Friday Links

Baseball season is finally here, which puts The Millions in mind of this excellent excerpt from The Art of Fielding.

It’s also Passover.  There is a new book out about General Grant’s expulsion of the Jews from Kentucky during the Civil War. It happened.  The episode also featured prominently in Dara Horn’s excellent novel All Other Nights.  (See my review of All Other Nights and my interview with Dara Horn about the novel.)

In other Passover news, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander co-edited The New American Haggadah.  I have a copy, and it’s beautiful.  Foer wrote about the project in The New York Times.  BGB contributor Nicole’s rabbi gives it a mixed review, calling it “the Mad Men” Haggadah.  Which may only make it sell more copies.

e-books may be increasing reading among adults.  Here’s more on the study.

Time has an excerpt of the second book in Colin Meloy and Carsdon Ellis’s Wildwood Trilogy, Under Wildwood.

News that made my week, Carrie Brownstein inked a deal for a memoir.  Yes, please.

Click here for that Game of Thrones visual guide that you’ve been looking for.

List: 67 Books Geeks Should Read to Their Kids Before Age 10.

Another list: Three Magical Myths for Grown-Ups

The list that begs the question – Have book lists jumped the shark?:  Top 10 Present Tense Books

Like Game of Thrones?  Like English Premier League Soccer?  Then check out the Game of Thrones to English Premier League Converter.

Chip Kidd @ Ted

Rock star book designer Chip Kidd gives a stirring TED talk about book design and the lasting thingy-ness of printed books.  This is excellent.
 

I have no idea what’s going on with his glasses.

What Kids Are Reading 2012

Renaissance Learning has issued their annual report called What Kids Are Reading, 2012.  If you are unfamiliar with the company, they provide reading services to schools and parents.  Their AR Book Finder helps parents find reading-level appropriate books for their children.  They also provide in-school testing to help determine students’ reading level, and they provide at home/in school comprehension tests on books that students have read to help gauge understanding.  My daughter’s school uses the service, so I was interested in learning more.

I found out about the report through an  an alarmingly titled article in The Huffington Post called American High School Students Are Reading Books At 5th-Grade-Appropriate Levels.  The slide show at the bottom of the article lists the Top 20 books being read by students in grade 9-12.  There were a few things that surprised me.  I was surprised that The Lightning Thief (reviewed by second grader yesterday) is on the list.

I was also surprised that among the novels that are deemed below grade level that contribute to this 5th grade reading average include Animal Farm (7.3), To Kill a Mockingbird (5.6), Of Mice and Men (4.5), The Great Gatsby (7.3), Elie Weisel’s Night (4.8), The Outsiders (4.7) and The Lord of the Flies (5.0).  All of those books have been on high school reading lists for forever it seems.  Is the problem with the kids?  The list also includes books in the Twilight (4.9), Harry Potter (6.9), and The Hunger Games (5.3) series.  (For quick comparison, Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1400+ pages) only gets you a grade-rating of 10.1. )

The report itself includes commentary from authors and education experts about what children should be reading. A them of supporting kids runs throughout from “our goal as parents is to respond to their interests without judgment and to be ready with a new book in hand” to  ”adults bear the responsibility and the privilege of welcoming readers…into the brave new world of literature not just by gauging what young people read but also by engaging in the reading itself, as well as in discussion of the choices and motivations that lie behind that reading.”  There is some excellent food for thought in the report for how parents and teachers should go about engaging children about books and guiding them towards more complex reading.

I’m a methodology nerd, so I want to know where the many lists in the report come from.   My guess is that the data is mined from the schools that use Renaissance Learning’s tools, which includes “24,465 schools in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.”  That’s a lot of data from a lot of students.  It’s data that is largely student driven, however.  It is the students, at least second graders at our school, that keep track of their books read and take the corresponding tests.  It would be interesting to know how well the students did, on average, on the comprehension of the novels at various grade levels.  I’m also curious to know how representative the lists are of the books actually read by the students.  Does it include assigned reading?  Are the lists representative of all the books that the kids read, or does it represent the books that they thought that they could pass a comprehension test on?

If you are a parent or teacher, do read the report.

