Reading Life 20

Mercy on these Teenage Chimps by Gary Soto

Gary Soto hits another out of the ballpark with this hilarious novel about boys growing up, finding love, and building up their friendship. Ronnie and Joey, best friends and recently turned 13, have devolved into U-G-L-Y, ugly! They look in the mirror and their noses are flatter than they were before, their ears a huge, they love to climb trees, and they eat bananas any and every chance they get. Ronnie can down a banana in three bites, even. So it makes sense for them to think they've turned into chimpanzees--not monkeys, you understand, because monkeys have tails and Ronnie and Joey don't, so chimps it has to be.

Oh, like boys will, they find trouble around every corner, and when Joey climbs the rafters of the gym to retrieve a balloon for a girl he's taken a liking to, the coach embarrasses the fire out of him in front of everyone attending the sports banquet, which means, for a chimp, that he will climb a tree in his front yard and hide. He's got it easy up there, though, with his IPod, a small tv set, a bowl of fruit, and inflatable mattress, and so many more ameneties; the only thing missing, just about, is the kitchen sink. Ronnie is on a quest, then: and how funny the messes he finds himself in.

This is the best Soto's written in a while; I'd argue it's his best and funniest ever! A must read, and a great title to add to your Soto reading unit; might even be good enough to replace Baseball in April. Maybe.

Life 4

My brother read the blog and he wanted me to add that his best 10K time is 41:06. He does very well in his particular age group, and I bet one of these days he'll actually come close to catching up to the lead pack. Maybe. Love you, Bro.

More ALA Awards Announced! More of My Two-Cents

This year marks the first for ALA to hand out the Odyssey Award for Excellence in Audiobook Production. And the prize goes to Jazz (by father-son team, Walter Dean and Christopher Myers), the audio part of which is produced by Arnie Cardillo; the audio product is described on Live Oak Media's website: "original music was composed for each poem and performed by a live jazz ensemble, while two outstanding jazz vocalists alternate with narration and song." Booklist Magazine is sponsoring the award.

This is a very exciting award because it is helping to redefine "literacy." It used to be easy, right? Words in books and the ability to decode them, to make meaning out of them. But with this award, this other kind of "reading" is validated. Several months ago, I was instant messaging with my brother, Eddy, and we were discussing what all we were reading. In my mind, before I knew how my brother was reading, I knew we were having one of the best talks on literature ever. I forget the details of the talk (what books, what topics, etc. and I know I can always check the history of an IM, but man, I'm so lazy), but it was deeper than he and I had ever gone before in terms of this kind of discussion. I mean, for a numbers guy, the kid was really impressing me. Me, a PhD in Literature, right? Come to find out, every time he said, "I'm reading this title or that," or "When I finished reading this or that title," or any number of other phrases in which he used the word "read" and its variations, he meant he was listening to the book in downloadable MP3 format. My baby brother is constantly training for 10Ks and so when he's out at night running, he's listening (read "reading") to books, and our talks about these books didn't suffer as a result. Had I not known he was listening to them and had he been a student in one of my lit classes, I would've given him all As, and not just because he's my brother and I love him, but because he knew what he was talking about.

Sure, some folks might argue that it's shortcut reading, much like watching the film version, but rare is the time that in film that you reproduce the book entire, without one blemish, without once straying, or having to make allowances for creative freedoms on the part of the screenwriter and or director and or editor and or actor(s). When you've got the audio version of the book, you've got, usually, some 7 hours worth of book, unabridged. And the only allowance you have to make for creative freedom is who's going to read it and how. Actors interpreting a writer's words, but they're the same exact words. And if a kid's having a hard time reading through a book on his own but he wants to do it, why not supplement the event with the voiced version? Why not, if a kid's a voracious reader, let her listen to yet another book (read "read") while in the car going back and forth to school or to the mall or on a long trip? It can't be the only thing a student "reads" (read "listens to") for class. He actually has to read read and show not just proficiency but improvement. But this format just might be what he needs to get on the ball.

Adolescent LitBlog 2

Wong, Janet S. Behind the Wheel: Poems About Driving. NY: McElderry Books, 1999.

What I enjoy about Wong's poetry is that she plays with voices. I have to be careful or I'll miss it and miss the point of the poem. In "Plain and Simple," for example, the poet asks, "…would you know who I am?" after describing the car she drives: a "…rusting Civic, bland / nothing much to shout about--." Immediately following is the car's response: it may not be the Land Rover, the Avanti, nor the Citroen the poet dreams after, but it is a car to be counted on. If I read without paying mind, I'll think the poem stinks because it just doesn't make sense. Something else I appreciate is that much of the poetry is in free verse*. In the next poem, "Prisoner," Wong relies on sound and rhythm rather than rhyme or other more traditional poetic devices. There is a quickness in the repetition of the phrase "and you don't know" that mimics the mother's confusion and anxiety. In "Restraint," Wong is not writing from her vantage point but from that of a student who spent the day at a writing workshop with the poet who "…came / to visit our school / to make us write some poetry." The rest of the poem describes how this student is awed by a peer's use of imagery: parents as seatbelts, always wrapped around the kid, but perhaps there for safety's sake: and all the persona can come up with is parents as airbags, waiting for trouble to hit, and then they strike out, "in your face." There is a hidden depth to many of these poems. We just have to look for the treasures.
*Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry (1994) argues that free verse "is not, of course, free. It is free from formal metrical design, but it certainly isn't fee from some kind of design" (67).

ALA Awards Announced! and My Two-Cents

The Newbery Medal goes to Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Meieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz (Candlewick), while honors are given too Christopher Paul Curtis's Elijah of Buxton, Gary D. Schmidt's The Wednesday Wars, and Jacqueline Woodson's Feathers. A surprise indeed that Schmidt didn't take the medal or Curtis since much talk on different blogs and boards have mentioned them over and over. No one had mentioned the Schlitz work. Never the less, congrats to these writers.

