NYT Lists

The New York Times has released its list of 100 Notable Books of 2010.   For some reason, I always look to this list as a yard stick for determining “how well” I’ve read over the past year.   Which I’ll agree with you and say is ridiculous and arbitrary.  Not to mention silly and severely limiting.  And then I’ll tally up the books that I’ve read anyway.  I’ve read 10 on the fiction list (with one more on the reading pile) and only one of the non-fiction titles (with one more on the reading pile).  I think that may be the most I’ve ever read on their annual list.  You know, if I was really going to use the list as a yard stick and all.

The NYT’s primary reviewers also have their own lists:

• Michiko Kakutani’s Top 10 Books of 2010
• Janet Maslin’s Top 10 Books of 2010
• Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Books of 2010

Boys and Reading: Part 4

I’m writing an on-going series of posts about the apparent reading gap between school age girls and boys.  The lowdown so far:

In Part 1, I discussed The Center for Education Policy’s report that shows that boys consistently lag behind girls in reading as measured by standardized tests.   I also discussed the debate around the use of “gross out” books as the answer to closing the gap.

In Part 2, I delved a little deeper into the Center of Education Policy report that kicked this all off.   I also offered some “context” for framing the problem.

In Part 2.5 I threw out some interesting graphs that I thought added some additional context to the discussion.

In Part 3, I interviewed author Raymond Bean.  Mr. Bean is the author of the children’s books Sweet Farts and the sequel Sweet Farts: Rippin’ It Old School.

In part 4, I’ll be taking a brief look at the roles that grown-ups may be playing in the disparity.

The gap between girls and boys on reading scores appears to be mirrored in the adult world by the gap in reading between men and women.  In 2007, NPR reported that women out-read men by a significant margin, and the gap is at its widest for fiction.  While anecdotes are not data, these finding do jibe with my general experience.  As a group, the men that I know well generally read much less than their wives do (if at all) and rarely read fiction, especially not contemporary fiction.  If only their  mothers and female teachers are visibly reading, what is the take-home message for young male readers?

The web site Guys Read, established by author Jon Scieszka, has set out to make positive changes for male literacy.  The web site’s “Guys and Reading” information page includes some grim statistics about boys and reading and overall educational prospects.   Under a list of reasons why boys may be having problems with reading, it notes:

Boys don’t have enough positive male role models for literacy. Because the majority of adults involved in kids’ reading are women, boys might not see reading as a masculine activity.

The solution to this particular problem:

Encourage male role models.
Men have to step up as role models of literacy. What we do is more important than all we might say.

If you are male and are concerned about male literacy, do something about it.  Be seen reading a book.  Talk to your male friends about books that you have read and enjoyed.  Start a Guys Read Field Office.

Fun Children’s Books for the Entire Family

One of the joys of having a daughter is experiencing all sorts of fun new children’s books as I read to her. I know these books weren’t around when I was a kid.  Three of our favorite books belong to a series called The Doll People by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin. If you have bad dreams about Chuckie, these may not be for you, but if you don’t mind dolls coming alive when humans aren’t around, you (and your child) will love all three and wait anxiously for the fourth.

The Doll People begins by introducing all the characters.   The Doll Family is a Victorian china doll set complete with doll house that was sent from England to the current owner’s great grandma in 1898. One funny thing about this family is that the baby is twice the size of the rest of the family – an obvious mistake in packing, but they love her as she is.

A second doll family, The Funcrafts, arrives into the house and the Doll Family can’t believe how big they are, how well they clean up – they are made of plastic, perfect for their owner’s game “Miami-Beach-A-G-Go” in the bathtub – and how unafraid they are to venture out of the comfort zone of the bedrooms.

During the first book, the girls, Annabelle Doll and Tiffany Funcraft, go on an adventure into the attic to look for Auntie Sarah Doll who has been missing for 50 years. It’s an amazing adventure involving the family cat, climbing up the attic stairs and spiders.

Surprising to my daughter and me, all dolls have the choice to take the Doll Oath when they are made. This involves swearing that they will not move or speak in front of humans and that they will work to protect all of doll kind.

