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May 22, 2007

Do you have time to read grown-up books?

I must confess that my reading lately is almost all limited to children's and YA books. I read more slowly now, and discussion groups keep highlighting great new books for kids and YAs and somehow, I only find time for grown-up books on vacations. Okay, I'll admit it: TiVo probably doesn't help.

But if I were to wear one of those buzz marketing buttons where you invite someone to ask what you're reading, I could say "Moby Dick," because that really is what I'm reading. In a convoluted sort of way, it is Roger Sutton's fault. Roger, editor of the children's review journal The Horn Book Magazine, posted on his so-wonderful-I-am-jealous blog this entry about a company that markets a text reader where the sentences are broken up into short increments. On the site, they have a demo you can try, so I did, and found myself immediately caught up in, of all things, Moby Dick!

I didn't find the reader all that helpful, but it did get me started. Since Melville's masterpiece is in the public domain, you can find the entire humongous novel online, and you know, it is not hard at all to read a chapter a day of anything, even a book you might as an English major have successfully avoided for decades. So, for your enjoyment, here it is: http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/moby/. You would be amazed at all of the classics you can find online--everything from Bleak House to the Aeneid.

So now, even with a TiVo filled to the brim, the Summer Reading Game looming on the horizon, and stacks of YA novels and children's books to read, I can say I'm reading Moby Dick. What are you reading?

Posted by susan at 4:08 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2007

Advice for parents

Happy Birthday, Dr. Brazelton! Dr. T. Berry Brazelton celebrates his 89th birthday of what has been a life extraordinarily well-spent. As he repeated today on NPR's Morning Edition, his advice has always been to look to the child--observe your child, figure out what kind of child you have, and go from there. What a wise and loving man. He is one of my heroes, along with the late Fred Rogers.

Listening to Dr. Brazelton made me think a little about what advice I would offer parents today, and as it happens, I have some! We visited our son at Macalester College this past weekend, and he also turned 20 yesterday. It's crazy how fast his time at college is flying by--half over already, and he just started. But what's even crazier is how much of children's lives these days are spent in preparing them for the college application process. Peter Abrahams made a gentle jab at this phenomenon in his funny mystery Down the Rabbit Hole,
in which the 8th grader's father is preoccupied with her algebra grade because he's worried she won't get on the right math track to get into Yale, or was it Princeton, but really...who cares? That's my point. With the thousands of colleges out there, how is it we actually spend the lifetime of our children worrying ourselves and worrying them about where they will spend four incredibly fast-moving years?

It's very hard not to get sucked up into it, even if you don't have one particular college you are hoping your child will attend. You still try to make sure the grades are good and the preschool/grade school/middle school/high school are the best they can be to get them ready for college, and that they have a wide range of talents and experiences, and they volunteer and take leadership roles, and....good grief!

Do we do it for them, or do we do it for us? You probably noticed that I worked in the name of my son's very fine college with its very fine reputation, right? I think it's a lot for us, so we can compete in the parental college olympics. So here's my advice for parents: help nurture your child into being a strong, loving person who has a sense of his/her strengths and what they might be called to do in life, and refuse to worry about college at least until high school. Sure, your child probably won't get into World's Best College that way, but it's just not that important. Really.

Now, how do I work that into the conversation with the parents at the library? Hmmm.

Posted by susan at 4:48 PM | Comments (1)

May 4, 2007

My unpopular opinions

Maybe it's just that it's Friday after a long week, but instead of being perky and positive, I feel like airing a couple of my unpopular opinions. So here goes!

Number 1 and Number 2 on the NYT Best Seller List for Children's Books are both way too fancy for me: too glittery, too pink, too cluttery, too frilly, too repetitive, and yes, too fancy.
Fancy Nancy makes my teeth hurt. Initially it made me laugh, but something about Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy has now turned me against the first book, too. Give me Ramona Quimby's doll Chevrolet over Nancy's doll Marabelle Lavinia Chandelier any day.

My second unpopular opinion? Jack Prelutsky is great. (Okay, that's not unpopular. ) Chris Raschka is wonderful. Put them together and you should have an extraordinary collaboration, right? Yes, except if the subject is sports poems,
because no matter who is writing them, sports poems are all the same. Just pick one of four possibilities:
1. Kid is bad at sports but succeeds this time
2. Kid is great at sports but fails this time
3. Kid is great at sports and succeeds this time
4. Kid is bad at sports and once again fails
Just keep making it different sports, and soon you have a book of not very interesting poetry. It's a waste of a great collaboration in my unpopular opinion.

Posted by susan at 3:31 PM | Comments (1)