The Printz Award this year goes to The White Darkness (HarperTempest) by Geraldine McCaughrean (while I thought Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was a shoe-in; just goes to show how little I know). Honors were doled out to Dreamquake: Book Two fo the Dreamhunter Duet by Elizabeth Knox, One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke, Repossessed by A. M. Jenkins, and Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath. Again, kudos to these authors.

The Caldecott Medal was awarded to Brian Selznick for his massive book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (a pleasant surprise because one normally thinks this award will be given to a more traditional picture book (that is, a 32-pager, large format; while Selznick's is a book, looking more like a thick novel), encouraging like last year's Printz award given to Yang for his graphic novel American Born Chinese, forcing teachers and librarians to rethink the novel, and now the picture book). Honors were given to Henry's Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad (Kadir Nelson, illustrator), First the Egg (Laura Vaccaro Seeger, illustrator and author), The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (Peter Sis, illustrator and author), and Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity (Mo Willems, illustrator and author). Disappointing is that Christopher Myers didn't get the nod for his wonderful and magical Jabberwocky: The Classic Poem from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There: Reimagined and Illustrated by…."

The Belpré Award, sadly, was not given to me! Boo hoo boo hoo. Bring out the violins. For illustration, the prize went to Yuyi Morales for Los Gatos Black on Halloween (though I think her own Little Night goes to show her worth as author and illustrator and is more deserving of this particular honor, though I guess it can't get the recognition because it isn't particularly Latino in nature). Margarita Engle received the prize for author for her The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano. This would be the only title on the list that isn't a picture book, per se. Which seems odd to me (and might seem like sour grapes to you) because it was a good year for novels by and about Latinoa/as: Gary Soto wrote a hilarious novel, Mercy on These Teenage Chimps; Malin Alegria penned Sofi Mendoza's Guide to Getting Lost in Mexico; then there's La Linea by Ann Jaramillo; and (here're the sour grapes) my own The Whole Sky Full of Stars; plus several more, I'm sure.

Adolescent LitBlog 1

Crowe, Chris. "Young Adult Literature: Rescuing Reluctant Readers." English Journal 88.5 (May 1995): 113-16.
In speaking of his son, Jonathan (a self-described "reluctant reader," Chris Crowe writes, "…I know that, unfortunately, he's not all that unusual.…" (114). That is, Jonathan, who is very intelligent and academically successful in all his classes, classifies himself among those who stereotypically are not so educationally adept, it makes sense that those "others," the not-so-smarts, wouldn't like to read. They come from this background or another, they are unfortunates for one cause or this other one. But not the smarties, right? They will love to read because they know how to read. And please, this Jonathan kid, he's Chris Crowe's son, for goodness' sake. Of all kids in his class, his whole school for that matter, Jonathan will love to read. But such is not the case. What does this say, then, about our methodology when it comes to exposing our kids to literature? But how rich an article is Crowe's: Jonathan gives us these awesome bits of advice that all teachers should keep in mind when assigning a book to read, among them number 10: "Don't decide what students have to read. Let them choose for themselves" (115).

Crowe, Chris. "Young Adult Literature: Dear Teachers: Please Help My Kids Become Readers." English Journal 89.1 (Sept. 1999): 139-42.

I love that Crowe encourages us "to work consciously to help my become readers" (139, italics mine). In other words, if our students are to fall truly head over heels in love with reading, we teachers cannot leave anything to chance. On the surface of our class, everything must appear seamless, smooth; I must never let my students see me sweat; beneath the surface, though, we must invest our blood, sweat, and tears so that our students get the impression that everything is cool with me, with the class, with the reading, and therefore with their reading in class and out. Now, this doesn't mean I over-plan; that will come through, and the kids will smell it on me if I do. But I can't rely on some kind of magic dust that will transform my alliterates, non-, and reluctant readers into honest-to-goodness readers in love with the act of reading. Oh, would that this dust existed, but it doesn't. Instead, we work at getting it done, day in, day out, year after year. It's that easy. It's that hard.

Reading Life 19

Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick

To be honest , I must admit upfront (to my shame) that I've had my copy of this book some 5 years, just sitting there on my shelf, first in my office in South Texas where I taught, and then in my office at Texas Tech University. I'd never felt compelled to read it, and yet, a couple of days ago for some reason I picked it up and haven't been able to put it down until now when I finished it. Come to find out, the book's part of one thread on a list I'm on: a principal in Texas didn't want her middle-schoolers to read the book because of stuff she'd read about it. Fortunately, she is a thinking principal (in my estimation), one of those worth their weight in platinum and gold and other various and sundry precious metals. Instead of relying on hearsay, she relied on the book itself, what Kevin (Freak) calls "a four-letter word for truth serum." Libraries are places "where they keep the truth serum, and the magic carpets." And in reading this book, both this principal and I have gotten our shot of truth. It's a wonderful book, and this administrator has realized it. So her students will be able to read it, from what I can tell in the postings. Thanks to her, thanks to the educator at the school who stood up for the book, for the truths in the book, for the characters, Maxwell, the freakishly gigantic boy, and Kevin, the boy born with a defect that keeps him small on the outside while his insides grown normally. These two are the unlikeliest of friends, but they bond, almost literally. Kevin rides high on Max's shoulders, and they become Freak the Mighty, knights of the old order out to hunt and slay dragons, to aide damsels in distress, and to go on one quest after another. I won't say more about the storyline. I'll say this, though: it was my mistake for not having read it a long time ago.