“‘Not all dolls take the oath,” Mama would reply patiently. “The Doll Code of Honor is serious. A lot of resonsibility comes with being a living doll. Many dolls choose to be regular everyday dolls.”"  (I believe Barbie refused to take the oath, so never comes alive.)

In Second book, The Meanest Doll in the World, Tiffany and Anna find their way into a backpack and are taken to school. They end up in another student’s house with “Mean Mimi”, a spoiled rotten princess doll who wants to become the Queen of All Dolls. She constantly jeopardizes all the dolls with her antics. All of them, except Mean Mimi, fear going into “Permanent Doll State.”   This occurs when a human has seen the doll too many times and the doll becomes frozen forever. The action really becomes heated when the G.I. Joe and little green army figures come to life.

Runaway Dolls, the third recently released book, involves the surprise arrival of the original baby that should have come with the Victorian Doll Family. Annabelle and Tiffany are afraid the Doll Family won’t accept this new baby and decide to run away. Once again they find themselves in the “real” world which is full of crazy adventures.

Brian Selznick does a fabulous job of bringing all the dolls to life with his illustrations. At times Mr. Selznick gives us glimpses of the world from the viewpoint of a two inch doll.

We parents are reminded constantly about the importance of reading to our children and when we have choices like The Doll Family series, reading becomes fun for the entire family!

Friday Links

Author Nick Hornby is opening an 826-inspired Ministry of Stories – an after-school writing/tutoring program in East London.

Scholastic reports on the effects of poverty and literacy and a Readers’ Digest poll finds that 1-in-20 kids reports never having read a book.  I’m incredibly dubious of that second one.

The new McSweeey’s Quarterly Concern will feature an excerpt of an abandoned Michael Chabon novel. (Thanks for the link, Frank.)

I’ve read good things about the Booker-nominated novel The Room by Emma Donaghue.  Reviews led me to understand that  the suspense of the novel hinges on slowly learning the mystery surrounding a small boy and woman who never leave a room.  Jessa Crispin is the king of spoilers in this post at Bookslut.  Was it not really a big secret?

Australian directir Baz Luhrmann is set to film an adaptation of The Great Gatsby

Lloyd Dobler to play Edgar Allen Poe

A new movie tie-in e-book in the  Narnia series showcases the promise/challenges of the enhanced e-book

The amusing story of an indie bookstore that was on the verge of turning into this story

TSA book for kids: My First Cavity Search

National Book Awards

The National Book Awards were announced last night.

Patti Smith won the award for non-fiction for her fantastic Just Kids.  I’m on the verge of over-selling it, but really, this is an amazing book.  You can read the BGB reviews here and here.

The fiction award went to Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule — a book that no one has read because it came out last week.

Soul Mining

As I mention here as often as I can, I love the intersection of books and music.  When the book Soul Mining: A Life in Music by Daniel Lanois appeared in my mailbox, it jumped to the top of my to read list.  I didn’t know much about Mr. Lanois, other than than the fact that he was the co-producer for almost all of U2′s albums and produced records for the likes of Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Emmy Lou Harris, Willie Nelson, the Neville Brothers, and on and on.  That was enough to pique my interest and get me reading.

Despite the “A Musical Life” subtitle, Soul Mining is not a memoir.  It is a collection of autobiographical essays on varying topics, and I quickly realized that theyare not arranged in a linear fashion.  For instance, near the end of the book Lanois mentions his service in the Canadian Navy in passing, and it’s a complete surprise.  When did he have time to fit that into an already eventful life?

Lanois got his start in the music industry as a teenager when he and his brother built a recording studio in the basement of his mother’s home in Hamilton, Ontario.  Hamilton is a blue-collar industrial town outside of Toronto that is not a musical cross roads by any stretch of the imagination.  One of the surprises of the book came when I learned that the Lanois brothers recorded an album by gazillion selling children’s singer Raffi.   Somehow, Lanois was discovered by famed musician and producer Brian Eno.  The two collaborated on Eno’s ambient music projects for several years.  Working with Eno got Lanois invited to share production on U2′s Unforgettable Fire album and then work on Peter Gabriel’s So.  Lanois has been hand-picking his projects from an endless stream of job offers ever since.

