Past the Point of No Return

The second quarter has not been quite as good as the first quarter (the end of the semester just swamped me). Still, I'm happy with 43 books and it definitely puts me on track to well exceed my goal of 120 books for 2009.

1. The Girl Who Could Fly - Victoria Forester
Cute, but it wasn't until the last 50 pages that I really loved it. Kind of a slow start.


2. Along for the Ride - Sarah Dessen
One of her best. But then, I love Sarah Dessen; you know that.


3. Waiting for You - Susane Colasanti
Fine, but not great. She gets touted as the next Sarah Dessen sometimes and I just don't buy it.


4. Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Almost True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka - Jon Scieszka
So amusing. Makes me want six boys, almost.


5. Princess of the Midnight Ball - Jessica Day George
A nice retelling, although not quite at the "Beauty" level for me. Also, JSD was one of my father-in-law's students which I think rocks.


6. The City of Ember - Jeanne Duprau
Oh my heavens, this book was so long.


7. The September Sisters - Jillian Cantor
Too dadgum depressing for me.


8. City of Bones - Cassandra Clare
Romance and snark. My two favorite things in a book.


9. City of Ashes - Cassandra Clare
Poor Simon. And yet, I was absolutely solidly Team Jace.


10. Sophomore Switch - Abby Mcdonald
I . . . did not like this book at all. The characters kept saying "totes" instead of "totally."


11. If I Stay - Gayle Foreman
Oh my heavens, I loved this book.


12. The Forest of Hands and Teeth - Carrie Ryan
Your own life has never looked so good.


13. The Doll People - Ann M. Martin
Somehow I missed the fan wagon on this one. Fine, but not wonderful.


14. City of Glass - Cassandra Clare
A nice conclusion to a good trilogy. Also, I'm finding that the people who hate Edward/Jacob also hate Jace. Interesting.


15. Breathing - Cheryl Renee Herbsman
I had such high hopes for this book, but sadly, the main girl was just too whiny for me.


16. Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side - Beth Fantaskey
I had low hopes for this book, but it turned out to be quite good, even with the fairly stupid title.


17. Hattie Big Sky - Kirby Larson
I loved Hattie and every page of this book. Read it.


18. Teen Idol - Meg Cabot
This book was incredibly unmemorable. Somehow Meg Cabot, queen of YA, doesn't quite do it for me.


19. Me, the Missing and the Dead - Jenny Valentine
I don't know what to say about this book - it was an odd one.


20. Escape! The Story of the Great Houdini - Sid Fleischman
I still think about this book. And wonder how he did some of those tricks.


21. Wings - Aprilynne Pike
I dreamed I got asked to write the sequel. I was terrified.


22. Keturah and Lord Death - Martine Leavitt
This book stretched on forever. Also, I was really surprised by the ending, not in a good way.


23. Going Too Far - Jennifer Echols
Surprisingly good, but a lot of swearing.


24. The Dead and the Gone - Susan Beth Pfeffer
Chilling - I now live in fear of meteorites and dying in an elevator.


25. The Wednesday Wars - Gary D. Schmidt
Just go read this book. What in the world are you waiting for?


26. Unwind - Neal Shusterman
A very quick engaging read, although the end kind of fizzed out for me.


27. Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy - Gary D. Schmidt
Sad but also happy. I love Gary Schmidt.


28. Love You Hate You Miss You - Elizabeth Scott
Not my favorite Elizabeth Scott book. Bloom and Perfect You were better.


29. A Kiss in Time - Alex Flinn
Not one of my favorite retellings - both characters were sadly unlikable.


30. Switch - Carol Snow
Cool concept, but it didn't quite fulfil its potential.


31. Catherine, Called Birdy - Karen Cushman
I know everyone adores this book, but it kind of dragged for me and I find Catherine quite unlikable.


32. Boys Adrift: Five Factors Driving the Growing epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men - Leonard Sax
Fascinating.


33. Suite Scarlett - Maureen Johnson
I didn't know what to expect from this book and it was even more not what I expected.


