Postcards from the Mothership » Books

100 best kids’ books

DaniGirl — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 11:48:49 +0000

I honestly don’t know how I missed it. I mean, I’ve always *meant* to read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, but I just never got around to it. So when I read a reference to it in the Ottawa Citizen earlier this week, it was top-of-mind when I was at the library yesterday and I picked it up. I asked the boys if they would mind pausing our current book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (which I think I’ve now read at least half a dozen times), to give this one a try. Simon especially was reluctant — he really loves the Harry Potter books. But he acquiesced and last night we read the first chapter of A Wrinkle In Time.

It was really hard to stop after just one chapter. I’m torn between sneaking it upstairs and devouring it myself or discovering it page-by-page with the boys. I felt the funniest echo through time, reading the perspective of oddball Meg who doesn’t quite understand why she doesn’t fit in with her mates. How have I never read this book before? Tristan and Simon agreed — they rated the book a “three plus” out of four after the first chapter, and agreed that Harry could wait until we figured out what a tesseract is and what happens next.

So it was a serendipitous sort of discovery to find in the Citizen (via Scholastic Books) a list of the top 100 children’s books of all time, with A Wrinkle In Time sitting prominently in the number 3 spot. Really, HOW have I missed it? And for the love of all things holy, what else have I missed?

Here they are, in case you’ve been missing out, too:

100. Animalia, Graeme Base

99. Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, Paul Fleischman

98. First Words, Roger Priddy

97. The Adventures of Captain Underpants, Dav Pilkey

96. Gossie, Olivier Dunrea

95. A Single Shard, Linda Sue Park

94. I Took the Moon for a Walk, Carolyn Curtis

93. We the Kids: The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, David Catrow

92. What Shall We Do With the Boo Hoo Baby?, Cressida Cowell

91. Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon, Catherine Thimmesh

90. Puss in Boots, Fred Marcellio

89. An Egg Is Quiet, Dianna Hutts Aston

88. Grumpy Bird, Jeremy Tankard

87. Rules, Cynthia Lord

86. Interrupting Chicken, David Ezra Stein

85. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Judy Blume

84. No No Yes Yes, Leslie Patricelli

83. Yoko, Rosemary Wells

82. Ivy + Bean, Annie Barrows

81. Lincoln: A Photobiography, Russell Freedman

80. What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?, Steve Jenkins and Robin Page

79. Llama Llama Red Pajama, Anna Dewdney

78. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, Robert C. O’Brien

77. Hi! Fly Guy, Tedd Arnold

76. Peek-a Who?, Nina Laden

75. Holes, Louis Sachar

74. Owl Moon, Jane Yolen

73. Tea With Milk, Allen Say

72. Are You My Mother?, P. D. Eastman

71. Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson

70. Blackout, John Rocco

69. The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks, Joanna Cole

68. Counting Kisses: A Kiss and Read Book, Karen Katz

67. Esperanza Rising, Pam Muñoz Ryan

66. The Maze of Bones, Rick Riordan

65. Birds, Kevin Henkes

64. My Truck is Stuck!, Kevin Lewis

63. The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick

62. Diary of a Worm, Dorren Cronin

61. The Lion & the Mouse, Jerry Pinkney

60. Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, Annie Kubler

59. Dear Juno, Soyung Pak

58. Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez, Kathleen Krull

57. The Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket

56. Living Sunlight, Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm

55. Smile!, Roberta Grobel Intrater

54. Through My Eyes, Ruby Bridges

53. The House at Pooh Corner, A. A. Milne

52. The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan

51. Sylvia Long’s Mother Goose, Sylvia Long

50. Sarah, Plain and Tall, Patricia MacLachlan

49. Martin’s Big Words, Doreen Rappaport

48. Hatchet, Gary Paulsen

47. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Bill Martin, Jr.

46. Not a Box, Antoinette Portis

45. The Composition, Antonio Skármeta

44. Good Night, Gorilla, Peggy Rathmann

43. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis

42. What Do People Do All Day?, Richard Scarry

41. Matilda, Roald Dahl

40. Moo, Baa, La La La!, Sandra Boynton

39. Zen Shorts, John J. Muth

38. Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney

37. The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear, Don and Audrey Wood 36. The Secret Garden, Francis Hodgson Burnett

35. Freight Train, Donald Crews

34. Swimmy, Leo Lionni

33. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

32. The Runaway Bunny, Margaret Wise Brown

31. The Mitten, Jan Brett

30. My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother, Patricia Polacco

29. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume

28. Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Mo Willems

27. Black on White, Tana Hoban

26. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin

25. The Giver, Lois Lowry

24. The Little Engine That Could, Watty Piper

23. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

22. Corduroy, Don Freeman

21. Bud, Not Buddy, Christopher Paul Curtis

20. Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein

19. Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale, Mo Willems

18. When Marian Sang, Pam Muñoz Ryan

17. Pat the Bunny, Dorothy Kunhardt

16. Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt

15. The Dot, Peter H. Reynolds

14. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

13. Madeline, Ludwig Bemelmans

12. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle

11. Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery

10. Frog and Toad Are Friends, Arnold Lobel

9. The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein

8. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

7. Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss

6. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J. K. Rowling (Also known as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone)

5. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

4. The Snowy Day, Ezra Jack Keats

3. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle

2. Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown

1. Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White

The most surprising and delightful part of this list was mentioning it to Tristan and Simon, and telling them that A Wrinkle In Time was number three on the list. They were intrigued, and it warmed my bibliophile heart to see them pouring over the list, finding their favourites and discussing the ranking.

Did your favourites make the cut? I was surprised to see that If You Give A Mouse A Cookie didn’t make the list, and not a single Robert Munsch? What do you think of the list?

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Five great books to read aloud to boys

DaniGirl — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:10:23 +0000

One of the great pleasures of my day is reading out loud to the boys at bedtime. Beloved and I take turns; one night I’ll read to Lucas and he’ll read to Tristan and Simon, and then we’ll switch. Lately, Tristan and Simon and I have taken to sharing some of the reading – they’ll read a page or two each, and then I’ll read the rest. It’s been a great way to (a) keep them engaged in the story, (b) share the love of reading and (c) monitor their reading progress.

We’ve been all over the map with our book choices, from JK Rowling to Dave Barry to Judy Blume, and we’re always looking for new suggestions, so I thought I’d share some of our recent favourites. By the way, I called this post “five great books to read aloud to boys” intentionally — while I’m sure that many girls (myself included!) would enjoy these books, I think it’s a little harder to engage boys in reading and these ones have done that well.

1. Peter and the Starcatchers - Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

This is a wonderful book to read out loud – the language just flows, the dialogue is engaging, and the story is a real page-turner. When I was reading it to the boys this summer, they’d ask me to start reading a little earlier than usual so we could read more, and we’d sit on the porch in the receding light to enjoy it. It’s a quirky, imaginative twist on the Peter Pan story, written by humourist and columnist Dave Barry. There are three more books in this series, and I look forward to working our way through all of them.

2. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing - Judy Blume

I read this when I was Tristan’s age, back when I devoured everything Judy Blume had written. Although some of the references are a little dated, the boys loved the interaction between 9 year old Peter, his pesky younger brother Fudge and their baby sister. There are now five books in this series, and we worked our way through all of them this summer. Simon especially seemed to love the antics of Fudge – more than one allusion from Fudge to Lucas was drawn! This one is impressively engaging for a 40 year old novel.

3. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

I tried to read Lord of the Rings several times in my life. I’d pick it up, put it down. Pick it up, put it down. I loved the mythology (I taught myself Tolkien’s rune alphabet when I was in highschool and used to write notes to friends using it) and loved the movies, but the books — ugh. I just couldn’t get through those pages and pages of Hobbit geneology. But The Hobbit itself? Love it. It’s the perfect quest novel – a diminutive hero, mythical and mysterious creatures, battles, treasure. What more could a young boy want? We’re about 1/3 of the way in right now, and although Simon was a little reluctant at first, I had them both sitting on the edge of the bed last night trying to figure out the riddles that Gollum and Bilbo were trading. (Tristan dropped my jaw by figuring out a few of them as I was reading, and then made up his own rhyming riddle on the spot!) Did you know Peter Jackson is filming a version of the Hobbit? It’s due to be released next year.

4. Percy Jackson books – Rick Riordan

I can’t personally testify to these books, as its Beloved who has been working through them with the boys since last Christmas. All three of them love the series, based largely in the world of Greek mythology. In fact, Beloved and I have occasionally bartered for more reading time when he was reading Percy Jackson and I was reading Peter and the Starcatchers — we each wanted to know what was going to happen next in our respective stories.

5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

We read the first book in the series earlier this year, and the boys loved it. I know the books get darker as the series progresses, but I find the first few books to be perfect for where they are right now. Given that it takes a month or so for us to read the average novel (I had to renew Peter and the Starcatchers three times from the library and still incurred a few days of late charges to wade through all 480 pages, and that was an easy read!) I figure by the time we work our way up to Deathly Hallows the boys will be in their teens anyway! I’m trying to read them each book before we watch the movies, but they’ve already seen The Chamber of Secrets — I’ve got some catching up to do!

Clearly, we have a fondness for science fiction and fantasy in our reading material! So, Christmas book-giving season is nearly upon us — what books are on your kids’ wish-lists this year? (Stand by for five more book recommendations for the preschooler in your life!)

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Canada Reads 2011

DaniGirl — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:22:22 +0000

Back in the day, I used to blog a lot about books. Way way back in the day, I used to consider myself somewhat of a fan, if not an authority, on Canadian Literature. So when I heard that CBC Radio was compiling a list of the Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade, I knew it would make great blog fodder.

And then I actually looked at the list, unveiled today, and realized that I have read exactly three of them. And for an embarrassing number of them, I had heard of neither the book nor the author. Eek. Clearly I am not spending enough time with Shelagh Rogers.

But, I was so excited to have a blog post that required (a) brain use and (b) no discussion of moving, unpacking or septic systems, that I’m going to charge ahead with this one anyway. In fact, I’m going to make a meme out of it! Remember memes? They’re about as relevant as my knowledge of Canadian literature, apparently, as I can’t remember the last one I’ve seen. Let’s call this a celebration of the Canadian Blogosphere circa 2005, whaddya say?

Ahem, anyway, here’s the list. If you want to play along, copy and paste it into your own blog. The ones in bold I’ve read. The ones in bold and underlined, I’d recommend. The ones with an asterisk are on my “I swear, I will read it before 2012″ list.

Ready?

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews *

Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall

Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright

Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant

Conceit by Mary Novik

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

Drive-by Saviours by Chris Benjamin

Elle by Douglas Glover

Essex County by Jeff Lemire

Far to Go by Alison Pick

February by Lisa Moore

Galore by Michael Crummey

Heave by Christy Ann Conlin

Inside by Kenneth J. Harvey

Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O’Neill *

Moody Food by Ray Robertson

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson *

Room by Emma Donoghue

Shelf Monkey by Corey Redekop

Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis *

The Birth House by Ami McKay

The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre

The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan

The Fallen by Stephen Finucan

The Girls Who Saw Everything by Sean Dixon *

The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe

The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart

The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden *

Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

Twenty-Six by Leo McKay Jr.

Unless by Carol Shields *

Hmmm, not a single Douglas Coupland or Alice Munro? I suppose Will Ferguson is not exactly a novelist, but I am in the delicious depths of Beyond Belfast, and loving it as much as I loved Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw and Hitching Rides with Buddha. Looks like my tenuous claim to a passing knowledge of Canadian literature is as dated as my taste in music.

What do you think? Have you read any of these? Would you recommend them for CBC’s shortlist of the ten best Canadian novels of the decade? And do you think maybe it’s time for me to wade out of the wilderness and try something from this decade on my next trip to the library?

If you decide to play along and post the list on your blog, be sure to leave a comment so I can come over and admire your taste in Canadian literature!

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Book giveaway – TOON comics for beginning readers

DaniGirl — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:25:04 +0000

Back in December 2008, I blogged about a set of books I’d been offered by TOON Books. Back then, I was enamoured by the concept of TOON books, and even more impressed by the product themselves.

Here’s what I said back then:

They sent us three books: Jack and the Box, Mo and Jo, and Stinky. The very first night, Tristan read the entire Jack and the Box book from cover to cover out loud to Beloved and Simon. That’s 30-odd pages, and he’s only in Grade One. I was so impressed! And it’s not an overly simplistic book either. That’s what I liked about these books, that they’re accessible without being condescending. Beloved and Tristan took turns reading the next two books out loud over the subsequent nights.

I think the concept behind TOON books is terrific. Beloved is a comic book and graphic novel fan from way back, so that may bias us a bit, but I think the comic book format really engages the boys at a different level. In their own words:

TOON Books are the first high-quality comics designed for children ages four and up. Each book in the collection is just right for reading to the youngest child but perhaps more remarkable: this is the first collection ever designed to offer newly-emerging readers comics they can read themselves. Each TOON book has been vetted by educators to ensure that the language and the narratives will nurture young minds. Our books feature original stories and characters created by veteran children’s book authors, renowned cartoonists and new talents, all applying their extraordinary skills to fascinate young children with clearly told tales that will welcome them to the magic of reading.

Tristan was in the middle of Grade One when we received our first set of TOON books, and he read an entire book by himself the first night we had them. If your child is a beginning reader, you know how empowering it is for a child to be able to read an entire book on his or her own.

So when the nice folks at TOON books contacted me earlier this month and asked if I’d be interested in a few more titles to review, I was happy to accept — on the caveat that maybe they could send me two copies, one for my boys and one set to share with you.

I’d actually forgotten about the books by the time they arrived earlier this week. We’d stopped at the mail box on our habitual after-dinner walk, and the boys were delighted to hear that new books had arrived. We didn’t even make it into the house:

(I swear, I did not set this up. I didn’t even have my camera — I ran into the house to get it when the neighbour admired their impromptu book club!)

Tristan had read Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework by the time they crawled into bed that night while Beloved and Simon (in senior kindergarten) read Benny and Penny in The Toy Breaker together. These are wonderful little books! They’re hardcover, intelligent, well-drawn and engaging — what else could you possibly want from a book?

When I asked Tristan what he liked best about Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework, he said he liked the story and found the animal facts at the end of the book very interesting. He was quite concerned, in fact, that I might give away his copy by mistake — he wanted to make sure he could keep it so he could read it again later.

Would you like to win Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework and Benny and Penny in The Toy Breaker? (I promise, I won’t send you Tristan’s copy!)

Here’s the fine print:

To enter, simply leave a comment below and tell me a book you loved when you were a kid.
Both books will go to a single winner.
You must leave a valid e-mail address, and be willing to send me your mailing address if you win.
Entries will be accepted until noon EST on Tuesday, 27 April, 2010.
The winner will be chosen at random and posted no later than end of day Wednesday 28 April.

