It's hard to turn the page when your fingers are frozen...

We have held off turning our heat on, fearing overwhelming gas bills in addition to the large electricity tab running every month. But the cold has proved itself a constant, and our efforts to stave off the chill in our apartment have gone largely unrewarded. This morning, the space heater, which I have taken to snuggling like a romantic partner, broke down.

So it's me, a heating pad, a sea of blankets, and an effort to read without exposing my fingers. Maybe the Snuggie people have it right - I am having trouble moving my arms without losing some of the blanket's protection. Still, I will not pay twenty bucks to wear a robe backwards, even if it means reading underneath the blanket... and missing out on a cool and useful complimentary booklight.

This week has been a fairly good one for reading. I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go last weekend, followed it up with the surprising The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, Francisco Stork's follow-up to this year's acclaimed Marcelo in the Real World. I'm now a bit more than halfway through Michael Adams' funny and brisk year-long quest to find the worst movie ever made, Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies. Adams' doesn't have the innate charm of other year chroniclers, notably AJ Jacobs, and the heart of the text doesn't completely make-up for the format's limitations, but still, it's an easygoing, even compelling study of what makes a "bad" film and what makes a truly terrible film, told with enthusiasm by the likable Adams.

If I don't freeze to death, I'll finish that one today. Then it's back on kids' upcoming releases. There's a new one coming out by Esperanza Rising author Pam Munoz Ryan that I've got to check out, and several from Random House that look great. I also might give Scott Westerfield's Leviathan a shot. I've been in a bit of a steampunk mood, ever since discovering this fantastic Etsy shop, but because I'd have to finish The Court of the Air to read its just released follow-up, maybe I'll stick with the new Westerfield.

And of course, there's always book #2 in the Shelf Discovery Reading Challenge. Oh, and I have to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid before Mother-Daughter Book Club on Thursday.

So much to read, so little time, so little heat. Let's hope that gets fixed soon.

PEN USA 2009 Literary Award Winners

I'm a nut for award season. I don't really care all that much about reading the big award books - it is especially the case in kids' lit that a lot of the best stuff never gets recognized by the established, prestigious award groups - but, like one would keep track of the general top teams of the a current sports season, I like to stay aware of what's making the grade and getting those classy gold stickers.

The PEN USA Literary Awards are little more expansive than your run-of-the-mill accolades. Of course, they have major winners for fiction, two distinct lines of non-fiction, poetry, childrens, etc. But they also name winners for teleplay and screenplay, both categories delivering wins to very deserving works this time around
[though, of the two AMC programs, Mad Men is my favored].

Visit the website for more information on the 2009 Lit Awards.

PEN USA 2009 Winners:
Fiction - KIM BARNES • A Country Called Home (Alfred A. Knopf)
Creative Nonfiction - STEVE LOPEZ • The Soloist (G.P. Putnam's Sons)
Research Nonfiction - LESLIE T. CHANG • Factory Girls (Spiegel & Grau)
Poetry - SEIDO RAY RONCI • The Skeleton of the Crow (Ausable Press)
Children’s Literature - KATHI APPELT • The Underneath (Atheneum Books for Young
Readers)
Translation - MAXINE CHERNOFF & PAUL HOOVER • Selected Poems of
Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Publishing)
Journalism - KAREN OLSSON • Before and After (Texas Monthly)
Drama - MARISELA TREVINO ORTA • Braided Sorrow (El Centro Su
Teatro)
Teleplay - GEORGE MASTRAS • Breaking Bad: "Crazy Handful of Nothin’"
(Sony/Gran Via/Highbridge)
Screenplay - DUSTIN LANCE BLACK • Milk (Newmarket Press)

As far as awards go, my quick favorites are the Man Booker, Newberry, the Pen/Faulkner, and the Hugo. I also look forward to hearing about the Printz Award every year, but mostly to debate and disagree with their choices. They play it too safe.

Do you have any award favorites? Ones you look forward to hearing about as soon as award season starts?

It's hard to hold a book while you're blowing your nose...

Maybe it was the recycled, shared air in the Dealers' Room at Horror Realm on Saturday. It was probably the inevitable consequence of everyone around me getting sick. Both colleagues and friends have been succumbing to the same cold for the past few weeks, and I somehow managed to evade it... until now.

Being sick during time off isn't ideal, but at least I don't feel any pressure to do stuff. Lacking a significant stretch of time or abundance of funds, a sleepy staycation seemed like a decent idea. Having a cold makes homebody-ness necessary.

Reading while sick has its ups and downs. Not all books are cold-day books. It's too easy to be distracted from reading that is particularly dense or dry. Eyes are quick to tire of very small type and minimal margins. Even the coloration of a book's pages can affect its readability.

