exploring the Fine Art of Children's Book Illustration by Dilys Evans $24.99
You're a Genius All the Time — Belief and Technique for Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac $12.95
You Know You're a Writer When … — by Adair Lara $9.95
The Writer's Toolbox — Creative Games and Exercises for Inspiring the "Write" Side of Your Brain by Jamie Cat Callan $24.95
Writer's Workshop in a Book — The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction — edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez $14.95
A Zeal of Zebras — An Alphabet of Collective Nouns by Woop $17.99

Fiction and One Nonfiction
The Doorbells of Florence: Fictional Stories and Photographs — by Andrew Losowsky $18.95
How I Stole Johnny Depp's Alien Girlfriend — by Gary Ghislain $16.99
Milk & Cookies — 89 Heirloom Recipes from Milk & Cookies Bakery $24.95
Murder al Fresco — A Sunny McCoskey Napa Valley Mystery by Nadia Gordon $12.95
This is My Best —Great Writers Share Their Favorite Works edited by Kathy Kiernan and Retha Powers $16.95

Not Books
Creature Floor Puzzles — by Andrew Zuckerman $24.95
Eric Carle Decorative Prints — by Eric Carle $24.95
See the World With Chronicle Books Tote Bag $2.99
Typewriter Eco-Journal $10.95

Win #2
Like my list? Leave a comment, because if I win, you could win all these books too. (Make it a good one, because I get to pick the winning commenter.)

Win #3
If my blog post is chosen the winner, the Chronicle Books will also donate $500 worth of books to the charity of my choice. I choose The Mighty Twig, which was founded during city budget cuts by the volunteers of the Evanston (Illinois) Public Library Friends. Here's what they do:

"What is The Mighty Twig? Smaller than a branch, (but mighty) the Twig provides children and adults with books, internet, computers, storytime and a community space. A small but wonderful library collection circulates in a new way, on the honor system: No cards, no fines, no fees, no fooling! Where else does The Twig take books? We provide donated books to community centers, coffee shops, and schools throughout Evanston. "

If you don't like my list, write your own blog post with your own list or check out other bloggers' lists (find out how here.) The contest ends 12/2/11. Be sure to leave info in your comment on how I can contact you when and if we win. Good luck.

Do Something Subversive: Read

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there."

— Clare Booth Luce (1903 - 1987)

 editor, playwright, politician, journalist, and diplomat 

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who ban books and those who fight censorship.

It's shocking to me (although perhaps it shouldn't be, given the current conservative political climate) that we are observing Banned Books Week, not as a look back at past folly, but as a raging contemporary debate. Who decides what books we are allowed to read and who should decide are ongoing questions. Spearheaded by the the American Library Association (ALA), "Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment."

Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2011

Between Gutenberg's big improvement to the printing press in 1452 and the arrival of the Internet, the basic process of producing and storing the written word remained relatively unchanged. But that world is changing fast now, almost daily.

There are those who believe the Internet will be the savior of written history, preserving great (and not so great) words in the electronic cloud forever. I'm not so sure. When I think about how vulnerable I feel when the power goes out for even just a few hours, I don't trust that virtual books are the answer. Anyone remember when Kindle deleted e-books from customers' devices? Book banning seems like it could become a pretty simple process in the hands of those who control parts of the Internet.

But whether we e-read or hold actual books in our hot little hands, being able to choose our own reading material is essential to the free and open exchange of ideas in a democracy.

I'm always bemused by the jumble of titles that make the list of banned and challenged books. The American Library Association's Top 100 most banned/challenged list of the last decade includes some fascinating juxtapositions, like Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey (#13) and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (#5). That same list includes at least seven of my own Top 100 books (at least so far):

Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling (#1)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (#14)
To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (#21)
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold (#74)
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving (#76)
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle (#90)
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume (#99)

(I also really liked 11 Points list of 11 Most Ironically Banned Books of All Time.)

What can you do to protest book banning?