Thanks to TOON books for the excellent giveaway. Good luck!

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Photography book review: PhotoJojo!

DaniGirl — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:29:00 +0000

Dear Santa, Of all the photography books I’ve read this year (and hoo-boy, I’ve read a LOT of them, maybe even ALL of them) the one that I’m asking for this Christmas is the PhotoJojo book. Yes, I know, I already read it once from the library. But it was so fun, so funny, so full of great ideas, that I simply must have my own copy to turn to and flip through and be inspired by at random points through the year.

I’ve been a fan of the PhotoJojo Web site and newsletter for quite a while now. In fact, together with CBC’s Spark podcast, they were the main inspirations for Project 365. I’d seen that they were coming out with a book, but since I’d been subscribing to their newsletter for more than a year, and had spent many fun hours plumbing the depths of their archives, I didn’t think I needed to pick up what they called “the convenient dead trees edition” of their Web site. Then one day to my delight I found it on the express shelf of the library and took it home.

I got about half-way through when I realized that not only was this one of the most delightful photography books I’d ever read, but that I needed a copy of my own.

So what is PhotoJojo? It’s a whimsical, fun and occasionally brilliant set of, in their own humble words, “insanely great photo projects and DIY ideas.” Some of the material has been recycled from their newsletters, but the vast majority of the content was new to me.

There are two parts to the book. The first section talks about things to do with the photos you’ve already taken but are languishing, unloved and unappreciated, in your hard drive or in a shoe box somewhere. The second section is called “have more fun with your camera” and provides ideas and inspiration for all the fantastic photos you are about to take.

You can see why I love it, right? The ideas run the gamut from the silly (how to build a harness for your dog to create “the amazing doggie cam” or how to make a hidden jacket camera) to the sublime (a disposable camera chain letter, and the most inspired take on the hoary old photo calendar idea I’ve ever come across.) It has fun projects like making snow globes and photo cupcakes, and practical projects like how to turn a water bottle into a monopod. And it’s threaded through with the geeky sort of humour that makes me snicker out loud as I read.

Photographic meets crafty, with a bent sense of humour and a penchant for whimsy: seriously, what’s not to love? Oh sure, you can do what I did and check out a copy from the public library, but if you’re a photo junkie like me, trust me, you’ll want your own copy too!

But wait, wait, I can’t be done the book review, I haven’t told you about the “everyone who comes to visit you photo wall” or the “photo lampshade” or “how to turn your SLR into a pinhole camera” or “how to build a fish-eye lens out of a door peep” or…

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NurtureShock: A book review in two parts (Part 1)

DaniGirl — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:00:53 +0000

Back in early 2007, the blogosphere was a-cackle over an essay that appeared in New York Magazine. The gist of it, from what I could glean, was that we were over-praising our kids, and that too much praise was a bad thing. I never did get around to reading the source article, but I frothed in more than one blog’s comment section about how ridiculous I found the concept. Too much praise? No such thing. After all, I was raised on a steady diet of affirmation and praise, and I think it was one of the factors that most strongly contributed to the best parts of the adult I am today.

In the last week or so, I started hearing buzz about that theory in the background noise again, and found out that the authors of the original article had expanded it into a book that was getting a lot of interest. The book is called NurtureShock, and the general idea they posit is that we’ve been ignoring some of the most important scientific discoveries about children, learning and parenting. They propose to “use the fascinating new science of children to reveal just how many of our bedrock assumptions about kids can no longer be counted on.”

They were on CBC’s The Current last week, and although I missed it, the buzz reminded me that I wanted to check out the book. I was 104th in the queue when I requested it from the library, but lucked into a copy on the two-week “express reads” shelf the very next day.

I had the blog post half-written in my head as I walked out of the library. I was going to do a thorough, scholarly analysis and discount the theory on a point-by-point basis. I was going to tear it to pieces. I could hardly wait. I still had 20 minutes left to kill in Tristan’s skating lesson when I pulled out the book and started reading, pencil and notebook at my side. I was on page four – FOUR! – when my jaw dropped open in shock and dismay.

They were describing Tristan. To a perfect T. I did a 180-degree about-face. They were — gasp! — right!

The chapter starts with Thomas, a child whose IQ test scored him among the top one percent of the top one percent of applicants to his school:

“~~Tristan~~ Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’” With no more than a glance, ~~Tristan~~ Thomas was dividing the world into two — things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t.

In the last year, I’ve seen this pattern a LOT in Tristan, in everything from riding a bike to drawing to math problems. Most things are easy for him, but the things that aren’t make him want to quit immediately. He’s reluctant to try, in case he might fail.

I read the rest of the chapter with avid interest. Turns out, their theory is not so much that praise itself is detrimental, but that gratuitous, insincere and non-specific praise is. They review a scientific study in which two groups of students were asked to do puzzles well within their ability. One group was given the single line of praise “You must be smart at this” while the other was given the single line of praise “You must have worked really hard.” The students were then offered the choice between two puzzles. One choice was a more challenging puzzle that researchers told the kids they’d learn a lot from attempting and the second choice was an easy test, just like the first. The results? “Of those praised for their effort, 90 per cent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The ‘smart’ kids took the cop-out.”

Carol Dweck, the researcher who engineered these studies, was surprised by the magnitude of the effect of praise on the students’ choices. She theorizes that praising the effort gives the child a variable he or she can control, while praising an innate characteristic like intelligence “takes it out of the child’s control, and provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

The chapter goes on to discuss the culture of self-esteem building that has been inherent to parenting advice for the last three or four decades, following the publication of Nathaniel Branden’s The Psychology of Self-Esteem. The authors note that the idea of promoting and preserving a child’s self-esteem has become “an unstoppable train [where] anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned on. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.”

Another researcher, after reviewing 200 scientifically-sound studies on measuring self-esteem and its outcomes found that “having a high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement.” In fact, he believes that “the contiued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: it’s so strong that ‘when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.’”

Ouch.

And yet, the more I read, the more “Aha!” moments I had. One of my pet rants is the ‘culture of entitlement’ we seem to be living in right now. No wonder “failure is not an option” in Ontario schools… and small wonder that adults bring the same attitudes into the workforce.

I was so gobsmacked, so excited by what I read, that I couldn’t wait to talk to Beloved about it. I stood in the kitchen and talked about how clearly I saw Tristan in the examples. He scores quite well in just about every subject, and yet he is so obviously reluctant to try things he won’t immediately excel at. He is very risk-averse when it comes to trying new activities, but loves to do the things he does well.

Beloved was obviously listening to me, but he was regarding me with an expression on his face so curious that I eventually stopped in mid-sentence. “What?” I asked.

“You don’t see it, do you?” he asked, and I blushed. I did see it. “It’s not just Tristan, it’s YOU!” I skulked out of the kitchen muttering, “Stupid book, stupid praise, stupid husband thinks he knows me so well, what does he know, grumble grumble grumble…”

Of course he is right. He’s so right. It is me. My name is DaniGirl, and I am a praise junkie. I need to be validated. This blog exists because of my fundamental need for external validation. From the time of sentinence, I have made choices that would please my parents and those around me. And, I hate to fail. Really, really hate to fail. My ongoing struggles with French are a case study in my unwillingness to take the necessary risk of possibly making a mistake in public and looking foolish in the name of learning. If I can’t figure something out practically immediately, I lose interest.

