(It's my birthday, ya'll)

Dear 24.

We know you don't like being told what to do, because you are headstrong and independent and have been since the very first day you exited the womb, all blue and covered in viscera. The establishment, however, feels that, since we are somewhat of a package deal, perhaps you could do with a re-assessment of your priorities on this, the anniversary of your 24th revolution around your brightest, hottest star. 23 was not bad, we're not saying it was bad, we're just saying that there might be room for improvement. Might be being the operative words here; are you listening? Okay.

24, we will require that you continue to follow your absolute own determination in matters of looks, style, personality, humor, eloquence, and gender assignment. As if anybody besides the covenant of academia could ever make you do or be anything that you were not planning on inhabiting already; as scholar and gentleman Mr. T once said, "I pity the fool". However, we urge you, 24, to continue to try to deeper understand the frailty and sensitivity of human life. Please complete your assignment of making room for the different aspects of being that keep violently occurring, as if out of nowhere, all around you. These specimens are of utmost importance, and it is the truly exotic ones that will, most likely, supply you with the most vital information.

Please, remember patience, while balancing the furtive notion that at all times, and all around you, clocks are forever ticking. Keep a certain stillness in your heart, or at least try, even when you are being the most ridiculous clown you seem hell-bent on being despite our every desperate effort. 24, please be more careful with your stubborn heart, but not too careful. Try to lead by example, let hope spring eternal, and believe that some, if not most, if not all people are generally, fundamentally, or at least partially good and wish to visit good, in turn, upon the earth. Cling to that notion of goodness as if it were the inflatable safety raft of your loss at sea.

Please maintain calm. We will reconvene in approximately 365 days, upon which we will evaluate your performance and will instate 25 as your successor. Please take care of the husk and its many physical needs accordingly, and remember, it never rains but it pours, throw excess salt over your right shoulder, 42, and the first rule of Italian race car driving: what's behind you is not important.

Hear Ye Hear Ye

In case you haven't heard, this past Monday revealed the ALA 2012 Youth Media Awards -- you may know this better as the Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, and other prestgious awards that are given each year.  We all have our mixed feelings of this year's picks, but we encourage you to form your own:

John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature:
-Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos
-Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai (honor)
-Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin (honor)

Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children:
-A Ball for Daisy  illustrated and written by Chris Raschka
-Blackout  illustrated and written by John Rocco (honor)
-Grandpa Green  illustrated and written by Lane Smith (honor)
-Me … Jane  illustrated and written by Patrick McDonnell (honor)

Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in literature written for young adults:
-Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
-Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler (honor)

-The Returning by Christine Hinwood (honor)
-Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey (honor)
-The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater (honor)

Coretta Scott King (Author) Book Award recognizing an African American author and illustrator of outstanding books for children and young adults:
-Kadir Nelson (author and illustrator of Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans)
-Eloise Greenfield (author of The Great Migration: Journey to the North) (honor)
-Patricia C. McKissack (author of Never Forgotten) (honor)

Coretta Scott King (Illustrator) Book Award:
Shane W. Evans (illustrator and author of Underground: Finding the Light to Freedom)
Kadir Nelson (illustrator and author of Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans)

Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement:
Ashley Bryan is the winner of the Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime achievement. The award, which pays tribute to the quality and magnitude of beloved children’s author Virginia Hamilton.

Schneider Family Book Award for books that embody an artistic expression of the disability experience:
-Close to Famous by Joan Bauer
-Wonderstruck: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick
-The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen

Alex Awards for the 10 best adult books that appeal to teen audiences:
-Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin,
-In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
-The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan
-The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens by Brooke Hauser
-The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
-Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
-Robopocalypse: A Novel by Daniel H. Wilson
-Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
-The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures by Caroline Preston
-The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

Andrew Carnegie Medal for excellence in children's video:
- Children Make Terrible Pets (Weston Woods Studios, Inc.  The video is based on the book written by Peter Brown)

Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults:
Susan Cooper is the 2012 Edwards Award winner. (The Dark is Rising Sequence)

Mildred L. Batchelder Award for an outstanding children's book translated from a foreign language and subsequently published in the United States:
-Soldier Bear (Dutch) by Bibi Dumon Tak
-The Lily Pond (Swedish) by Annika Thor (honor)

Odyssey Award for best audiobook produced for children and/or young adults, available in English in the United States:
-Rotters by Daniel Kraus and narrated by Kirby Heyborne.
-Ghetto Cowboy by G. Neri and narrated by JD Jackson (honor)
-Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt and narrated by Lincoln Hoppe (honor)
-The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater and narrated by Steve Westand Fiona Hardingham (honor)
-Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt and narrated by Wendy Carter.