• Read.
• Participate in the Virtual Read-out by taking a video of a banned book being read aloud and uploading it to this YouTube channel. 
• Read to your kids.
• Support your local indie bookstore and public library.
• Donate a book.
• Check out this list of BBW events. 
• Take a look at the BBW blog hop co-hosted by I Read Banned Books and I'm a Reader, Not a Writer. Many of the bloggers listed are sponsoring giveaways.
• Follow #bannedbookweek on Twitter to see what others are doing.
• Read my post on SheWrites about banned books and children.

Beyond Borders

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who will remember Borders as the book giant that failed, and those who will remember the flagship store in Ann Arbor as the coolest indie bookstore ever.

Tom and Louis Borders opened their used bookshop on State Street in Ann Arbor in 1971. My parents moved us to Ann Arbor from a big Detroit suburb in 1974. I was not-quite-14 years old, full of teen angst exacerbated by the move, and completely miserable in my new home town.

I was lonely (14 is a sucky time for girls to have to move; don't do it to your child) and bitter. My old school was 6th-8th grade and I had made all my friends there. My new school was 7th-9th grade (due to an overcrowded high school) and I couldn't beg or bribe my way into the cliques. All my friends were going to high school and I was stuck in a fourth year of junior high, a fate worse than death. I may, with a little more therapy, find a way to forgive my parents.

To me, the only decent thing about Ann Arbor back then (I think of them as the Wonderless Years) was free bus transportation for students. I started exploring a bit and discovered three great things on State Street:

The State Theater — a grand old dowager that had seen better days, but let students in for a buck and showed late-night movies. I'll never forget getting the beejeezus scared out of me when I went to see Sissy Spacek in Carrie at midnight with my uncle, who was just a few years older than I.

Wazoo Records — may still be one of the coolest record stores in the world (Stylus Magazine thought so in 2007), though I haven't been there in years. Those were vinyl days, and Wazoo was where I bought my copy of Janis Joplin's Pearl and my very first Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash records. Everything about Wazoo was cool in the hippie counterculture kind of way that I had missed by being born 10 years too late. I started my record collection there, which recently brought $300 into the family coffers, despite being used and abused to the point of being barely audible.

The original Borders — hunched right next to the State Theater and across from Wazoo, and was cool in a whole different kind of way. It felt more Nor Cal than midwest, all laid back and intellectual, just this side of pretentious. Since before I could read, stories had transported me beyond the mundane limits of late century midwest suburbia. Borders was an oasis, a calm, reader-centric environment with benches everywhere and a few comfy chairs that invited to you sit and read. Don't yawn. Back then, that was truly innovative. Other bookstores were crammed with shelves and snarky staff who looked down their noses and dared you to crack one of their new spines without paying for it first. Our Borders hired smart college students and book lovers of all ages who knew a thing or two, and were happy to share their recommendations or help you find the perfect gift. And Borders even had refreshments. You could (and I did) practically live there.

Though I continued to prefer the grownup Borders to Barnes & Noble, and feel plenty guilty about my Amazon binges, the Borders I will mourn hasn't really existed since it moved down the block to what they came to call "Store No. 1" on Liberty. Maybe that's what ultimately led to Borders' downfall— rewriting history and kind of forgetting what the real Store Number 1 was all about.

Do you remember the real Borders? If not, what do you think this failure means, if anything, to book lovers everywhere? Click here to comment.

Mogul Diamond Readers

There are two kinds of people in the world: fast readers and slow readers.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was more specific (and more critical) in his assessment of readership:

"Readers may be divided into four classes:

1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also."

I tend to agree less with Coleridge and more with one of the speakers in my writers' workshop who said that writers do only half the work; readers complete it. Each time a book is read by someone new, or even when it is reread, it is rewritten.

I don't remember not knowing how to read. In fact, once I broke the code, it seemed impossible not to read or try to decode a series of letters organized in the shape of a word. I do remember the enormous pleasure I got from reading as child. I devoured books (not quickly, I'm one of the s-l-o-w readers), but in great gulps. I remember reading straight through the Little House books in third grade, then moving on to other, more treacly series like the Bobbsey Twins and Sue Barton Student Nurse, just because there were so many of them. I read every biography of every famous female I could find. I lived and breathed the lives of the March sisters, furious when I finished the last Louisa May Alcott book in our school library.