Now, I also believe that the strong sense of self that my parents instilled in me from birth has practically everything to do with the fact that I am a happy, confident and successful adult who has achieved by age 40 just about everything I set out to do in life. In the grand scheme of things, I’d rather be a vaguely needy praise junkie with a successful career, loving husband, stable environment, lovely children, supportive family and terrific friends than an independent and persistent homeless crack addict. But I have to say, the first chapter of this book has given me lots to think about.

When I got to the end of that first chapter, I turned the page and realized the subject had moved on to an examination of whether kids getting, on average, an hour less sleep is causing ADHD, obesity and lost IQ points. Another interesting theory, perhaps, but I was anxious: where’s the rest? Where’s the answer? I want more on the subject of praise, please. Twenty-six pages hasn’t covered this in nearly enough detail for me. I need a roadmap, and a checklist. I need a work sheet. What if I fail?!

In all honesty, I’m not sure I can dial back the praise. It is too deeply ingrained in who I am, and in how I raise my boys. It is fundamental to who I am. I will, however, be more selective in my praise, and try to praise what the boys can control over what they cannot. I like the idea presented that the brain is a muscle that grows with each mistake made and learned from, and I’ll definitely be incorporating that into my mothering repetoire.

I’m almost afraid to read the rest of the book. What other deeply-held and fundamental tenents may be toppled like the Berlin Wall by the time I’m done? I’ll come back and let you know whether I can even look myself in the mirror by the time I’m done.

In the interim, as always, I’m curious as to your thoughts. Can you praise a child too much? Have we as a culture become self-esteem junkies? Is there any hope for an inveterate praise junkie like me, or should I just focus on saving the boys from praise addiction?

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Book review: Hell is Other Parents

DaniGirl — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:45:07 +0000

Okay, I’d admit it, the title of this one sucked me in. It made you look, too, didn’t it? When the rep from Hyperion/Voice offered me this book to review, she pitched it as a series of funny non-fiction essays from a New York City mother of three navigating the new world of helicopter parenting. Seeing myself as a free-range-parenting kind of girl, it caught my attention enough that I said “Yes please!” to the offer of a free review copy.

Despite my interest being piqued, I was somehow prepared to dislike this book. Would it be yet another snide, snippy book written by a Lululemon-wearing yoga mom, aching for her lost figure and trying too hard to be hip? Turns out, not at all… despite my first impressions.

The author and I have a lot in common — we both have three kids and, erm… *sound of crickets* …yeah, well, I guess that’s all we have in common. She’s a Vespa-riding apartment-dwelling resident of New York City, a stage mother to the kid who played “Young Spock” in the latest Star Trek movie and who turned down a small role for her son on Lost because it would be too disruptive to the family, and a former Emmy-award-winning TV producer and war photographer. No, really! And I am — none of those things, although I do like to take pictures and watch Lost religiously.

Anyway, despite my initial misgivings and the lack of shared life experiences, it’s a testament to Deborah Copaken Kogan’s lively writing style that she totally sucked me in, and I ended up hooked on the loosely linked vignettes that form the chapters in Hell is Other Parents, And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion. From the very first essay, where she tells the story of her youngest son’s birth and sharing a hospital room with a teenaged new mother with a potty mouth, I was endeared. Writing with equal parts humour and pathos, Kogan has an easy and amiable intimacy in her style that makes reading her essays feel a lot like reading some of my favourite bloggers.

The pitch from Hyperion/Voice was a little off the mark, though, in my opinion. The book shares its title with the second essay, and does paint a picture of mothering in Manhattan that bears no resemblance whatsoever to mothering in suburban Ottawa. She writes:

I read No Exit, Sartre’s famous existentialist play, in my early twenties, and I remember thinking at the time that it was interesting on a conceptual level but not a literal one. Hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone every actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape.

Then I became a parent.

And I realized that anyone who defines hell as being stuck for eternity with an adulterous deserter, a lesbian sadist, and a narcissistic baby-murderer has never spend an hour at a Mommy and Me class. Or killed a Saturday afternoon in the children’s shoe store in my neighbourhood, with its sign-up sheet thirty kids deep and shoe projectiles flying across the aisles. Or been forced into any seemingly innocuous but secretly agenda-laden interaction with the parent of your child’s peer.

And she goes on to enumerate some truly wretched interactions with other parents, including one mother who is aghast at the mention of Cookie Monster in her toddler’s presence, “yell-whispering, ‘Sam has never eaten a cookie!’” while slapping her hands over her son’s ears. So, despite an early connection to Kogan’s writing, I found it hard to relate to her on an level of shared experience. The other parents I know in real life seem to be, for the most part, as perplexed by parenting as I am, but generally willing to share the journey amiably.

It was this paragraph, buried deep in another essay called “La Vie en Explose” that made me realize that even though she was dancing on the edge of celebrity, leading a life I could only imagine in terms of movies I’ve seen, maybe Deborah Copaken Kogan and I weren’t so different after all. Stuck in a hospital ER for hours with undiagnosed appendicitis, an editorial deadline overdue and no backup childcare, she writes:

Here in the United States… where our social safety net seems limited to the guarantee of a Starbucks on every corner, family life can often feel as if it’s stacked like a house of cards, with one small gust of air — an absent babysitter, another day off from school, a medical emergency — knocking the whole structure to the ground. One can plan theoretical contingencies in the event of each occurrence, but life doesn’t always offer a single gust at a time. Sometimes the perfect storm blows into town, and then your left, in triage limbo, with a bum appendix, a dying man at your feet, three kids scattered to the four winds, your sitter in Manila, and only your wits and whatever karma you’ve accumulated back on earth to save you.

I think that line about “social safety net limited to the guarantee of a Starbucks on every corner” is just about perfect, don’t you? And the rest of the paragraph just gets better from there.

I have to say, my only caveat about this book is that occasionally, it seemed less like real life and more like reading what would happen if Carrie from Sex and the City grew up, got married and had three kids — but in a good way. Reading about Kogan’s life is like reading science fiction, a world that bears little resemblance to ours at first glance, but where parallels become clear in the details. In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, so much so that I’m going to search out a copy of her first book, Shutterbabe, a memoir about her years as a war photographer.

Stay tuned, and later this week you can have a chance to win my very own slightly worn but well appreciated copy as part of another giveaway!

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Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog (a book review)

DaniGirl — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:50:19 +0000

About a million years ago, I used to do book reviews here on the blog. I think it’s been more than a year since I’ve put one up. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s been at least six months since I’ve read anything other than a photography book (but man, I’ve read a lot of those!) or a trashy detective novel from my mother’s endless stash.

Also a million years ago, I was a co-presenter with an amazing panel of writers and bloggers at the Association for Research on Mothering’s (ARM) Motherlode conference. Have you heard of ARM? This is how they self-describe:

The Association for Research on Mothering, at York University, Toronto, houses the Association for Research on Mothering, the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, Demeter Press, and Mother Outlaws. The Association’s mandate is to promote feminist maternal scholarship by building and sustaining a community of researchers interested in the topic of mothering-motherhood.

These bits of ancient history intersected in a recent e-mail I received from ARM. Earlier this year, they released a book called Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog. I received a review copy a week or so back, and I couldn’t wait to dive into it.

The book is a series of essays, ranging in tone from scholarly papers to personal narrative, all centred around the experience of “mommy” blogs. The essays also range in perspective from the blogger to the reader of blogs to, in the introduction, the relatively uninitiated.

I have to tell you, I didn’t read every word. Some of the essays appealed to me more than others. Of course, I devoured every word of the contributions from my friends and Motherlode co-presenters, Ann Douglas and Jen Lawrence.