A lot of people use their sick day reading to indulge in guilty pleasures, cheesy romances or mysteries featuring a weekly knitting club's members set in a small, New England town. While I'll use being sick on the couch as an excuse to watch terrible, unforgivably bad movies (I have Fear Net and I'm not afraid to use it), my patience for clumsy or convoluted writing is worn especially thin when sick. That's not to say I'm paging through Violence by Slavoj Zizek or attempting, for the umpteenth time, James Joyce's Ulysses. Rather, things that will escape my notice when I'm reading amidst a current of activity are more likely to trigger my annoyance when being read in a vacuum of lonely sick time in bed.

Bad writing can be exhausting. So can really good writing. When you're sick, the last thing you want to do is struggle with what you're reading. I tend toward the humorous, subtly crafted literary fiction (Zadie Smith is a good example - an author of extraordinary talent, but whose work doesn't itch with trial or writerly posturing), magical children's fiction, and light or pop culture-centered non-fiction.

Food writing is fairly safe - During a particularly bad cold last year, I devoured several food-related biographies and chronicles, including the enchanting Alice Waters and Chez Panisse by Thomas McNamee, as well Waiter Rant, The Devil in the Kitchen by Marco Pierre White, and My Life in France by Julia Child. The episodic nature of most food-related tales lends itself to the pick-up-put-down habits of sick reading. Plus, it's fun to think about frivolous things like a nice meal when you're drowning in snot-clotted tissues and orange juice.

Short stories are suitable in similar fashion - finish one, and you feel fairly accomplished in your sick state. Go for writers whose simplicity works on multiple levels of sophistication, and whose plots and characters are good enough to make-up for the possible delay of mental faculties to put together more complex thoughts of symbol, theme, and tone. Raymond Carver is a perfect example. I'm also a longtime devotee of Alice Munro - any of her collections will do, but I cut my teeth on Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories. Two very good recent short story collections: Barb Johnson's New Orleans tapestry More of This World or Maybe Another and Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, a spectacular debut collection of short fiction by Kevin Wilson.

Graphic novels are always good - the emphasis on visuals relieves strain on the eyes. I go for lean serials in favor of longer tomes. I've mentioned it before, but Y: The Last Man will make anyone a convert to the comic form. A sharp, funny, and surprising series surmising what would happen if a global plague wiped out every male on Earth... except one. I've recently dug into Vertigo's other big series, Fables, a clever take on well-known fairy tale characters and tropes.

Any sick day reading suggestions? How do you spend your sick days?

Book Blogger Appreciation Week!

Thanks to the ever-excellent Boston Bibliophile, I have learned not just of Book Blogger Appreciation Week {September 14 - 18), but also this fun reading meme from the sight for Tuesday, September 15th.

And, as always, I'm more than happy to indulge in a reading meme.


Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack? Sometimes - I do a lot of reading while commuting, and that doesn't really lend itself to another activity. Favorite reading snack? Chinese noodles or cheese and crackers.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you? I don't mark my books, but it doesn't horrify me. Every once in a while, I'll highlight a sentence in a non-fiction book I'm reading.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Both - I make bookmarks out of just about anything, including the corners of pages.

Laying the book flat open? I've gotten better about not doing that.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both? Both, in unequal proportions. I try to get a good amount of non-fiction in there, but I admit to falling off in favor of a good YA title or two.

Hard copy or audiobooks? Mostly hard copies, but the occasional audiobook is nice - we get promos every once in a while, which is awesome, but I mostly give mine to my mother, who is a junkie for audiobooks.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point? Depends on the book.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away? Absolutely. I do the same when I come across any bit of information that I want to know more about.

What are you currently reading? Just finished the wonderful Impossible by Nancy Werlin. Just picked up The Magician's Elephant, the new one by Kate DiCamillo.

What is the last book you bought? Dinosaur vs. Bedtime by Bob Shea, a picture book about a dinosaur triumphing over various challengers, including a pile of leaves and a bowl of spaghetti. Dinosaur wins!



Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time? I can really only do one at a time.

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read? In the sun box (or generally in my living room), mid-afternoon.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books? Stand alone. I never keep up on series. Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games is the rare exception.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over? Depends on the person I'm recommending to. However, I've pretty much shilled The Hunger Games to anyone who would listen.