34. If I Stay - Gayle Forman
It is very fun to try and conceal your bawling in an airport terminal.


35. The Summoning - Kelley Armstrong
I thought this book would be scarier and less interesting. I was happily surprised.


36. A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table - Molly Wizenberg
Where is my cider cream sauce?


37. A Long Way From Chicago - Richard Peck
What a sweet book; the ending solidified this as a just darn good book.


38. A Year Down Yonder - Richard Peck
Even better than A Long Way From Chicago.


39. The Luxe - Anna Godbersen
This book was just fun.


40. Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow - Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Interesting in some parts, but a little slow in others


41. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
I loved this book. No wonder it's such a best seller.


42. A Season of Gifts - Richard Peck
I am totally on the Richard Peck bandwagon now.


43. Al Capone Shines My Shoes - Gennifer Choldenko
I liked this one better than the first book.

Tell Me What To Read

You lovely readers were all very enthusiastic about the "Tell Me What To Read" idea (for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You all are great).

So here we go, Round 1! Tell me what book I should read in July. It can be any genre, any age level, and have been published last week or three hundred years ago. You can pick it because it's a book that everyone should read or because it changed your life or because it is great literature or just because it entertained you.

Here's how it goes:

1. Comment with the title of one book you think I should read (any book you want). One title only, please, lest my brain explode.
2. On the last day of the month (that's tomorrow), I'll select one comment at random.
3. On the off-chance that I've already read the book you select, I'll contact you and ask for a follow-up suggestion (make sure there is a way to contact you either by blog or email).
4. I'll get a copy of the book and read it by the end of July.
5. I'll write a review of it here. Even if I hate the book, I will not hate you.

And. . .go!

A Long Way From Chicago and A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck

8/9 of 10: I'd give an 8 to A Long Way From Chicago and a 9 to A Year Down Yonder, but they are both just delightful. These are the kind of books I can't wait to read aloud to my children.

The summer that Bart and I were engaged, I started reading again in earnest, with a particular focus on the Newbery winners. The BYU library helpfully had all their copies of Newbery books on a big display wall, so I plowed through a number of books I had, embarrassingly, never read, including Bridge to Terabithia and The Giver.

A Year Down Yonder was also one of them. I remember loving it, and I remember being vaguely aware that this book was a sequel, but I'd never gotten around to reading the first one, until a copy of the two, bound together in a teacher's edition, showed up on my doorstep, courtesy of Penguin. I started reading the first one on the airplane to Las Vegas and finished up the second book on the way back home a few days later.

A Long Way From Chicago, won a Newbery Honor, and is about a brother and sister, Joey and Mary Alice, who leave Chicago for a week every summer during the Great Depression to visit their paternal grandmother, the unbelievably feisty Grandma Dowdel who lives in a teeny tiny town in the Illinois countryside. There is a short section for each of the summers and the hilarious things that Grandma Dowdel gets up to. She loves to tell crazy lies to the neighbors or even her grandchildren, but she also is incredibly loving, in her own brusque way. She is crazy resourceful and completely capable - she fishes, gets Joey a ride in a plane, finds her granddaughter a dance partner, and pretends to shoot a corpse. You can't help but adore her.

The second book, A Year Down Yonder, nabbed the top prize with the Newbery Medal, and is even better than the first one. It takes place in 1937 and the Depression is officially over, but times are still hard and getting harder. So hard, in fact, that Joey is off serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps and their parents send Mary Alice down to Grandma Dowdel's alone for the year because they can't afford to keep her. She enrolls in school (instead of the huge Chicago school she's used to, there are only about fifteen students total in a single building). At first she's worried about being there alone, leaving behind all her friends, but she comes to love living with Grandma Dowdel, accompaning her on late night fox hunts, helping her steal pecans from a neighbor's tree, and watching her catch the boys who attempt to burn down the privvy on Halloween night (you can't get anything past Grandma Dowdel).