In “Web 2.0, Meet the Mommy Bloggers” Ann Douglas, esteemed parenting writer and a long-time friend and mentor, writes about the darker side of the “mamasphere” — how the influx of marketers and marketing, as well as human nature’s baser instincts, make mothers compete against each other for a slice of the pie. The pie is not just financial recompense, though. She notes,

…social networking sites are able to attract hundreds of thousands of members who are willing to accept popularity — or even the promise of popularity — in lieu of cash payment for the content they provide to these sites. [...] This can, in turn, create an atmosphere of competition rather than cooperation between mothers.

Jen Lawrence, a blogger I credit as one of my first favourites and a blogger I’ve tried to emulate over the years, submitted a reworked version of her Motherlode presentation. In “Blog for Rent: How Marketing is Changing Our Mothering Conversations” she discusses how the advent of the monetization movement circa 2006 completely altered the dynamic between bloggers and readers, and among bloggers themselves. She includes one of my favourite analogies of all time, with respect to marketing and bloggers. She says,

I think that blogging can be an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to building community, even if there are blog ads running down the sidebar. [...] But I don’t want blogging to become just another guerilla marketing technique. I don’t want to be invited to a friend’s home, only to discover I was really invited to a Tupperware party.

I didn’t just love the essays in this book that happened to be written by my friends, though. I was completely sucked in by Melissa Camara Wilkins’ “Beyond Cute: A Mom, a Blog, and a Question of Content.” Her essay examines why she blogs, and the satisfaction she derives from being a part of the online mothering community. She perfectly surmizes one of the reasons I so love mommyblogs as a whole: “I’m not narcissistically writing about myself; I am recording my personal narrative and contributing to a collective, descriptive understanding of contemporary motherhood.”

Also on a personal note, I was drawn in by May Friedman’s essay, “Schadenfreude for Mittelschmerz: Or, Why I Read Infertility Blogs.” Since I cut my teeth reading those same infertility blogs, I found Friedman’s perspective (as a “quite fertile” reader of infertility blogs) rather intriguing. And I read with a sort of openmouthed wonder Jennifer Gilbert’s “I Kid You Not: How the Internet Talked Me Out of Traditional Mommyhood.” She explains, in witty detail, how reading mommyblogs convinced her that “mothering was a thankless, Sisyphean exercise that involved prying jellybeans and loose change out of a child’s nose from sunup to sundown” (*snicker*) and simply not the life she wanted to live.

When I first started reading this book, I cringed at how dated some of the references felt. I don’t know a lot about the publishing industry, but it must be hard to get out a book that’s cutting edge when references to things that happened less than two years ago seem like ancient history. Then again, there have been a lot of pixels posted about the nature of mommyblogging again this summer, so like every other fad in motherhood, whatever is old is new again… the cycle is just a lot faster now!

If you’re at all interested in how mommyblogs are shaping our mothering conversations, I highly recommend this book — or at least, big chunks of it. And the nice thing about such varied styles and perspectives is the fact that the chunks that appeal to you are likely not the same ones that appealed to me. Like the mamasphere itself, it offers an intriguing range of voices and opinions, some contradictory and some conciliatory, some vexing and some inspiring, some educated and some entertaining. In this case, as in the mamasphere, the whole is as intriguing as the sum of the parts.

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Forget the kid, I’d like to go myself!

DaniGirl — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:50:04 +0000

Courtesy my dear friend Cait, “Would you send your kid to Hogwarts?” Um, only if I couldn’t go myself…

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BBC Books meme

DaniGirl — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 11:26:30 +0000

(I filched this meme from a couple of friends’ Facebook pages. According to the original meme, the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 important books here. Thing is, I went looking for the original source of 100 books, and couldn’t find it anywhere. There’s this BBC Big Reads list from 2003, but it’s not the same. But hey, since when do we allow a little thing that factual sources stand in the way of good blog fodder. On with the meme!)

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen *
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien Xish (kind of. I tried! Sooooo long in the Hobbity bits, though!)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X++
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible Xish (see comment above re: Tolkien)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X+
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Xish (I own it, but havent read every word)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X+
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X +++
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X+
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+++ (Don’t panic!)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini X (and *hated* it!)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving *
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery * (Oh, the shame!)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel Xish (I’ve started it half a dozen times)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley *
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon *
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (I honestly can’t remember if I actually read this or just sucked it into my pores via osmosis and overexposure.)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X (In French!!)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

I think that’s about 40 or so, not including the “maybes” and “sortas.” I sure hope that the BBC is impressed!

(I hate it when these memes suss out the really obvious gaps in my literary education. I really ought to read LM Montgomery before I fill out my next passport application or they’ll renounce my citizenship….)

Let me know if you decide to play along!

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Stephen King disses Stephenie Meyer

DaniGirl — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 15:33:27 +0000

Y’all know I pretty much worship the pages Stephen King writes upon. And I’ll admit that I got pretty well sucked in by the first book of the Twilight series, while gradually losing my enthusiasm through the next three. But I found the idea of a Stephen King smackdown of Stephenie Meyer particularly delicious. Apparently he loves JK Rowling and thinks “Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.” To date, Meyer has not responded. I hope she does, though. It’d make for some great literary spectating!

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Celebrity sightings?

DaniGirl — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:32:46 +0000

I’m pulling this conversation out of the comments from yesterday’s post, which has turned to minor (and major) celebrity encounters. Share your celebrity sighting (or, erm, stalking) stories here!

Margaret Atwood was mentioned in the last set of comments, and I have a story of my own to add – one that nicely straddles the line between sightings and stalking, in fact!

It was the late 1990s, maybe 1998 or so, and I was attending a Margaret Atwood reading at the National Library. I had a small collection of autographed Canadian literature, and I was clutching my hardcover copy of Alias Grace, hoping for a signature. I stopped off in the washroom about fifteen minutes before the reading was scheduled to begin and – gasp! – there she was! Margaret Atwood! In the bathroom!!

She stepped into a stall, and I froze. Would there be a public book signing after the reading, or would this be my only chance? If I slipped the book and a pen under the side of the stall, she’d be comfortably seated and able to sign at her leisure. In less than a second, the realm of possibilities played out in my head, and finished with me being escorted out of the library by security with neither my book nor my dignity. In the end, I decided to wait, and got my autograph by standing in line with the rest of the world. “The time I almost stalked Margaret Atwood in the ladies room” doesn’t play out for laughs quite to the extent that “The time I stalked Margaret Atwood in the ladies’ room,” but I didn’t know about blog fodder back then.

Do share! What’s your best brush-with-celebrity story? (And, only a couple of days left to vote to send me to Chicago. Just think of the potential for minor celebrity stalking at BlogHer!!)

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On bad dogs and vampires: or, how hype influences your reading life

DaniGirl — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:50:26 +0000

How does hype affect how you approach a book? The last two books I’ve read have been ridiculously overexposed and analyzed half to death in the last month or so, probably not coincidentally because they were both made into movies that were released in December.

Just before Christmas, I read most of John Grogan’s Marley and Me, the sweet story of one family’s life with the world’s worst dog. My dad gave it to me, after a friend loaned it to him. He has personal experience with the world’s worst dog, which is really a post for another day, but let me say this: at least Marley never ate anybody’s dentures. Twice.