Pura Belpré (Illustrator) Award honoring a Latino writer and illustrator whose children's books best portray, affirm and celebrate the Latino cultural experience:
-Diego Rivera: His World and Ours illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh
-The Cazuela that the Farm Maiden Stirred illustrated by Rafael López (honor)
-Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match illustrated by Sara Palacios (honor)

Pura Belpré (Author) Award:
-Under the Mesquite written by Guadalupe Garcia McCall
-Hurricane Dancers: The First Caribbean Pirate Shipwreck written by Margarita Engle (honor)
-Maximilian and the Mystery of the Guardian Angel: A Bilingual Lucha Libre Thriller written by Xavier Garza (honor)

Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award for most distinguished informational book for children:
-Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade by Melissa Sweet
-Black & White: The Confrontation between Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor written by Larry Dane Brimnerand (honor)
-Drawing from Memory by Allen (honor)
-The Elephant Scientist by Caitlin O’Connell and Donna M. Jackson (honor)
-Witches!: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem by Rosalyn Schanzerand (honor)

Stonewall Book Award -Mike Morgan & Larry Romans Children’s & Young Adult Literature Award given annually to English-language children’s and young adult books of exceptional merit relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience:
-Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy by Bil Wright
-a + e 4ever by Ilike Merey (honor)
-Money Boy by Paul Yee (honor)
-Pink by Lili Wilkinson (honor)
-With or Without You by Brian Farrey (honor)

Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for the most distinguished beginning reader book:
 -Tales for Very Picky Eaters by Josh Schneider
-I Broke My Trunk by Mo Willems (honor)
-I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen (honor)
-See Me Run by Paul Meisel (honor)

William C. Morris Award for a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens:
-Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
-Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson (finalist)
-Paper Covers Rock by Jenny Hubbard (finalist)
-Under the Mesquite by Guadalupe Garcia McCall (finalist)
-Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys (finalist)

YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults honors the best nonfiction book published for young adults, ages 12 – 18, each year:
-The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism & Treachery by Steve Sheinkin
-Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom and Science by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos (finalist)
-Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition by Karen Blumenthal, (finalist)
-Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way)by Sue Macy (finalist)
-Music Was It: Young Leonard Bernstein by Susan Goldman Rubin (finalist)
 
Come on in or shop online at http://www.brooklinebooksmith-shop.com/.

For more information on the ALA youth media awards and notables, please visit the ALA Web site at www.ala.org.

Destination: East Anglia

If you have ever asked Lisa here at Booksmith for a book recommendation, you were probably regaled with an elaborately structured oral term paper on the book in question, and, very likely, you walked out of the store with said book tucked underarm. The art of the book review is a difficult skill to master, as any reader of the NYRB can tell you, and to give one verbally, on demand, is a talent few readers possess. So when Lisa told me about her latest read, Edmund deWaal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes, I listened with rapt attention, to learn not only about the book, but about the art of talking about books. An art cultivated in bookstore aisles.

De Waal's narrative follows the history of his family's inheritance--a collection of netsuke, Japanese wood and ivory carvings--through the Parisian and Viennese art worlds until the family's wealth was dispersed during WWII. To get a full review of the book, come on in and ask for Lisa. When she told me about the book, she compared it to Sebald. I stopped her. "Wait...who?!"

I had just begun reading W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn the night before. Delighted with the coincidence, we began to discuss the author. I just mentioned Sebald to a customer, Lisa told me, who had not only read him, but coincidentally, had recently published an article about him. This customer's father, I learned when I read his article for myself, had once left England for a walking tour in Germany. In Rings of Saturn, Sebald, a German, takes the reader on a walking tour of England.

Such coincidences are not uncommon in a bookstore, and, in fact, abound in the works of Sebald. To Sebald, everything is connected, so that to say he takes the reader on a walking tour of East Anglia is a gross understatement. Sebald's work is travel narrative at its fullest, a deeply-layered, multi-faceted exploration of what it is to travel, not only to new spaces, but across time. Sebald describes each place he encounters not only for what it is, but for what it has become through a culmination of its history, science, culture, and environment. He examines the wars, the explorations, the inventions, the everyday lives, and uncommon deaths that occured in these landscapes over centuries. The result is a meditative masterpiece of modern literature--a hidden inheritance for any reader to discover--that will have you running to your nearest bookstore to find someone to share such a journey with. We can't wait to hear about it.

Herakut, why you need to know that name

Take this home. I promise it will explode all over your living room.

For four remarkably productive years, the graffiti loving and street art affiliated "storytellers," Hera and Akut, have combined their artistic skills and individual specialties in order to create one odd but always exquisitely beautiful, instantly recognizable style: Herakut. It's an extremely contradictory mix of ingredients - Akut's autodidactic but top-level photorealism and Hera's classically educated though Don't-Give-A-Shit-roughness - that results in a surprisingly well-balanced fusion of respect for each other's qualities and the shared urge to capture life's anecdotes with brush and spray can. For the second time this book explores the interpersonal and creative processes behind the duo's murals and canvas paintings, which have attracted the attention of the international art scene.