My mom asked me about these books and, without checking, I said, "I think A Year Down Yonder won the Newbery twenty or thirty years ago." Imagine my surprise when I discovered it won only eight years ago. And that's what I love about these books; they feel like they could have been written any time within the last sixty years.

I hate to use the term "heart-warming" but these books are just that. And they are laugh-out-loud funny too. I'm considering reading them to some of the older classes at my elementary school this fall - they are just the most absolutely delightful books you can imagine. I love that Grandma Dowdel.

And now I'm diving into A Season of Gifts, Richard Peck's newest book out this fall about Grandma Dowdel. Oh, I can't wait to see her again.

You've Got Mail

I love getting the mail - it's like anticipating a little surprise every single day.

Many days, of course, it's nothing but HEB flyers and coupons for Pizza Hut, but on occasion something lovely shows up and it keeps me anxious to keep checking the mail (wasn't there a study about pigeons and random reward allotment?).

On Sunday, I went to get my Saturday mail and there were TWO delightful things there:

RA, of Definitely RA, had sent a card addressed to "Janssen, MS (Great Librarian Overlord)." How can you not love a card that says that? I now need to get bookplates or something that has that title on it. The card included a recipe for Sour Cream Cookies. She said she sent the recipe instead of actual cookies in deference to our two desserts a week limit, which I thought was very thoughtful. Oh, I just love the Internet.

And then, a small package from Bart's dad. When he'd been here for graduation, he'd noticed the five green-spined books up on my mantle, all by Louisa May Alcott.

My mom told him about stopping at a used bookstore on her way to the grocery store one day when I was young and finding two of them and then searching the rest of the store until she found the entire set (six books) and buying them all with about half of the week's grocery money.

Sadly, I had lost one of the books at, I believe violin camp, years ago, and the set had been incomplete ever since.

Unbenownst to me, Bart's dad did some research to figure out which title I was missing (we'd thought it was Rose in Bloom), emailed Bart to double-check, and then found an identical copy. If that isn't the nicest gift you've ever heard of, well, I probably won't believe you.

And as if completing the long-incomplete set wasn't enough, he sent me a guidebook to all the Laura Ingalls Wilder sites as they just went to visit a few of the sites in the midwest. My family are huge Wilder fans (in fact, my original hardback library editions of the entire series(purchased from our Wisconsin library for 25 cents each when I was six) sits on the otherside of the mantle from my Louisa May Alcott books), and I plan on seeing all of the sites sometime during my lifetime.

I'd planned on waiting to reread the books until my children are old enough to listen, but I'm afraid I won't be able to wait. I just love those books so very very much.

It's really the days like this that will have me checking the mail with great excitement for weeks to come.

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg

8 of 10: A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table is a book that made me want to eat cool salads made from chopped pistachios and bittersweet chocolate. Also, I now want to move to Seattle and buy my fish straight from the sea.

After book blogs, my biggest chunk of Google Reader is probably dedicated to cooking blogs - I love to cook and bake, but I generally require a picture of the food to do so, which makes food blogs perfect for me. I could browse Smitten Kitchen all day long.

Last year, I read several food/restaurant memoirs and loved them all, but this is the first one I've read since then. This one was different because it didn't have quite the same hook as the other ones (the previous ones focused on working in a super fancy restaurant, going to Le Cordon Bleu culinary school, or living life without gluten).

Molly Wizenberg's story isn't so much like that - it's more about her whole life, life as a child, then in college, living in Paris, then as a graduate student, and her ongoing relationship with food. There are some ongoing threads, like her father who loves to cook and whose death is the spur she needs to realize her heart lies in cooking and food, rather than as a Ph.D. candidate, but there are also many sweet standalone anecdotes. Also, I never felt like the stories were trying too hard to relate to food, which I appreciated.

The stories are so sweet and most of the recipes are, shockingly, things I would actually eat. Salmon in cider cream sauce? Yes, please. A few, of course, made me grimace a little or think, "wow, I could never ever eat so many salads," but overall, it was a lovely blend of stories and real food.