Anyway, the book: I read it, but I didn’t get sucked into it. It took me more than six weeks to get through it, because I kept picking it up and putting it down again. I felt like I had to read it, partly because my dad had given it to me and my dad has never recommended a book to me before, but partly because it’s a story about a big yeller dog and my heart has endless space in it for big yeller dogs, especially ones with a mischievous streak.

I laughed out loud a few times, especially in the parts that brought me back to the days of wrangling my own impossibly stubborn golden-shepherd mix pest (who, by the way, turned into the world’s best doggie), but I didn’t cry once. That may have been, though, because I saw where the book was going about two chapters from the end and decided to bail. When you have a 10 year old dog that you love beyond words in your life, you don’t need to read about the demise of other people’s dogs no matter what kind of happy ending they try to wrap it up in. In the end, it was a nice book and I enjoyed the stories, but I really didn’t see why everybody was so gaga over it. It just didn’t catch me, yanno?

By contrast, I have been righteously hooked by Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Oh my good lord, how I am hooked. I can barely stand to take these rare minutes of calm quiet nap time to write this out, when I could be reading to find out what happens next to Bella and Edward and the rest of them. I’m halfway through the third book now, and after racing through the books to this point, I find I’m trying to slow down, knowing there’s only one book after this one and then I’ll be done. Whatever will I do then?

I’d asked for the books for Christmas, after waiting nearly two months to move from 600th to 350th in the public library queue for the first book alone. I wasn’t even sure, to be honest, that I’d like the books, but I’d heard enough from those whose taste I truly admire to think that maybe I’d enjoy them. Besides, even if they were a little too teeny-bopper sacchariney, as I feared they might be, I’ve always been a fan of a good vampire tale. Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned are still among my favourite books of all time.

Now that I think of it, I think I’ll post my review of the Twilight books under a separate post. This one is long enough, methinks! But for now, I’m curious about the “Oprah effect” and how it affects your enjoyment of a book. I think I would have enjoyed Marley and Me a little bit more if I’d just stumbled randomly upon it, rather than having it saturated through popular culture. And yet, although the hype about the Twilight books is no less ubiquitous, I’m completely and utterly drawn in. I can’t even say that they’re more finely crafted. I expected to enjoy them, but I didn’t expect to want to put my life on hold until I finished them!

What do you think? Do you find that the “Oprah’s Book Club” stamp on a book is the thing that draws you in, or (like me) the thing that makes you say, “No thanks.” Do reviews and the recommendations of friends enhance or take away from your enjoyment of a book?

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Kids, books, and a love of reading: Part Two of two

DaniGirl — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 18:46:36 +0000

In part one of this mini-series on helping your kids to fall in love with books, I talked about a new website full of book suggestions. This post is about a great set of new books that I was offered for review in mid-November. Not just any books, but ~~graphic novels~~ comic books for beginning readers.

I might have mentioned before, we come by a love of comic books honestly in our home. Beloved studied illustration formally before moving on to an animation program, and our basement is crammed to the rafters (literally!) with the paltry remains of his once-legendary comic book collection, largely skewed to the 1980s superhero genre. And at the tender age of six, Tristan is already creating his own comic books. So when the nice people from TOON Books sent me a pitch offering me a couple of free high-end hardcover comic books for beginning readers, I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough.

Here’s the pitch that hooked me:

Since the early days of comics, parents and teachers have experienced a challenge: Kids, even reluctant readers, love comics, but are comics good for them?

With TOON Books, the solution has arrived. Authored by illustrious cartoonists and children book artists, edited with the highest literary standards, and thoughtfully making use of a controlled vocabulary, the new books are perfect for emerging readers ages four and up. The series, developed by Francoise Mouly (Art Editor of The New Yorker) with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (MAUS) as Advisor, builds on a tradition of excellence in children’s literature: young readers will fall in love with these books and return to them over and over again. The luxuriously produced hardcovers are gifts that they’ll treasure for years to come.

They sent us three books: Jack and the Box, Mo and Jo, and Stinky. The very first night, Tristan read the entire Jack and the Box book from cover to cover out loud to Beloved and Simon. That’s 30-odd pages, and he’s only in Grade One. I was so impressed! And it’s not an overly simplistic book either. That’s what I liked about these books, that they’re accessible without being condescending. Beloved and Tristan took turns reading the next two books out loud over the subsequent nights.

The same week we received and devoured our TOON books, Art Spiegelman was interviewed on my favourite radio program, CBC’s Q. There’s an article about the books, and you can listen to his interview from the CBC site. (Gah, the link to the interview from the CBC article doesn’t work. If you’re determined, and it is worth it, go to http://www.cbc.ca/q/pastepisodes.html and scroll down to December 2 to download the podcast of the episode.) It’s really quite fascinating, the philosophy behind reclaiming the comic book genre for beginning readers. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion about how Jack and the Box is even a bit on the scary side, from a child’s point of view, and how they attributed kids with a level of sophistication and cognizance that a lot of beginning-reader books simply do not. They also talk about how comic books add a nuance in expression and interaction that regular picture books do not. Even if you don’t get the books, which I highly recommend, the interview makes for some thoughtful discussion.

Am I raving a bit? It’s genuine. I honestly love these books, and can’t wait to go out and add some more to our collection.

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Kids, books and a love reading: Part One of two

DaniGirl — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:45:32 +0000

I’d originally planned this as one post, but time and my own loquaciousness have deemed that they be separated into parts one and two of a theme: I love reading and by all things holy, my kids shall love to read as well. Lucky for us, I’ve got two great new tools to help with that goal.

The first is a new website designed to help you find books that one celebrity author thinks your kids will love, courtesy of a Mother-Talk blog tour.

James Patterson, one of our generation’s most prolific authors, has taken to heart the cause of getting kids of all ages to love reading. To that end, he recently launched a new website, ReadKiddoRead.com, filled with recommendations to truly great books for kids. From the Mother-Talk pitch I received:

Whether you are still enjoying picture books with your baby or have an older child reading at an advanced level, ReadKiddoRead acts as a resource for finding the best books. Each featured book, hand-selected by Patterson, includes a synopsis, related themes, quotes from critics, links to find the book in any number of locations (including local libraries), and even similar suggested reads. In addition, the website provides resources for finding book discounts and promotions, features interviews and contributions from authors and celebrities.

I signed up for this blog tour because it’s a topic close to my heart, but I was genuinely impressed by the ReadKiddoRead website. It starts with an overview of various age groups and book types. Click on one of them and it will bring you to a list of book ideas in that category with truncated reviews of each one. Click one more time, and you get a full review of the book, including where to buy it, a US library finder (too bad there’s no Canadian equivalent!), a few words from the critics, and a list of a dozen or more “if you like this book, you’ll love this one” suggestions.

They’ve set up a Ning community (you’ll know Ning if you signed up for TwitterMoms or Nablopomo, among others) to discuss ReadKiddoRead and other book ideas for kids.

Just in time for the holidays, if you’re looking for a new book or ten for your favourite kiddies, this is a great place to start. A lot of my board books have been drooled to death, so I might just use the 0 – 2 category for a few suggestions to fill Lucas’s stocking this year!

Coming up next, a set of amazing new books for beginning readers…

Disclosure: I received a $20 amazon gift certificate for participating in this Mother-Talk blog book tour.

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Ten-pages-in book review: In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

DaniGirl — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:28:23 +0000

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written a 10-pages-in book review. This is largely because I am in the year of the series, working my way through all seven Harry Potter books, the His Dark Materials trilogy, Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, and I’m currently in the middle of re-reading one of my all-time favourite series, Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a trilogy in five parts)(snicker). But this isn’t about those books.