The images are stunning, a little girl pealing out of a body suit of an older obese woman, "play ageing"


Mothers and children wearing animal skulls, or live heads, representing some performitive aspect of species, and perhaps gender identities

Guns, alcohol, children, flowers all enormous building sized murals offer both hilarity and haunt.

Fierce and surprising contrasts of violence and innocence make these artists unequalled.

This is an incredible book for your table, for some inspiration, and for a challenge.

Then buy their first book

Sign of the Times

Many moons ago, before I even worked at the Booksmith, I came here regularly to unload my books in the UBC. I'm from a smallish town in the Northwest, so when I came into the store with a book SIGNED by the author, I thought Carl, the buyer at the time (and now my colleague!) would be so IMPRESSED, so EXCITED, that he would buy the book and put it in a special glass case for all to marvel upon. My fantasy was short lived as I pointed out the book was signed to him and he simply shrugged.

How could he not care that the author who wrote this book ALSO SIGNED HIS NAME IN IT?! Now that I've been around for a bit, I've come to understand that it was because 1) there are a lot of authors in the area, and a lot of signings, so signed books ain't so rare and 2) not all authors are created equal (story of my LIFE), and the only authors whose signatures are worth $$$ are sadly but-a-handful.

cartoon by Andrew Weldon

I'd say that the mission of the Used Book Cellar is to contain books you want to read, or will want to once you see them because they are weird and/or unique, and at a good price. We're a general-interest kind of shop, no super-academic books, no ultra-rare and expensive things. We're more about reading and less about making a museum to the book object. So we pass on a lot of antiquarian, rare books that may be worth a lot because we're more interested in carrying books for readers. If you have a signed book, we might take it because we think it will sell, but unfortunately only in extremely rare cases will an autograph affect the book's value. We get more offers from people who want to sell us signed books than we get requests for people who want to buy signed books. It's basically just a supply-and-demand thing. Nothing personal!

In Which We Join Our Heroine On The Cusp Of Something Super Duper Serious, Namely, Viral Videos.

There's this thing that just started happening on the internet, and it began with the "Stuff* Girls Say" video. It feels stupid to say it "went viral" (because I never liked that saying, this isn't small pox okay) but it kinda went viral.

The videos, for by now, there are 3, consist of Graydon Sheppard, (Toronto-based writer and filmmaker) in drag playing a fairly simple minded "anygirl" reciting quick one liners of dialogue off of Sheppard's twitter, (Stuff* Girls Say) co-created by his friend, Kyle Humphrey. Since the video is essentially calling out an entire gender, obviously some people are going to have reservations or even be insulted by the insinuation that these are typical "girl" things to say. I, myself, wondered, while viewing, 'why aren't I more insulted by this?'

The truth is that, this is stuff* I say.

I thought maybe having a man portray the female character in the video might make some people uncomfortable, and indeed, the entire twitter is written and maintained by two dudes, which, I admit, does give me pause. However, the things girls say do not portray women in a bad or stupid light, and I think that's what makes it humorous. The stuff* girls say is so mundane and yet so female specific; as I started to write this blog post last night, I was reading some of the tweets out loud to a co-worker, and she kept wanting to respond as if I was casually talking to her. Things like, 'I'm so excited for tomorrow!' or 'first of all, ew' are so undeniably part of my vernacular, and I am an (over???)educated, employed 20 something woman. What I'm getting at is, I'm smart, ya'll. This video still applies to me.

The most interesting thing about these videos is the thousands of others they have spawned. Every culture, sexuality and gender presentation have their own "Stuff* They Say" videos, and even a broad search on youtube brings up numerous different varieties. This phenomenon is fascinating to me, and I'll be interested to see what becomes of it, and what other people think about it. Is it more insulting than perhaps I think it is? Or is it lightly poking fun at itself, because it's so clearly impossible to delineate what an entire gender "says", and yet, these are all girl things to say? I'm interested in what you guys think.

*not the original word, but another, similar, four letter word starting with S.

Stuff* Girls Say, episode 1

Stuff* Girls Say, episode 2

Stuff* Girls Say twitter

the ideal pet

Penguins are quite the coveted pet, at least in children's literature. And, if there was such a thing as a domesticated penguin, who wouldn't want one of these fashionable, fun creatures? Lower the room temp and make a bed in the freezer, and that's all there is to it, right? Just ask the experience of Joe and Osbert in My Penguin Osbert. Or, compare notes with the French family who is sent a new penguin every day for a year in 365 Penguins; or, the father (or better yet, ask his family) who acquires 12 penguins in the classic Mr. Popper's Penguins. Okay, maybe taking care of a penguin is a little more of an adjustment -- unless you are Elliot, the son of a science nerd. 

 

In One Cool Friend, Elliot asks his father if he could buy a penguin at the aquarium. The answer is "yes." But, the question is, does his father realize he means a real penguin? Elliot certainly forms a quick friendship with Magellan and is knowledgeable on caring for him. They are quite the snazzy dressers, too. This is a great, funny picturebook to add to your winter library. (ages 2-7)