By middle school, I had moved on to adult literature (there was little by way of Young Adult [YA] material back then, though I vividly remember A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Mr. and Mrs. BoJo Jones (later, a truly awful movie of the week starring Desi Arnaz, Jr.) and Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (a "true diary" as fraught with controversy as James Frey's Million Little Pieces). Back then, the thing I loved most about books is that I could scan them for every little mention of the topic most on my mind — sex — without having to ask any adults. I remember sneaking into the stacks of the public library and reading the Angelique books by Sergeanne Golon, a tawdry historical series set in 17th Century France.

In high school, I was steeped in Chaucer and Fitzgerald, and began a life-long love affair with John Irving. My family was big in car trips and reading took me all over the world while our station wagon traversed practically every square inch of the state of Michigan and most of US east of the Mississippi.

But by college, I ran out of time for fiction. I had so much school-related reading to do, and read it all so slowly, that I just couldn't squeeze in much extracurricular fiction (except for a brief tour through Harlequin romances my sophomore year, which I still regret, but those bubblegum books took even a pokey reader like me less time time to read than it took for my gum ball to lose its flavor). Rediscovering the joys of fiction after graduation was a gift.

I have one son who reads as fast as an Evelyn Wood speed-reading graduate. He literally reads whole pages in a glance — it's remarkable. My middle son claims to hate reading. Last year, he told me he was a "bad" reader. When I asked what he meant, he said he's a bad reader because he reads one word a time. I assured him that I've always read one word at a time and consider myself a very good reader. He wasn't convinced. When his English teacher told me at the beginning of the year that my son had the highest reading score in his grade, I told the boy to get over his reading phobia and embrace his word-for-word technique.

Like my son, though, I always assumed my slow reading was a liability, until I read Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. In addition to having perhaps the best name ever for a writer, Prose is also a critic and teacher, and advocates what she calls "close reading" — reading at the word level, the sentence level and the paragraph level. Suddenly, I discovered that I had been a brilliant reader all along. (For a nice 2KoP review by Wilson Knut of Reading Like a Writer, click here.)

As life has gotten busier, as I have buried myself in all the reading I must to do for parenting and work, I find that I don't indulge in fiction the way I should. I read all the time, but mostly on line these days. Like golf, fiction just takes too long, or so I tell myself. The other day I began to prepare to teach a four-week creative writing camp by making a poster board about writing. "Writers write" said rule #1. "Writers read" said rule #2. "Hypocrite" was what I wanted to write in my little teacher bio.

To avoid having to condemn myself in my summer camp bio, I started and finished the book I've been wanting to read for months. The leisurely pace and beautiful language of the writing encouraged me to read the way I read best — word-for-word, one word at a time. I read for long stretches every day until I was just about 25 pages short of the end, when I did what I always do with books I love … I set it aside, not wanting the story to end, not wanting to lose my connection with the characters. I hate the end of a good book, which may be the real reason I read as slowly as a do.

I hope you will let me give you the gift of recommending this book for your summer reading list: The Bird Sisters, by Rebecca Rasmussen. Be one of Coleridge's rare and valuable mogul diamond readers. Savor the words. Rasmussen has imbued The Bird Sisters with everything that makes for good storytelling: love and betrayal, longing and despair, devotion and sacrifice. And tornadoes, both real and metaphorical:

"After her father returned, wild-eyed and windblown, Twiss ran to him, but not as quickly as she could have. It was as if he had inadvertently told her something essential about himself, a secret she would have to keep forever: You can't count on me."

— Chapter 4, The Bird Sisters

In my next post, I'll tell you about getting to know author Rebecca Rasmussen. In the meantime, let me know if and when you read The Bird Sisters. Or take a minute now and tell us how you read, fast or slow or somewhere in between. And please share your best recommendation of what should be on our summer reading lists. Just click here.

Happy Haul-idays! 2KoP First-ever Giveaway

There are two kinds of people in the world — those lamenting the decline of publishing as we know it and those who believe that books are just too important to fade away. I love books. I love the Internet, too, but it's not the same as reading a book. I think e-Readers play an increasing and interesting role in the world of writing and reading, but they aren't books.