The book I’m reading right now is Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I’d seen it mentioned here and there, and it was on the library’s express read shelf. In a fit of optimism (I read quickly, but never seem to have the time to get around to reading lately, and the books are due in seven days) I picked it up. I am so glad I did.

I don’t know if this book would have resonated so deeply with me if I weren’t already in the midst of my own dietary recalibration exercise, but the timing couldn’t have been better. Pollan’s book is an examination of how we in Western society have reduced food to nothing more than nutrients, and asks why in a society completely obsessed with ‘healthy’ eating we are more overweight and more sick than ever before. It’s fascinating reading: part history lesson, part self-help, part diatribe. Even with the library-imposed deadline, I couldn’t put it down.

Why does Pollan think food needs to be defended? He observes that over the last generation or so, we have slowly replaced our intake of actual food with highly processed foodlike substances. He says that in reducing food to its nutritional components (not only macronutrients like proteins, carbohydrates and fats, but micronutrients like omega-3 and vitamins) and reducing the purpose of eating to bodily health, we actually do ourselves considerable harm.

In Defense of Food is broken into three parts. The first is a historical examination of how we came to be in this “age of nutritionism”, as Pollan calls it, and how “fake foods” became so ubiquitous. We in Western culture are so obsessed with the nutritional value of food that we have elevated it to an ideology requiring an “-ism”. Pollan blames the unholy trinity of the food industry, nutrition science and journalism our current mentality, and for propagating misleading and even dangerous dietary recommendations: “[M]ost of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half-century … has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.” Not to mention, he observes, ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan illustrates this in the example of margarine, “the first important synthetic food to slip into our diet.” He notes that margarine was created in the nineteenth century as a cheap substitute for butter, but became the poster child for the anti-saturated-fat movement that began in the 1950s at the advent of nutritionalism. This (albeit lengthy) paragraph illustrates not only Pollan’s point but his rather entertaining style as well:

[M]anufacturers quickly figured out that their product, with some tinkering, could be marketed as better – smarter! – than butter: butter with the bad nutrients removed (cholesterol and saturated fats) and replaced with good nutrients (polyunsaturated fats and then vitamins.) Every time margarine was found wanting, the wanted nutrient could simply be added (Vitamin D? Got it now. Vitamin A? Sure, no problem.) But of course margarine, being the product not of nature but of human ingenuity, could never be any smarter than the nutritionists dictating its recipe, and the nutritionists turned out to be not nearly as smart as they thought. The food scientists’ ingenious method for making healthy vegetable oil solid at room temperature – by blasting it with hydrogen – turned out to produce unhealthy trans fats, fats that we now know are more dangerous than the saturated fats they were designed to replace. Yet the beauty of a processed food like margarine is that it can be endlessly reengineered to overcome even the most embarrassing about-face in nutritional thinking — including the real wincer that its main ingredient might cause heart attacks and cancer. So now the trans fats are gone, and margarine marches on, unfazed and apparently unkillable. Too bad the same cannot be said of an unknown number of margarine eaters.

Fake foods and nutritionism aren’t Pollan’s only targets. He notes that the problem starts in the industrialization of food production. Pollan notes that two-thirds of our daily caloric intake comes from four crops: corn, soy, wheat and rice. Think about that. TWO-THIRDS! Humans are designed to be omnivores, so this kind of restriction — not to mention the lengths to which those four crops are processed — is a completely unnatural diet. He also talks about how the way in which we produce food has slowly eroded the quality of the food in order to improve yields, pointing out that it would take three apples from today to equal the iron content in one apple from the 1940s. He goes so far as to suggest that maybe this “nutritional inflation” is an underlying cause of the obesity epidemic: we are the first generation that is overfed AND undernourished at the same time.

As far as dietary advice, Pollan’s prescription is poetic in its simplicity: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the last third of the book, in which I am currently immersed, he expands upon this advice with a few simple dietary rules of thumb like, “would your great-grandmother recognize it as food” and “don’t eat it if it has ingredients you don’t recognize and/or can’t pronounce.”

It’s an engaging, easy-to-follow and eye-opening account, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. And, as an aside, I think Pollan is the first published writer I’ve ever seen even more in love with the parenthetical interruption of his own stream of thought than I am. Read this book, because it will totally change how you think about food.

Coming up next: integrating these ideas into the Plan B diet.

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Five-thousand pages in: Stephen King’s Dark Tower books

DaniGirl — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:56:52 +0000

Once upon a time, I used to write 10-pages-in book reviews. I haven’t written one in a very long time, and a large part of the reason for that is that I’ve spent the last six months immersed in the seven books that comprise Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series. I got the first four books for Christmas, and settled in to read them just after I finished the Phillip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy. (It was, in retrospect, apparently a dark Christmas.) It was prolly mid-January when I turned the first page of The Gunslinger, and I was reading book three, The Waste Lands, while waiting for the pitocin to ramp up my contractions in the delivery room when Lucas was born. I took a bit of a breather from reading for those first blurry six weeks or so of his life, and have been charging headlong through to the end of the series since then.

To steal a phrase: what a long, strange trip it’s been.

I loved these books. They moved me, they inspired me, and they gave me the creeping willies more than once. Hell, more than a dozen times. They also deeply annoyed me at times, and I rolled my eyes in exasperation in a few places. I don’t think anyone can maintain perfection through a full novel, let alone seven of them, but much like JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, this series was on whole much more good than bad, and the characters and the stories both got deep under my skin and into my head. Especially as I rolled through the last couple of books, I frequently found myself wanting to reach out to Stephen King somehow — to e-mail him, to give him a call, to pace back and forth in front of his fence for a while until he came out for a bit of a palaver*. I wanted to know more, to chew the fat about these characters and this world, to have the chance to savour them just a little bit more.

So what are the books about? This dude named Roland, who lives in a world like ours but not quite ours, is on a quest to the Dark Tower. That’s it in less than 25 words, but it takes about 5,000 pages to get there. It’s about an obsessed man’s single-minded quest, but also about love and friendship and fear and some nasty things that make squelchy noises in the dark — this is, after all, a work by Stephen King. If you’ve read a lot of King’s books, you’ll recognize visiting characters from Hearts in Atlantis, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Stand and a whole whack of others. Towards the end, there’s a surprising homage to the Harry Potter books, and even King himself makes an appearance as a character.

As I’ve written before, I avoided these books for many years. I’d see a new Stephen King book on the bookstore shelves, and then sigh in dismay. “Ugh, another stupid ‘Gunslinger’ book. Bah!” and I’d turn away. In a way, I’m glad I was late to these books, as I truly loved being immersed in the world of the Dark Tower so completely, and for such a long time. The books are set, as I said, in a world like ours but not quite like ours. Eventually, we find out that this world intersects ours, and that there are innumerable parallel worlds (another neat crossover with the central idea of Pullman’s trilogy.) The story weaves back and forth through wheres and whens in this world and others. King has not only sketched a set of alternate universes, but has coloured and contrasted them with their own histories, customs and linguistic quirks. I think this was my favourite part of these books, how rich and textured the worlds are, and after a while it felt less like reading the books and more like inhabiting the worlds. You know how sometimes when you’re reading a fantasy book, it’s like there is a little bit of scenery sort of half-imagined directly around the characters like the shadow of a spotlight, but everything else is kind of hazy? I felt like I could crawl right into these books and the scope of the world(s) around me would just go on forever.