Throughout the book, Lanois peppers his amazing stories with nuggets of wisdom and advice for those who want to lead a creative life.  Early on Lanois, a French Canadian Catholic, frames a brief digression on faith as a belief in one’s self and hard work as its own reward.  “Stick to your story” he advises the reader on several occasion and believe that the skills that you aquire through discipline and daily application to your craft will pay off one day.  For Lanois, learning the ropes of one’s craft is not only a meal ticket, it means being able to hang out with the cool kids because of what you are able to offer:

Skill was an automatic ticket to an interesting scene.   I made a decision that I would never ask for anything from the table, I would always bring something instead.

Write that down, kids.

The book takes its title from Lanois’s general philosophy for making music.  For Lanois, “soul” is the essence of art, it’s what is “true” and what is left when artifice has been stripped away.  Soul mining is following your heart to dig deep into yourself for inspiration:

Soul music is music that rises up from inside you because it has to.  It operates outside the restrictions and preconceptions of the music business.

At just over 200 pages, there was plenty of room for Lanois to delve deeper into some stories that are inherently fascinating (there’s almost nothing here on recording The Unforgettable Fire, which was clearly a turning point in Lanois’s life, for example).  Occasionally the descriptions of equipment and recording techniques is overly technical.  Refreshingly, Lanois doesn’t gossip, isn’t confessional, and doesn’t set out to settle old scores in this book.  While Soul Mining is a bit uneven at times, it’s nevertheless a fascinating account of  the issues and experiences that Lanois considers the takeaway lessons in what has been a rich and rewarding musical life up to this point.

Cautionary note:  As a result of reading this book, I’ve now bought five CDs that Lanois worked on, and I have been listening to lots and lots of U2.  Be prepared for additional cash outlay if you pick up this book.

A/V Bonus:

First, check out this video for Lanois’ new band Black Dub.  Lanois is on piano.  This is fantatsic.   (Thanks to Rich G for providing the link elsewhere)

Lanois was also a recent guest DJ on NPR’s All Songs Considered.   Tune in to hear the author talk about his musical inspiration and his musical philosophy.

As I mentioned I’ve been listening to a lot of U2 lately.  This Lanois-produced number is now permananetly lodged in my head:

U2 – Until the End of the World

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And Lanois says that U2′s One is “one of those songs that stands outside of an artists’s control; it lives because it needs to.”  These two songs are back to back on u2′s Achtung Baby CD, which seems rather incredible to me.

Boys and Reading: Part 3

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a series of posts about the apparent reading gap between school age girls and boys.

In Part 1, I discussed The Center for Education Policy’s report that shows that boys consistently lag behind girls in reading as measured by standardized tests.   I also discussed the debate around the use of “gross out” books as the answer to closing the gap.

In Part 2, I delved a little deeper into the Center of Education Policy report that kicked this all off.   I also offered some “context” for framing the problem.

In Part 2.5 I threw out some interesting graphs that I thought added some additional context to the discussion.

For Part 3, I’m branching out beyond what I think and  enjoying some Q&A with Raymond Bean.  Mr. Bean is the author of the children’s books Sweet Farts and the sequel Sweet Farts: Rippin’ It Old School.  Mr. Bean first came to my attention in an AP story that asked “Can fart jokes save the reading souls of boys?”  This story was run in seemingly every newspaper, blog, and PTA newsletter in North America. Mr. Bean also received a prominent mention when the inevitable backlash followed in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Bean seems to be uniquely positioned at ground zero in the war for the hearts and minds of America’s male readers.  (I’ve tried a million times to lay off the hyperbole.)  When he agreed to field questions from the likes of us, I jumped at the chance.  Read on for…

The Baby Got Books interview with Raymond Bean, author of Sweet Farts and Sweet Farts: Rippin’ It Old School

Baby Got Books: Tell us about how the idea for Sweet Farts came about?

Raymond Bean: I wanted to write a funny book for kids. In my search for a universally funny topic I kept coming back to the topic of gas. If teaching elementary school for over a decade has taught me anything, it’s that kids find gas funny. If someone passes gas in an elementary classroom you’re going to have giggles.