I loved this book - it was just so delightful and I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys memoirs or cooking or both.

And if you end up making a pistachio and chocolate salad, please invite me over.

Brown Squirrel

Early this morning, I left for a week of camping with a bunch of teenage girls. Along with five other leaders, I'm responsible for 25 thirteen-year-old girls and another 6 sixteen and seventeen year old girls who act as junior leaders for the younger girls. We'll hike, stargaze, learn outdoorsy skills, swim, and probably come home filthy.

Also, this is Texas, so it will likely be extremely hot. And we're going south toward Houston, so the humidity will, I expect, be out of this world.

I went to Girls Camp five times as a teenager and loved it every time, but it's been seven years since I last went and I'm thrilled to be going again, even if I am a bit nervous that I'll forget something vital or that the girls will find out that, despite my efforts to hide it, I'm a giant nerd.

I like to camp in general - I am young enough that sleeping on the ground doesn't bother me at all, I love s'mores, and I'm still in awe of how beautiful the stars look when they aren't drowned out by the city lights.

I just hope no one tries to talk me into doing dreadlocks because, friends, I have done it at girls camp before and considering that I have approximately zero hair and am blond, it makes me look frighteningly bald. There shall not be pictures.

Life Goals

A few months ago, my mom sent me an email about HUGE goals. She was listening to a seminar that suggested coming up with your life goals - what you really want to do with your life, even if it seems almost impossible - and setting three-year goals based on that. Otherwise, you set year-long goals which aren't as meaningful because they are too short and don't have a long enough view.

My mom said as she worked through what her HUGE life goals were, she came up with a few guideposts to help her decide what she really wanted to do with her life:

1. What you want to become
2. What you want to do
3. What you want to achieve
4. Places you want to visit/live
5. Things you want to have
6. People you want to meet

I've thought about this a lot in the last few months, since then, wondering what I really want from my life. Here are a few things that I've come up with:

I have no aspirations to write a novel, but I'd really like to write professional book reviews or articles for publications like The Horn Book Magazine or School Library Journal.

I want to serve on a Printz or Newbery or Caldecott award committee.

I want to live abroad for at least a year.

It's been really interesting to think about what I want to do with my life in the long-term. I'm excited to keep working on my list and working toward achieving those things.

What about you? If the sky was the limit, what would your HUGE life-long goals be?

The Luxe by Anna Godbersen

8 of 10: The Luxe was just a fun fun read; I don't see much YA historical fiction set at the turn of the century, but I was completely sucked in to it. Romance, intrigue, class-warfare - what's not to like?

I picked up The Luxe in MARCH from the library. I read 20 pages and then got busy with school and kept renewing it until eventually I had to return it. A few weeks later I checked it out again and renewed it without opening it.

Finally, yesterday on the flight home from Las Vegas, I picked it back up and finished the whole thing by dinner time. I don't know what took me so long!

The book begins with the funeral of Elizabeth Holland, one of New York City's high society girls, on the day she was supposed to have married one of the city's most eligible bachelors. It introduces the main characters present at the funeral and then backs up about two weeks to show the events leading up to Elizabeth's death and the roles of the various friends and family of Elizabeth.

I told Bart the whole story and he thought it sounded fascinating, so half of me is tempted to tell you about all the surprising little twists and turns, the various romances, the backstabbing, and the pressures of society to do the "right" thing. But on the other hand, I loved reading it with absolutely no idea how things were going to turn out or any expectations, and I don't want to to ruin it for anyone who might read it.

Each chapter is told from the point of view of one of the five main characters (1. Elizabeth, 2. Diana, Elizabeth's younger sister, 3. Penelope, Elizabeth's best friend, 4. Lina, Elizabeth's maid, and 5. Harry, Elizabeth's betrothed). Sometimes this multiple POV can drive me crazy, but it was perfect in this book. The character development is very strong and I, especially for some of the characters, was both repelled and delighted by them simultaneously.