I was fascinated by the fact that this series took Stephen King the best part of his life to write. He started it in 1970, before Carrie was written or published, and finished it a quarter of a century later in 2003. I think that fact contributes to the sprawling, epic feel to the books. In a way, Roland the Gunslinger ages and matures in Stephen King’s real time. Time is major theme in the books, almost a character in its own right.

Stephen King says in the forward to the books that what he wanted to do as a young writer was get inside peoples’ heads. He’s always been able to do that to me, always been able to crawl deep into the tiniest hidey-holes of my soul and shine a light on the bits that I try hard not to think about. In the Dark Tower series, he’s done it again. It’s been called his magnum opus, and I can see why. As I paged relentlessly through the last book of the series, I watched the dwindling amount unread pages with dismay. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll head out into the interwebs to see if I can find a discussion group or fan site somewhere. I’m deeply hooked on Roland and his ka-tet and his quest, and not quite ready to give them up just yet.

*Actual goosebumps raised on my arms when I was reading the afterward to the very final book, and King spoke about how much he values his privacy and how he intentionally obscured details of his location even as he incorporated himself into the stories so as to protect his ever-eroding privacy. To me, it was almost like a personal “thank you” for not disturbing his privacy when I was stalking him that sunny Saturday morning last year. Chills.

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Canadian Children’s Book Week

DaniGirl — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:52:32 +0000

Did you know it’s Canadian Children’s Book Week?

I was looking for information about kids books for something meme-ish, and came across this list of 100 Best Canadian Books for Children, courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, but I have to admit that I’ve only read about ten or so of the books. Some of our favourites made the list, including Paulette Bourgeouis’ Franklin stories, Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie, and Mordechai Richler’s Jacob Two-two Meets the Hooded Fang. (I read this when I was a kid, but haven’t thought of reading it to the boys yet. Hmmm. Note to self: would make a good Christmas gift!) And of course, we are Robert Munsch fans around here, particularly Mortimer, The Mud Puddle, I Have to Go, and Thomas’ Snowsuit — anything but Love You Forever, perhaps the most morbid and disturbing kids’ book ever written.

But in one hundred books, they didn’t find room for some of our very favourites. The boys adore Allen Morgan’s Matthew’s Midnight Adventures series, and they’re the kind of clever and funny books that I don’t mind reading over and over again. We got a copy of Barbara Reid’s Read Me A Book from First Words program when Simon was born, and we were instant fans, and Kerry gave the boys a copy of Reid’s The Subway Mouse. Also thanks to Kerry, we love Linda Bailey’s Stanley’s Party, a charming and funny story about a dog’s adventures when his people leave the house.

But truly, how could any list of Canadian kids’ lit overlook Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater? It’s a national treasure! (Edited to add: a bit of a tangent, but if you haven’t seen it, you must click through and watch the short film based on The Sweater, courtesy of the NFB.)

So, it’s the gift-giving season, and what makes a better gift than books? Fill up our reading list – what are your favourite kids’ books? Bonus points if they’re Canadian!

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One thousand (!)

DaniGirl — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:04:55 +0000

Did you know that the letter A does not appear in the English spelling of any number lower than “one thousand”? Oh, the trivial gifts the Interwebs give to me.

One thousand. Like, a thousand words, or a Thousand Islands. Or, one thousand posts.

Yes, my bloggy peeps, this is my one-thousandth post. One thousand posts in not-quite 34 months. The mind boggles.

You know, I always wanted to be a writer, and I always knew that I had an easy style when it came to stringing words together — but I always feared I had nothing to write about. *snicker*

And now, in honour of my one-thousandth post, a couple of favourite subjects: Books! Memes! BOOK MEMES!!

(Thanks to Raising WEG, from whom I filched this one.)

This list is via the Guardian’s report of the top 20 books re-read by Britons. I’ve italicized those books I’ve read, and bold-faced the books I’ve read more than once.

The Harry Potter Series by JK Rowling
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
1984 by George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee
Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
The Bible
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Hmmm, so I’ve read a lot of books Britons like to read, but didn’t enjoy them enough to re-read them. These books, however, are the first five that come to mind when I think about books that I’ve read more than once, and sometimes more than twice:

Contact, by Carl Sagan
Generation X, by Douglas Coupland
Who Do You Think You Are, by Alice Munro
The Shining, by Stephen King
Shoeless Joe, by WP Kinsella

What books have you found worthy of re-reading?

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10-pages-in book review: The Reincarnationist

DaniGirl — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:45:28 +0000

I don’t usually do sponsored book reviews as 10-pages-in reviews. I try to keep them distinct, partly so you’ll know books I’ve stumbled upon serendipitously versus books I’ve been offered to review, and partly because if someone is going to the trouble of sponsoring a review (in this case, MotherTalk provides a copy of the book and a $20 Amazon gift certificate) the least I can do is read the whole book before reviewing it!

In this case, I’m going to make an exception. I would have likely been curious enough about this book to pick it up on my own anyway. Plus, I didn’t receive it until a week or so ago, and quite frankly – I just haven’t had time to finish it yet! Right now, I’m about two-thirds of the way through.

After all that, on with the review. Today we’re talking about MJ Rose’s The Reincarnationist, a suspense thriller with a historical twist, akin to Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code meets Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian.

Photojournalist Josh Ryder witnesses a terrorist attack in Rome, one that kills a nearby security guard and nearly kills him as well. From that moment onward, he finds himself haunted by waking nightmares, visions and hallucinations he can’t explain. They are flashbacks to Josh’s prior life as Julian, a fourth-century Roman having an illicit affair with the last of the Vestal Virgins.

The narrative swings from Josh’s story to Julian’s and back again. As the narrative leaps from modernity to ancient Rome with stops in between, the reader is drawn deeper into a complex web of interlocking mysteries that include a modern-day murder and the theft of a set of mystical objects called Memory Stones, rumoured to have the power to help the holder know all of his or her past lives.

It’s an intriguing novel and I find myself becoming more drawn into it as the story progresses. I compared it earlier to The Da Vinci Code and The Historian, and I don’t think it’s quite as compelling or well executed as those two novels – although I can’t quite put my finger on the reason why. I wish I had a better feel for Josh – and for Julian, for that matter. I have neither a clear picture in my mind of the character, nor do I quite buy into his behaviour.

Regardless, it’s one of the better books I’ve read this year, an exciting story full of page-turning suspense. There are sinister forces at play, a likeable hero, more than a hint of romance, and a handful of mysteries to be solved. What more could you ask of a book?

What I am particularly enjoying, and frankly wish there was more of, is the philosophical examination of reincarnation. I’m ambivalent about the topic myself – I tend to agree with Hamlet, who said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” So while I won’t discount reincarnation outright, I also can’t say I’ve ever been compellingly convinced of its existence.

I had never really thought before reading this book about why the Catholic Church has such a problem with the idea of reincarnation (I’ll paraphrase it to “we can’t leave the eternal redemption of the unwashed masses in their own hands; whatever will our priests do?”) and found the historical description of the evolution of religion in the early years of the Church quite intriguing. I wish I knew / remembered enough about history to know whether it’s an accurate portrayal.

With a full third of this book left to read, it’s just getting really good now, and I’m quite hooked. Divergent story lines are just starting to come together, and I’m curious to see how it all comes out. If you’re curious, you can read more about The Reincarnationist on author MJ Rose’s website.

So, what do you think about the whole reincarnation thing? Were you a peasant farmer or wealthy noblesse in a past life? Or is this your one and only kick at the can?

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