I decided to try and build a fun and silly book around this giggle inducing topic. In an attempt to work science into my story, I decided to have a fourth grader set out to find a cure for the smell of human gas for his annual science fair project. My research led to a letter written by Benjamin Franklin in 1781 called A Letter to a Royal Academy. In the letter, Franklin mentioned the need for someone to find a cure for the smell of human gas. It was perfect, I figured, if Franklin could write about farts in 1781, surely I could do it today (not everyone agreed).

BGB: You are both a teacher and an author. How does your experience in the class room inform your writing?

RB: Kids are pretty honest about what they like and dislike in books. I spend my days reading with and to students. Having a constant dialogue with young readers about books helps a great deal toward developing my understanding of the kinds of books they wish were out there. I can’t wait to get more of my books out for young readers to enjoy.

BGB: I’ve read that Sweet Farts started out as a self-published book, and the agent and publishing contract came only after you were able to sell a lot of books on your own. What has that experience been like?

RB: Self publishing the first Sweet Farts book allowed me to reach my audience almost immediately. After several years of close calls and rejections, my wife and I decided to self publish under a pen name. Within three months of release we were selling multiple copies on Amazon every day. We had little more than word of mouth, but we were proving that there was an audience for the series.

About ten months after the release of the first Sweet Farts book, I signed with AmazonEncore to write Sweet Farts: Rippin’ It Old School, the sequel. About the same time I started getting more agent and foreign rights interest. A few months ago I signed with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to work with such an amazing agency as I move forward as a writer. So far the first Sweet Farts book has been translated into Korean and is being translated into German and Italian. In addition, both books have been recorded as audio books by Brilliance Audio. I’m currently working on a third Sweet Farts book.

BGB: You’ve been the center of some recent controversy. On the one hand, you’ve been put forward as one possible savior for boys who won’t/don’t like to read, and on the other as being personally responsible for the downfall of civilization. This must be a little surreal for you. What do you make of all this?

RB: Surreal indeed! I was thrilled to be included in the AP article. At the time of the interview, I was a self-published author being interviewed by the AP. In my opinion, the author of the article was attempting to draw attention to the CEP report on the gender gap in children’s literacy. As a teacher, parent, and author I was elated to be included in the conversation. In the days and weeks that followed the publication of the article, I was fascinated by the response.

The point I hoped to make in the AP article was that silly fiction can help bring the most reluctant readers to the book shelf, get them reading, and leave them seeking more books. I have encountered many 8 to 10 year- old students who were video game and TV “addicted”. When this happens, reading falls away as an option outside of school. Many of these students do not live in homes where reading is a priority. Silly fiction can help some kids discover that books can be fun and surprising. Once that connection is made, young readers are hopefully eager to read.

The WSJ editorial piece was particularly surprising to me. The writer made reference to the “Sweet Farts philosophy” of education. I wrote the Sweet Farts books, but I was not aware that it was a “philosophy” of education. The article went on to state that books within the genre do little more than create, “morons and barbarians.”

I take issue with such an extreme statement. I argue there is a need for light-hearted and silly children’s fiction for the simple fact that it is light-hearted and silly. Like adults, children sometimes just need a good laugh. They generally spend a few days with a book and then are on to the next one. A few days of harmless fun with a silly book is just that, harmless.

As a teacher I encounter students every year that are dealing with divorce, sick parents, and other heart- breaking situations. Silly books can provide a much needed laugh to a child dealing with an overwhelming life experience. Is the child who has a father sick with cancer a “moron” or a “barbarian” because he read The Day My Butt Went Psycho for a distraction?

BGB: Do you get the feeling that many who criticize your books haven’t actually read them?

RB: Yes, I have a sense that some of the people who are the most outspoken probably framed their opinion based on the title alone. I’m quite certain Rush Limbaugh didn’t take the time to sit down and thumb through the Sweet Farts books. Although the visual is kind of fun to think about, don’t you think? He did, however, blast them on his Morning Update in July 2010. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the exposure. Personally, I think he might have enjoyed the books if he read them, just a hunch.

Why so many adults are paying this much attention to my book is beyond me. It is intended for ages 8 – 12. In my experience, people generally like the series. I’ve received feedback from teachers, librarians, and parents (some of them homeschoolers) on how much they enjoyed the Sweet Farts series. It’s currently being carried in over eighty library systems across the country and close to one-hundred libraries. You can search for a library near you on www.worldcat.org.