The historical background is also great - there is a lot of detail about the city, the lifestyle, and the social expectations without it feeling forced.

It's no Jane Austen, but it's a delightful book, perfect for a plane ride or an afternoon on the couch. I loved every last page.

Frankly, the cover alone should be enough to sell you on the book; I adore that dress.

Now, of course, I'm frantically combing the library for a checked in copy of Rumors (and the one after that, Envy). Story of my life.

Falling Into Place

Sometimes there's all this mystery on blogs about special, in-the-works projects: "I have something really awesome going on, but I can't tell you about it. Sorry!" That's not irritating at all, is it? I didn't think so.

Fortunately, I won't keep you in suspense. I got a job.

Sorry, that wasn't quite right. I got a job!!!

I won't go into great detail, obviously, but it's in a suburb of Boston, overseeing the libraries at two elementary schools in a lovely little district. The schools are gorgeous, and I've been very impressed with the principal, the current librarian, and the teachers I've been introduced to.

I am absolutely thrilled, and I can hardly wait until August to start.

I am so deeply relieved about how this has fallen into place. It means we know what general area of Boston to live in (if I hadn't had a job, we could have moved to a suburb on one side of Boston and I could have gotten a job 15 miles outside of Boston in the other direction, and then I'd be dealing with a really long commute). It means I can spend my summer working on lesson plans and programming for the year, instead of applying for jobs, interviewing, and writing cover letter after cover letter.

But mostly, I can't stop thinking that, come Fall, Bart and I will be living in our dream city, both with our dream jobs. Life is sometimes just too good to take in.

Boys Adrift by Lenord Sax

9 of 10: Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men is, undoubtedly, a change from my regular fare, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

This book is about the changes in society that have made it increasingly common for men in their late twenties and earlier thirties to still be living at home with their parents, working a part-time job, spending their time online or playing video games, and basically going nowhere with their lives.

The five factors he discusses are:

1. School becoming too serious too quickly (i.e. kindergarten now is what first or second grade used to be) and boys in particular are just not developmentally ready for it, turning them off to school from the very beginning, which many of them never recover from.
2. Boys are increasingly likely to be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD even when they don't have it (studies apparently show that ADHD/ADD medication has a positive effect on students that don't have ADHD or ADD, so the idea that your child improves when they go on the medication doesn't necessarily mean they have ADHD or ADD) and the medication they go on has long-term affects.
3. Video Games (oh, aren't you SO surprised to hear that?). He talks in-depth about how video games give boys a sense of control and gives them instant gratification (and reduces their desire to do things that have delayed gratification).
4. Chemicals that imitate sex hormones and make boys less male. I kind of rolled my eyes at this one when I read the introduction to it, but by the end, he'd presented a lot of convincing evidence. Time to throw out the plastic water bottles, people (I sound insane, but so be it).
   
5. Lack of positive male role models. He talked about how, 50 years ago, the father figure was portrayed as smart and capable (think "Father Knows Best") while most fathers now are portrayed as total doofuses (think "The Simpsons"). In fact, Kim just wrote a post about this the other day and I completely agree with both her and Dr. Sax.

Boys Adrift is amazingly readable - I was never bored and I kept stopping to reread parts out loud to Bart. I'm certain this is a book I'll return to if I have sons.

Even Less Interesting Than My Groceries

Many thanks to you lovely people who added your email addresses to your profile yesterday. You are all winners!

However, I suspect there might have been a few of you that read that post and thought, "That's all well and good, Janssen, except that my email address is 'FirstNameLastNameSocialSecurity#@gmail.com' and I don't actually want to broadcast that to the whole world, especially not every single time I comment on a stranger's blog."

And you know what? I completely understand that! I mean, I don't even have small vulnerable children to protect and I think about privacy and online safety all the time (this may be, in part, thanks to the Masters in Information Studies. Also my natural paranoia).