This holiday season (like every holiday season in my past) — I will be celebrating with books — giving some and, if I'm lucky, receiving some as gifts. Imagine my joy when I learned that Chronicle Books is offering bloggers the opportunity to win $500 worth of books. Even better, if you comment on this post, we could both win. Simple as that. This is my first-ever giveaway post here on Two Kinds of People. I hope it makes you as happy as it has made me. Here's my Chronicle Books wish list, in order of discovery:

Lotta Jansdotter Seedlings Journal $9.95
L is for Lollygag — Quirky Words for the Clever Tongue $12.99
Show and Tell — Exploring the Fine Art of Children's Book Illustration by Dilys Evans $24.99
This is NPR — by Cokie Roberts, Susan Stamberg, Noah Adams, John Ydstie, Renee Montagne, Ari Shapiro, and David Folkenflik $29.95
You're a Genius All the Time: Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, by Jack Kerouac $12.95
Secret Lives of Great Authors: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Famous Novelists, Poets, and Playwrights — by Robert Schnakenberg $16.95
You Know You're a Writer When … — by Adair Lara $9.95
Writer's Workshop in a Book — The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction — edited by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez $14.95
No Plot? No Problem! A Low-stress, High-velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days — by Chris Baty $14.95
Art of McSweeney's — by the Editors of McSweeney $45.00
Creature ABC — by Andrew Zuckerman $19.99
Creature Floor Puzzles — by Andrew Zuckerman $24.95
Duck! Rabbit! – by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld $16.99
Eric Carle Decorative Prints — by Eric Carle $24.95
The Lonesome Puppy — by Yoshitomo Nara $17.99
Creature — by Andrew Zuckerman $60.00
Eric Carle Animal Lacing Cards — by Eric Carle $14.95
Eric Carle Animal Flash Cards — by Eric Carle $14.95
The Doorbells of Florence: Fictional Stories and Photographs — by Andrew Losowsky $18.95
This is My Best: Great Writers Share Their Favorite Works — edited by Kathy Kiernan and Retha Powers $16.95
Walk the Dog: A Parade of Pooches from A-Z — by Bob Barner $9.99
Amazing Animals: Snakes $5.99
Amazing Animals: Parrots $5.99
Animals Nobody Loves — by Seymour Simon $7.99
Simms Taback's City Animals — by Simms Taback $12.99
Happy Hamster — by Mathijs van der Paauw $9.95
Hope Valley Mix & Match Stationery — by Denyse Schmidt $8.95
Animal Greetings Mix & Match Stationery — by $8.95

That's a whole lot of book love (with a few peripherals thrown in for fun). Some I'd like for me, some I'd like for gifts, some I want for other, secret reasons. I know the list is a bit … eclectic … but, hey, I'm hard to pin down when it comes to books. If you would like the chance to win these books, comment here. If you think you might like someone else's list better (to each his or her own), you can check out other bloggers participating in this contest or write your own post with your own list. Be sure to leave a comment here and let me know if you do, but be quick about it: last day for entries is 12/10 and winners will be announced on 12/13. Good luck to us all.

Update 12/13/10: Sad to say we did not win. Congratulations to cakespy.com (sort of. I guess. I'm really happy for them. Really.) Happy Holidays, all. I guess we'll have to go to the book store.

Let's Hear It for Women Writers — CMB Post

This post originally appeared on the now defunct Chicago Moms Blog.

I try not to get my knickers in a knot when I hear younger women say that feminism is irrelevant in their lives. Memories are short, especially young, American memories, and many of these post-feminist young women may not have encountered (or recognized) blatant sexism, but it's still there. I know it is because women still only earn about $.77 for every dollar a man earns.

But I'm a writer, and I can't turn a blind eye to the fact that the recently released Publishers Weekly list of the Best Books of 2009 did not include a single female author. Not one. In fact, all but one of the authors on the list was a white male — not that there's anything wrong with being a white male author. I'm all for them. I'm all for any author achieving any form of success in a publishing industry that is struggling mightily to survive.