BGB: I’ll own up to suggesting in a recent blog post that just maybe the AP news story that touted your book (among others) was suspiciously timed to coincide with the release of your sequel Sweet Farts: Rippin’ it Old School. So how about it? Is your marketing team really that good?

RB: I’m pretty sure the timing of the article had more to do with the release of Dav Pilkey’s new release, The Adventures of Ook and Gluk. I think I just wrote the right book at the right time.

BGB: I’ve been talking about the “reading gap” between boys and girls for a few weeks now. What do you think is really behind the gap and what are the solutions?

RB: In my experience, every reader is different. Every child approaches reading from a different life experience. You can’t dictate a child’s readiness to become a reader. That being said, there needs to be a wide variety of good books on the shelf (and e-reader) waiting for children to discover, explore, and share. Insisting that ONLY one genre is the answer is naïve and fruitless. When young readers are immersed in all genres and many authors, they learn to love books.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that many parents read to their children when they are very young. Then, when the child learns to read, parents expect the child to read independently and still love reading. I find that when parents read chapter length books and picture books with their third, fourth, and fifth graders, it helps tremendously. Reading together not only helps increase comprehension and a love of books, it also allows for time well spent between parent and child. If you want your child to love reading, read with your child. Only, don’t be afraid to read a silly book now and again, who knows, you just might enjoy a good belly laugh together and feel like a kid again. It doesn’t get much better than that! I recommend the Sweet Farts series by Raymond Bean.

My thanks to Raymond Bean for taking the time to chat with us.  Anyone who has been taken to task by Rush Limbaugh has our enduring respect and admiration.

A Brave New World

Just last week, I wrote about a friend of the blog who had released his new book in e-book only format with the patented Radiohead “pay what you want” model.  Another friend of the blog, Len Cassamas, has undertaken a similar, but different, experiment.  Len had grown frustrated with the traditional avenues of book publishing and decided to release his novel into the wild one chapter at a time – for free.  New chapters are posted via blog on Mondays and Thursdays.   When all the chapters have been posted, Len will make the whole thing available as a PDF.

Variations on these themes seem to be increasing round the ‘net.  Whatever else may be said about the digitization of publishing, it’s exciting to think that voices that otherwise may not have been heard are able to find a readership through low cost ideas like these.

Reading Every Day

From Scholastic:

Friday Links

What?  It’s still Friday…

Just last week everyone was writing about the imminent “rehabilitation of George W Bush.”  Now that his memoir has been released,  I guess the powers that be forgot that the pitchman for the project would be George W Bush.  Also: apparently he plagiarized chunks of the book.  Also:  There is a guerrilla movement afoot to relocate Bush’s memoir to the “crime” section of unsuspecting bookstores.  (This one is kind of funny, too.) Also: readers are submitting their own ideas for better covers of the biography here.  This is all so shocking.

In other plagiarism news, Cooks Source Magazine apologizes to the writer who called them on their appropriation of recipes from the “public domain” internet.

Publisher’s Weekly rolls out their 10 Best Books of ’10.  I don’t want to give anything away, but this is the cover:

The Economist declares what Cory Doctorow has been saying along:  e-books offer only the illusion of book ownership.

The Ian Fleming estate is cutting out their long-time publisher as 007 heads to e-books.

Nice.  Liz Phair, the musician responsible for the incredible album Exile on Guy Street, reviews Keith Richard’s new biography for the New York Times.

99 Problems

This will be, perhaps, the least objective review of a book ever to appear on BGB.  99 Problems: Essays on Running and Writing is written by Ben Tanzer, a friend of the bog and of mine.  That’s usually not a big deal, I’ve reviewed books by by people that I know before.  Any chance of an objective review, however, was nixed when I got name checked in the essay What I Talk About When I Talk About Bad Television Movies.  That Tanzer fellow, he’s alright.

What’s interesting about this collection is that Tanzer went all New School for its release.  It is only available in e-book format (you can buy it here).  He’s also using the “Radiohead” pay model.  You pay want you want. If you want to check it out for free, go ahead.  I’m sure that the author would love payment, but I think that he’d be happy if you just read it.