My regular Gmail account is a standard FirstNameLastName for all the regular professional reasons, and I don't want that email address scattered about haphazardly. But I also don't want to be logging in and out of many many different email accounts, trying to keep track of what I'm emailing from, etc. The thought of managing separate email addresses for work, school, personal life, and my blog makes me want to weep.

Fortunately, as usual, Gmail is here to save the day, your privacy, and your sanity.

And I am here to tell you how it can do that. Lucky you.

Here's the plan - set up an additional email account that doesn't give away personal data, get it to forward to your regular email address, and then adjust the settings so it responds with your safe email address too.

Go to Gmail.com (I will not entertain ideas of using a different email client for all others have been tested and found wanting) and click "Create an Account."


It will ask you to fill in the following information. I filled in my first name which I don't mind using and then I put in ONE LETTER for my last name. Do not put in your last name. Then choose a login name that you also are fine with anyone in the world seeing (this would be a good time to also not use your last name). Fill in the rest of the page and click the button at the bottom about accepting the terms of use.


It should take you automatically to your new gmail account, but if it doesn't, you can just go to Gmail.com and log in with your new login name and password. When you're in, click "Settings" in the top right corner. Then choose the "Forwarding and POP" tab. Click the second circle that says "Forward a copy . . . ." and then fill in your regular most used email address in the box that says "email address." It doesn't matter what you choose for that last drop down box. I choose "archive" because I hate a cluttery in-box even in an email account I never look at, because I am one of those crazy people. Click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the page.


Okay! Time to log into your regular favorite standard email account. I am, again, assuming it is Gmail. Go to "Settings" again (right top corner) and then choose the "Accounts" tab. You'll see your email address (you may only have one. I currently use. . .many) and then under it you click "Add another email address you own."


This window will pop up. Put in the name you want to use (No Last Name! No Street Address!) and then the email address you just set up. Click "Next Step."


This will come up. Click "Send Verification."


Log out of this email account and into the new one (last time. I promise). You should have a shiny new email waiting for you. Click the link!


Now you can go back to your regular email address that you know and love. Click "Settings" one more time. And then choose the "Accounts tab." Under your email addresses, it will say "Reply from the same address the message was sent to." Select that. You should get a little yellow message at the top of your screen saying "Your preferences have been saved." Ta-da! If someone emails you at your super anonymous awesome email address, you will automatically respond with it too, so it won't give them your FirstNameLastNameSocialSecurityNumber address. Or your last name.


If you don't even want the letter after your first name, click on "edit info" next to your anonymous-ish email address and change the display name to only say your first name. Or intials. Or something random. Whatever you want it to say.

Go and change your Blogger profile to this email address (using the steps here) if you want and sit back and relax knowing your privacy is protected and your identity is safe. Time to start worrying about something else, like how soon the milk expires.

Let Me Help You Help Me

Sometimes people need a little public service announcement, I think. Jenna wrote a passionate post (read it and you'll see that the word "passionate" is actually a pretty mild term for the post) about the word verification/anti-spam thing that pops up on many blogs when you comment. You know, that thing that makes you type in "sid09df" before your comment goes through. Except you can never tell if it is an "O" or a "0" and you end up typing in random combination after random combination.

I had turned mine off a year or so ago and gotten two spam comments within the day, so I turned it back on. But, fearing for my life after her post, I decided I'd give it a shot, and what do you know? No spam in the three months since then.

So here's my plea for today. If you use Blogger, and I know many many of you do, I'd like to kindly suggest that you set your profile to show your email address so that when you comment on a Blogger blog, the writer can respond back. If you don't have this set, when I get your comment via email and go to respond, it looks like this. I'm guessing your email is not "noreply-comment@blogger.com." Unless somehow dozens of you signed up for the same email address.


And because I care so deeply, here's how to do it. It is incredibly easy (we're talking two minutes, tops) and then I will be able to respond when you ask things like, "What book should I read?" (Answer: The Hunger Games).

Also, even if you DON'T have a Blogger blog, many of you still have Blogger profiles so that you can comment, so it'd be very very lovely if you could do this to your profile too.