So, why is it such a big deal, that a top 10 list doesn't include any female writers? It's a big deal because it shows that women are still not held in the same regard as men who do the same job. PW claims that they "ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz," but what makes these guys "the best"? Any top 10 list is fraught with subjectivity, so not including a single female author on such a list is making a statement — to the world, to writers and readers, and especially to our daughters — that women writers just aren't good enough. In an interesting article about women, literature and feminist theory today published in Eurozine in June (months before the PW list came out), author Toril Moi states: "To make women second rate citizens in the world of literature is to say that the female experience of the world carries less value than the male." To me, that is exactly what the PW list represents — the idea that a woman's voice, a woman's story, a woman's experience is less valuable than a man's. I'm not the only one who was flabbergasted by the omission of women on PW's list. In fact, Women in Letters and Literary Arts (WILLA) started their own list on of great books published by women in 2009. I, personally, would like to recommend four books published this year by terrific women writers: Haven by Beverly Patt, This Lovely Life by Vicki Forman, Invisible Sisters by Jessica Handler; S is for Story: A Writer's Alphabet by Esther Hershenhorn.

Read them. Then read one of your favorite female authors. Share these writers with your mothers and sisters and daughters; share them with your fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. Then, maybe, you can read some of the books on PW's to 10 list.I leave you with this thought from Margaret Mead, a great woman writer:"If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place."This is an original Chicago Mom's Blog Post. When Susan Bearman isn't worried that she has offended the editors of Publishers Weekly and will never make one of their top 10 lists, she can be found writing at Two Kinds of People and The Animal Store Blog.

Assuage Any Trouble

"I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage." — Charles De Secondat (1689-1755)

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love to read and those who don't. I don't remember learning how to read. In fact, I don't remember not knowing how to read. 

I do remember the feeling of power that reading gave me — the power to travel, to explore, to learn, to laugh, to escape. The power to be someone else. The power to imagine. It seems this essential skill has always been imbedded deep in my brain cells, due in no small part to my mother, the librarian, who read to us generously from our earliest days and gifted us with her own love of reading.

I have been a flashlight-under-the-covers reader for as long as I can remember, and I have only recently given myself permission to stop reading a book I don't like. Like my mom, I love reading to my kids. The big kids and I are slowly working our way through the final Harry Potter book. It has taken forever, not because we aren't enjoying it, but because it's hard to find time with teenagers and none of us is willing to let one of the other two get ahead in the story. I'm on my second time through the Rowling series, this time with the little boys, and we are nearly finished with book four. I love that this woman had kids waiting in line to buy her books.

I'm not a fast reader; I read one word at a time, which has limited the number of books I have been able to absorb, but greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the ones I have read. I was delighted this summer to discover that "close reading", the way I do it, is a virtue according to Francine Prose (isn't that a perfect name for a writer?) in her passionate exploration of words, sentences and paragraphs called Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them.  

Have you ever walked into the library or bookstore and been totally overwhelmed by the number of possibilities? If you're looking for some guidance, check out the 2008 edition of Field-Tested Books. This Chicago publication contains 143 short (300-500 word) reviews from more than 90 contributors. The question asked of each reviewer was how their perception of a book was affected by the place in which it was read (or vice versa). The online counterpart has even more (and longer) offerings. Let me know what you discover.

Given the surfeit of reading materials — more than 190,000 US book titles published each year, thousands of magazines and countless Web pages — I'd like to thank you for spending some of your reading time on my blog. 

I'm also excited to announce that I have been invited to be a contributing author on Chicago Moms Blog, a collaborative group of moms writing about their lives in Chicago. I will be submitting to this site twice a month and my first post, Lousy Lice, went up today. I look forward to your feedback. Check the sidebar for an updated list of where you can find my writing elsewhere on the Web.

Read — for pleasure, read to your kids, read to learn something new or just to escape. Read to assuage your troubles. And as always, I look forward to your comments — just click here.

Photo credit: Day 110 - Judy and the Dream of Horses by margolove via flickr.com.

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