For this collection, Tanzer drew inspiration from novelist Haruki Murakami’s ode to running, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. (Do you see what he did there with the essay wherein I get name checked?  Nice.)  The collection draws it’s name from the Jay-Z song:

“99 Problems” by Jay-Z comes on as I coast down the last half-block towards home, and I can’t help but smile. This is a good way to finish a run. So is catching a big fat snowflake on my tongue on my first attempt, Karate Kid style.

An of course, he’s talking about the original Karate Kid for you youngsters out there.  What I enjoy most about Tanzer’s writing are the nods to high and low culture (and mostly the “low culture” of shared pop culture).

The essays were all designed around a central theme.  Ben decided to write a series of essays about long runs that he’s taken while traveling for work or with his family. The essays highlight the creative outlet that running can provide. Tanzer reflects on the projects that he’s working and the various thoughts that pop in and out of his head while running.  If you’ve ever been a long runner, you know the luxury of time alone with your thoughts that it can provide.  If you’ve never been a distance runner, Tanzer may well inspire you to give it a try.

99 Problems is a gem of a book.  You’ll learn a lot about the author and his creative processes, which highlights the level of introspection that can come from time alone pounding the pavement.  Of course, my favorite essay is about a run that Tanzer takes in Atlanta.  I met up with Ben and some literary scenesters that he assembled at Twain’s Tavern after the run, and we talked over beers about books and bad TV.   Here’s how Ben characterizes the book scene in Atlanta:

Social Networking for Readers

Last week Huffington Post asked the question “Social Networking For Book Lovers: Will Online Communities Work?” It seems an odd question to be asking in 2010 when several of the sites listed have been going strong for years.  The piece features six social networking sites and includes brief blurbs about each of them.  In the order presented in the post, they are:

1. Goodreads.  I’ve used Goodreads since 2008.  Of the social networking sites for readers that I’ve actually used, it is the one where I actually know most of my “friends.”  I’m not not sure why that is.  For that reason, I still maintain my shelves, even though I find the user experience a little clunky and needlessly complicated at times. Everyone else I know seems to love it though.  If you check out my shelf, you can see how far behind I am on posting my reviews here.
2. LibraryThing.  I joined LibraryThing in 2005 under my old nom de blog.  By 2007 I quit updating my shelves and started looking for another reader site.  Some folks I know swear by LibraryThing.  To me it seemed sterile, all too serious, and based on a 2003 web aesthetic.  My shelves look exactly the same as the day I abandoned them in 2007.
3. Shelfari.  When I fled LibraryThing in 2007, Shelfari is where I landed.   Shelfari is still my favorite social book site.   Even though I have the same number of Shelfari and Bookreads friends, I actually know fewer of my Shelfari friends.   Shelfari’s user interface is so easy and intuitive that we use it to keep up with my six-year old daughter’s reading, too.  My mom is also a “friend,”  so three generations of my family are plugged in.  I’m keeping up with my shelves here, too.  I did not know that Amazon owns Shelfari until I read about it on HuffPo.
4. Alikewise.  I hate that Alikewise looks so cool and inviting.  I cannot imagine a scenario where I would join and populate another social reading site from scratch.  Can’t do it.
5. You Are What You Read.  This one is owned by Scholastic.  I love the sentiment, but can’t join another site.  Sorry.
6. Spine Breakers.  A teen site in the UK.  Since I’m not a teen and not in the UK, I found this one easy to pass up.  Spine Breakers is owned by Penguin UK.

Not included on this list is Book Army.  I decided to check this one out after they had the good taste to name us #9 on their list of Best Book Blogs.  The site is in the UK, and I quickly stumbled upon issues where US releases couldn’t be located for adding to my shelf.  This sort of defeated the purpose.  I’d love to show what my shelf (no longer updated) looks like, but I can’t find a way to do that without forcing you to join.  Another drawback.