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?) Once I have permanent and collection-encompassing shelves, I will organize. Until then, my library remains a hodgepodge of this and that. I want to separate the adult and kids titles, however, with a special area devoted to YA.

friday finds

It was a busy week, and this week is going to be even busier at the store, as Monday marks the first of our week-long Band Camp. I'm armed with random junk, kazoos, poster board, and Ann Wiseman's beyond excellent Making Music. The first day of June's Superhero Camp was pretty rough, but I have a better idea of what to expect, and hopefully with something more tangible as teaching basics of music and rhythm to the kids, there will be more active things to do and discuss.

But I don't want to just do Friday Finds (as fun as it is to keep track of my incoming books), so I'll try to keep the blog as fresh as possible this week. I finished both Knife of Never Letting Go and the upcoming Candor, and there's a lot to discuss regarding both books. I didn't intentionally seek out two like texts, but in the process of finishing Candor, I realized that there were a lot of parallels to both its and KNLG's storylines. Both feature male protagonists who are both insiders to their horrifying worlds, but outsiders because of the presence of disparate perspectives and willingness to defy the momentum of the status quo. So, hopefully, more on both of those books later this week.

Onto the Friday Finds! Only a day or so after my last Friday Finds post, I received a big box of Random House ARCs, and I have to say that this may have been one of the best promotional boxes I've gotten in a long time. I put a lot of the books on my galley shelves in the storage closet, but I snagged a large amount for myself. Among the selections in the box:

- A two-in-one ARC for the Looking Glass Library release of The Book of Dragons by E. Nesbit and The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald.

- Dream Life by Lauren Mechling, the follow-up to Dream Girl Coming out January 2010.

- Party by Tom Leveen - Entitled teens at a party - Yay for underage debauchery! Coming out April 2010.

- The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History by Adam Selzer - I love The Smart Aleck's Guide series, and I still hold a fondness for Dave Barry's Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, so I'm looking forward to this one. It's coming out December 2009, and I think it could be a great Christmas sell.

- The Sixty-Eight Rooms by Marianne Malone. Truth be told, the cover sucked me in one this one, but as I learned with The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, sometimes that's all you need to clue you into a great read. This is an art mystery, similar in sound to Blue Balliet, Mystery of the Third Lucretia, etc. Comes out February 2010.

- The Knife That Killed Me by Anthony McGowan. High School-set thriller coming out April 2010.

- All Unquiet Things by Anna Jarzab. Mystery thriller, featuring the mean, rich, elite of a private school. I don't read enough murder mysteries featuring bitchy teenagers. This one looks like it will be more than a cut above the rest. Comes out January of 2010.

- Ostrich Boys by Keith Gray. Three boys strike revenge on those they believe responsible for their friend's death. Set in England and Scotland, I'm very, very excited for this one. Coming out March 2010. [By the way, kudos to Random House for getting these ARCs out super early. It's not always a great thing to be laden down with galleys, especially if you get them only a month or so before the release date. Getting them far in advance gives you a chance to really get into each title, increasing the publisher's chances of having you not just read the book, but enthuse about it, build up excitement about it, etc.]

-Notes From the Dog, the latest release by Gary Paulsen, who has always been hit or miss with me, but this one sounds pretty promising. It comes out this Tuesday, so I'm hoping to get a jump on this title. Also, I'm chasing after Wendy Lamb books these days, because I've had such good experiences with their releases.

-Split by Swati Avasthi. Another March 2010 release, this one an intense coming of age about a runaway moving in with his estranged brother.

So, those were my RH box grabs - There were at least three or four other books that I left on the shelves that I may go back for. Right now, I'm going to try and get through at least one of these galleys a week.

Other grabs:

- The Writing Class by Jincy Willett - Because I am a cheap bastard at heart, I was waiting for this one to come out in paperback. Not that I don't think she's every bit worth the twenty-some dollars for the hardback. Willett may be my favorite writer, and I've only read Winner of the National Book Award. I just started this one, and even though I'm only ten pages in, I'm pretty sucked in. And as a former English Lit/writing student, the use of a creative writing workshop as a backdrop for a murder mystery appeals to every bit of my sense of humor.

-A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century by Jane Vandenburgh. I've read quite a bit about this memoir, and I've liked the sound of it, so when I saw this in a box of ARCs, I grabbed it immediately. I don't tend to jump into memoirs like I used to, but I'll give this one a read very soon.

That's it for the finds. Wish every week could be as lucrative in books (although my bookshelves must certainly be relieved that this kind of windfall only happens occasionally).

Where the Wild Things Are trailer

I can't make assurances for the movie. I can't make guarantees. I wasn't entirely optimistic about this project when it was announced. And I'm still a little dubious. BUT...

...trailer looks freaking awesome. Breathtaking, really.

Watch it. Watch it now. Look, I put it below, just for you lazies who don't want to be bothered.