Anyway, without further ado:

Step 1: Go to Blogger.com, sign in, and ta-da, there is your dashboard. Click "Edit Profile" (for your convenience, I've drawn a very impressive red arrow pointing to it with Paint. Because I am a high-tech blogger).



The "Edit Profile" Page will open. Two things to do on this page. First, check the box that says "Show my email address." And then, if you scroll down a bit more, you'll see a box labeled "email address." Enter the email address you'd like people to respond to in that box. Please.



Then, scroll to the very bottom of that page and click the big orange "SAVE PROFILE" button.


That's it! So easy!

And I will love you forever because I'll be able to respond when you ask a question or if I want to ask YOU a question or just say "yes, yes, I love that book too and we should be friends." And believe me, if you have your email address set to display, we will be friends.

Prison Stripes

At TLA, I met one of the marketing directors for Penguin Books and she asked if I would like to be added to their mailing list for advance copies of books. Needless to say, I said yes.

However, now, after having received a few books from them in the last two months, I'm not only thrilled, but deeply impressed. Whoever their packaging/marketing people are, they are brilliant.

Does a book show up just in a nondescript box? Oh no. (Well, sometimes).

But some of them? They show up like this:


You can't help but at least be CURIOUS about the black envelope with the sticker telling you what book it is.

And if you haven't read the first book (Al Capone Does My Shirts), let me tell you that it's about a young boy who lives on Alcatraz (his dad is an electrician hired by the prison). I tell that so you'll appreciate how awesome what's INSIDE the envelope is.

The book, obviously, but not just shoved in and flung into the mailbox. Oh no.


And even more impressive - when you flip it over, it's got this on the back:


I'll tell you what, I haven't even started reading the book yet and I'm already raving about how awesome the packaging is to anyone who will listen. Because, seriously, PRISON-STRIPE tissue paper. Brilliance.

A few days before this book arrived, I got copies of Richard Peck's books "A Long Way From Chicago" and "A Year Down Yonder" and then the newest one in the series, which is coming out this fall and is Christmas themed. It came in a silver mailer and the books were tied together with a long shiny red ribbon.

Penguin, I am in awe of your marketing prowess.

Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

10 out of 10: Cheaper by the Dozen is one of my all-time favorite books, one I've read over and over again. It makes me laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. It has zero resemblance to the (very lame) Steve Martin movie.

Growing up, my mom read to us nearly every night before we went to bed. My sisters and I would braid each others hair and paint our toenails while she read aloud. It was only rarely that my dad would choose a book and read it to us, but when he did have a book he wanted to read to us, we knew it would be fantastic.

The copy of Cheaper by the Dozen we owned was very old (probably from my Dad's childhood) and had huge chunks of pages were falling out. The cover was, inexplicably, hot pink.

My dad, as was his habit, had read small sections of the book to us previously, but I'd never read the whole thing and I had no idea what was coming. When the book was finished, I cried for at least an hour.

Cheaper by the Dozen is a true story about a family with twelve children (only eleven lived, but "Cheaper by the Eleven" is a fairly stupid title) in the 1910s and 20s. Both the parents were engineers (alert to all you female engineer readers out there - I know there are at least two of you!) and worked together as "efficiency experts" for a bunch of major companies.

The dad, Frank, loved trying to run his house and his eleven children as efficiently as possible and the book is full of the hilarious stories about him teaching them Morse Code (he'd leave clues written in Morse Code around the house that would lead the kids to a candy bar hidden in a drawer or a toy stashed in a cupboard, or sometimes the note would say "Hello, Live Bait. This one is on the house. When you finish reading this, dash off like mad so the next fellow will think you are on some hot clue. Then he'll read it, too, and you won't be the only one who got fooled. Daddy") or how to multiply large numbers in their heads.

It's hard to do this book justice since it doesn't really have a single overarching plot line - it's a series of lovely, hilarious stories about a family that comes into sharper focus the more you read. As an adult, I read this book and see something of what so delighted my dad in its pages, a glimpse of what he wanted our family to be, at least to some degree (lots of learning and family fun, less head thumping with pencils).