The main reason that I use these sites is too keep up with what I’ve read and to look at what my friends are reading.  I don’t do much, if any, actual socializing  on social book sites.  For keeping up with my own reading, none of these sites comes close to my own Excel spreadsheet that I’ve maintained with alarming obsessiveness since 2005.   What I like about my own system is that I can track all sorts of things that the social networking sites don’t allow me to easily do, if at all.  I like to keep track of basic questions like how many books have I read so far this year?  How many were works of fiction?  How many were written by women?  How many were not written by Americans?  I like to keep up with this kind of data so that I can do data nerd stuff like graph my fiction vs. non-fiction reading.  Sadly, I’m not kidding:



Social networking sites collect a huge  amount of information about you.  It would be great if the sites dedicated to readers would allow you to actually get at and use that data.

Eggers on the Giants

Dave Eggers was commissioned to “cover” the World Series through a series of drawings for the Bay Citizen.  McSweeney’s now has a poster of the collected drawingsof the crowd at Game One.

Friday Links

There’s a new kids’ book about Jimi Hendrix.  I suspect that there will be some editing involved.

Speaking of editing, there may be an editor in need of a job very soon.  A woman recently contacted Cook’s Source Magazine when she found that they had posted one of her original recipes (with some editing) without her permission.  Instead of apologizing or paying her, the editor of the magazine responded with this:

“…honestly Monica, the web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it!… If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain… We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me!”

Do not mock the internet!  A Facebook page has turned into a clearing house for tracking all the other recipes that were copied directly by the magazine.  The taunts on the magazine’s Facebook page are hilarious, too.

The American Library Association, the folks that hand out the Newberry Award and the Caldecott Medal,  has added a prize for best gay and lesbian book for young people.  Cue the vitriolic right wing outrage in 3…2…1.

Atlanta author Laurel Snyder has had a recent brush with this kind of intolerant outrage.  Her new book for young readers, Penny Dreadful, includes a character with two moms.  They are minor characters in the book but they nevertheless prompted this response from a reviewer:

The only problem is, being a lesbian is not normal. It’s not something that “just happens” to people, like being poor or brave. In fact, when you look through Biblical glasses, homosexuality is, well, an abomination.

Characters like Willa and Jenny, however, with their happy little family, show elementary-age readers that Christian beliefs are hateful and silly. Add these characters to the full-blown assault of politically-correct propaganda that is molding America’s children.

Got that?  Portraying lesbians as happy in a book is an assault on children.  Check out Snyder’s thoughtful response.

Library Journal’s list of the top 10 books of 2010.  Which still has two months left.  I’m just saying.

This trailer for Rainn Wilson’s is great.  I still don’t know what the book is about, but it looks cool.

Creeped out by those MY Baby Can Read! commercials?  Me, too.  Check this out.

On the TV:  I am LOVING the first season of Sherlock on PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery.  You must tune in this week if you haven’t seen it yet.  Fantastic.

Also on the TV:  I tuned into the first episode of The Walking Dead, the AMC adaptation of the popular zombie comic book series.  I’m not sure that I would have tuned in they didn’t film a scene on my street, but I’m glad that I did.  Also featured in the first episode: numerous houses in my neighborhood, our neighborhood park, my office, and the area around my office in downtown ATL.   I kept an eye out for zombies while walking to lunch yesterday.

Best Books of 2010

I’m not ready to put together my annual list of favorite reads, what with there being two more months left in the year and much reading to do.  That didn’t stop Amazon from publishing their Editor’s List of the Top 100 Books of 2010.  It’s an interesting list with some books that I’ll need to check out soon.  They have Patti Smith’s Just Kids at #9 (BGB reviews here and here).  Unless something fairly dramatic happens over the next two months, Patti will be perched at the top of my list.

I Heart Patti

Inside the Outbreaks

Ronald Reagan once said (paraphrasing) that the government is populated by mediocrity because if the employees were any good they would be working for private companies for more money.  (I tried to find the exact quote, but sifting through Google searches of “Reagan quotes” is depressing.)  This sentiment is echoed by many in today’s political climate who see all government employees through the Department of Motor Vehicles lens.   It was a breath of fresh air then to see the cover for Mark Pendergrast’s Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service portraying government scientists as super heroes.  Look!  It’s science man!

Inside the Outbreaks is a history of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Epidemiology Intelligence Service (EIS).  The EIS is an elite training and surveillance division of the CDC that provides “boots-on-the-ground” scientists to investigate outbreaks of disease.  As one scientists notes, “A disease outbreak is a sign that something has gone wrong…it’s like a giant arrow pointing, PROBLEM HERE!”  The EIS’s job is to figure out what the problem is and solve it.