Later, my mom told me that my dad asked her to read it before they got married, and five years ago, I made Bart buy a copy and read it before we got engaged.

Everything about this book charms me and it's made even better by the sequel, called Belles on Their Toes which is, if such a thing is possible, even better than Cheaper by the Dozen.

I have since read it at least three times and writing about it makes me ready to go pull my own (not hot pink) dog-eared copy of the shelf and fall in love with it all over again this weekend.

Interested?

So I have a (maybe) great idea.

Yesterday, on my post about YA books, RA commented saying:

You know I am all about YA fiction, and that question to Sherman Alexie is horribly ignorant. But... sometimes I wish I could share my adult fiction (although I call it modern fiction so as to take away the squick feel) with you and see what you think! Would you be game?

I said, yes, I would be game. I told her to give me one title and I would read it by the end of the month and tell her what I thought. Her pick was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Cool, right? I think so.

So here's what I'm suggesting. Every month, I'll ask you to offer up one book title that I absolutely must read (old, new, adult, YA, romance, mystery, sci-fi, you name it) and I'll draw one at random. Then I'll read it that month and review it.

Is that completely lame or would you participate?

Shame

A week or two ago, I got a comment asking why I was reading (and reviewing) mostly young adult or children's books and then noting, with some astonishment, that there were all these other adults apparently reading them too, based on the comments.

And yeah, I can understand why people who don't read a lot of young adult books would think that. Does reading teen books mean you can't handle the possibly-more demanding language and themes in adult books? Does identifying with teen characters mean you're immature? Isn't reading teen literature a lot like an adult eating nothing but pureed fruits and vegatables instead of real actual adult food?

On the other hand, I can't really buy those arguments. I think it's just that most adults nowadays have no idea what the Young Adult Literature world looks like now. It used to be small; there weren't all that many books being published in that genre and many of them weren't particularly well-written. Books that would now be considered YA books were just published as general adult fiction.

Now? It does not look like that at all. Teen books are being published at an incredible rate and the cross-over appeal is getting higher. For me, a major sign of the change was when the New York Times Bestseller list started breaking up Adult and Children/Teen books because Harry Potter was dominating all the top spots on the list. The idea of an adult reading a book aimed at children and teens is getting less strange.

And for good reason - I cannot emphasize strongly enough how many terrifically written, interesting, and all-around phenomenal books there are out there.

Certainly there is still a bias against it. Sherman Alexie, after winning the National Book Award for his YA book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, was asked if wished he'd won the award for an "adult, serious work." He said, "I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian — that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.” (Read the whole New York Times essay if you're interested in this topic).

Some people still are embarrassed to be reading a book that is marketed primarily towards children or teens, when they are in their thirties or forties or fifties (or hey, even their twenties). I am sympathetic to that, but I think they are missing out, whether out of some sense that there is something wrong with reading books for a younger audience or because they just don't know about all the good things there are to read that have a "YA" sticker slapped on the spine.

I absolutely sincerely believe there is nothing more "noble" about reading adult literature. They are all just books. Some are good, some are bad. Some focus on adults, some on teens or children. Some are just for fun, some are real works of literature.

And I refuse to be ashamed to walk in to the teen room at my local library.

Of COURSE I'm Posting About This

At least in the movies, Jacob may finally get the following he deserves; it's like payback for all us Team Jacob folks who had to watch Jacob get the shaft time and time again in the books. Let's be honest, Robert Pattinson is totally the wrong guy to play Edward (heresy, I know, but it must be said).

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

And, while I'm on the topic of Twilight, for those of you who are also Mortal Instruments fans, I saw this hilariously awesome shirt on Wondrous Reads that has a picture of the City of Glass cover on the front and this text on the back "Dear Edward and Jacob, I adore you both, but I'm spending the weekend with Jace. Sorry! Love, Stephenie."

How awesome is that? (Hint: Very Awesome).