Members of the EIS have helped to eradicate smallpox by chasing it to the far ends of the earth. EIS scientists performed the “shoe leather epidemiology” necessary to identify HIV/AIDS.  (The group’s unofficial logo is a shoe with a hole in the sole over a globe.)  Polio is a thing of the past in the US thanks to EIS efforts.  They’ve been on the front lines of Ebola, SARS, flu epidemics, and other emerging diseases.  You can bet that they are in Haiti helping to contain the current cholera outbreak there.  It sounds like an incredibly rewarding job to a science nerd like myself, but it’s not all glamour as evidenced by this tidbit on a EIS scientist involved in the smallpox effort:

Six-foot-tall Jordan had lost 60 pounds, down to 134. An American lab identified seventeen kinds of parasites in his stool.

Yikes.  It would seem that the EIS’s work would enjoy wide bi-partisan support.  Pendergrast shows that this is not always the case.

…the 1956 [polio] epidemic in Chicago was concentrated in the black ghett0, where the children were not getting vaccinated.  The American Medical Association had fought free immunization as “socialized medicine.”

Ah, the more things change…  The CDC also ran into opposition when they started to treat gun-related deaths as an epidemic that could be investigated using proven epidemiological techniques.  The Republican-led Congress at the time was so outraged that they passed a law that specifically prohibits the CDC from issuing recommendations for curbing gun violence.  That prohibition remains in place today.

Administrations on both sides of the aisle have also made cuts or reallocated the CDC’s funding over the years, which can have direct impacts on national and international public health efforts.  To help insulate itself from changing political winds, the CDC Foundation was formed.  The CDC Foundation is a non-profit organization that “helps the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do more, faster by forging effective partnerships between CDC and others to fight threats to health and safety.”  Even though I live in Atlanta, the headquarters of the CDC, I hadn’t heard of the CDC Foundation until reading Outbreaks.  It’s a fascinating approach to a real problem for government agencies with long-term missions.

It tackling the history of the EIS, Pendergrast interviewed hundreds of EIS graduates.  If Inside the Outbreaks has a weakness, it’s that the material to cover necessarily limited the amount of space that could be spent on what are individually fascinating topics in their own right.  And the fascinating topics Pendergrast briefly hits upon are legion. Indeed, there are a number of prize-winning books that are entirely dedicated to topics that get only brief mention here - Polio: An American Story (Pulitzer) and And the Band Played On come to mind.  Laura Garrett’s doorstop The Coming Plague covers the emerging diseases aspect of Outbreaks in great detail and the best seller The Hot Zone delves more deeply into Ebola and other “sexy” diseases.  If you’re looking for a nice overview of the history of a largely unknown group of government scientists that are tops in their field, Inside the Outbreaks is the book for you.  However, if you’re looking for detail on a specific disease or outbreak, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Boys and Reading: Part 2.5

If you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick recap of our ongoing series of indeterminate length and intellectual rigor on the boys and reading issue, here’s what you’ve missed:

In Part 1, I discussed the following:

• The Center for Education Policy issued a report that shows that boys consistently lag behind girls in reading as measured by standardized tests.
• An AP story says that fart books may be the solution to this problem.
• A Wall Street Journal editorial takes issue with that solution

In Part 2, I responded with limited to success to a comment to Part 1 and delved a little deeper into the Center of Education Policy report that kicked this all off.   I also offered some “context” for framing the problem.  I’m calling this Part 2.5 because I’ve stumbled across some additional context to throw out there for your consideration.

First, I came across this chart in a CDC report, Diagnosed Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Learning Disability: United States, 2004–2006.  I’m not saying that ADHD is responsible for the reading gap between school-age boys and girls, but it is a striking parallel and I hope that it’s at least part of the conversation somewhere.

Secondly, I came across this graphic from data compiled by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (via Flowing Data – my favorite source for data geekery):

This graphic begs the question: if the US is currently only a mid-performing country in reading (as of 2003), is the boys/girls reading gap issue missing the forest for the trees?

Stay tuned for Part 3.