Book Time with Meg

I’m excited to kick off what I hope will become a regular feature here at BGB – The Book Time with Meg podcast.  Each episode will feature an interview with my daughter Meghan about a book that she’s read.  Meghan turns 8 tomorrow and is in second grade. In this inaugural episode, Meghan talks about the first book in the Percy Jackson series, The Lightning Thief.  She is way more polished than I am.

Book Time with Meg: 01

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.

Friday Links

The Sisters Brothers wins the Tournament of Books!

The NYT discusses raising an e-reader, as in a reader (child) that reads electronically.  Interesting takes.  A teacher says,  “Old books don’t really cut it anymore,” she said. “We have to transform our learning as we know it.”  And then someone who actually studies learning says:

“Right now, the state-of-the-art, in terms of research-based practice is: read traditional books with your child,” said Julia Parish-Morris, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied e-books and how children interact with them. “We don’t have any evidence that any kind of electronic device is better than a parent.”

Good. My job as a parent is safe. For now.

Your Brain On Fiction – the neuroscience of reading stories.

An excellent overview of how big a deal the appearance of the Harry Potter series in e-book form is for JK Rowling.  Even cooler, the author is making the series available for digital loan from libraries.

The assclown that wrote a book about being manly that came out two weeks ago says that adults shouldn’t read YA books.  Ever.  He says, “I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.”  Laurel Snyder, Atlanta author of books for children says:

When adult authors suddenly write Op-Eds that disrespectfully stir the Kidlit/YA pot, they are FLACKING THEIR OWN BOOKS. Please ignore them.

— LaurelSnyder (@LaurelSnyder) March 29, 2012

Uh oh.  Facebook is asserting copyright claims over the word “book.”

Ian McKellan and Stephen Fry swoop in to rescue a pub called The Hobbit from copyright police.  The pub may have actually gotten off easy.

An interesting read about the lost original manuscript of A Confederacy of Dunces.

The e-book reader of the future – as imagined in 1935

This is not the official Baby Got Books tote bag, but it ought to be.

A friend sent me this article – “Ann Arbor man punched during literary argument.”  I’ll bet the guy who got punched wouldn’t shut up about Atlas Shrugged.  Totally justified.

This is awesome.  How a book is made.  The paper kind:

All My Friends Are Still Dead & Hilarious

Remember our enthusiasm for the dark comedy gold of All My Friends Are Dead?  Imagine how psyched we are to learn about the sequel, All My Friends Are Still Dead.

History of Books

For homework, my second grader is working on a project concerning how communications have changed over time.  She decided to do her project on the history of books.  Her brainstorming session for research ideas looks like this:

We had a great discussion this afternoon, but I can’t stop researching the topic for my own edification.  I’ve stumbled across some cool web resources as a result:

• Wikipedia has a nice overview
• What this U Penn web site lacks in pizzazz it makes up for in thoroughness
• This page hosted by UCSD (also lacking in utlilization of 21st web design) has some great info
• This page, on the History of Graphic Design site, is beautiful and well done
• History of Information’s info is very nice, too
• UNC-Pembroke has resources on the history of books “from cuneiform alphabets to Curious George”
• This History of Visual Communication website has nice chapters on The Art of the Book, The Printing Press, and The Master of Type

Friday Links

When I heard that this was a parody of Jay-Z and Kanye West song, I went to check out that song (the one with the unsavory reference to the gents in Paris).  I don’t like that song so much.  But this, this is pretty great.

The folks at St Martin Press had a package addressed to someone who doesn’t work there with 11 pounds of pot inside.  No one knows who is responsible.  Definitely wasn’t the stoner in the mail room.

Doubleplusgood?  A new film version of 1984 may be in the works.

Goodreads wrote an interesting article about discovering books on Goodreads and other places.  Interesting pie chart.  Mmmmm.  Pie.

This seems inevitable.  There is apparently a booming business for people to write positive book reviews of your book for you on Amazon.  The going rate seems to be $5.

When my daughter sees this, we’re going to have to pack our bags for London.

Cool:  Monks defaced illuminated manuscripts with complaining marginalia.

16 things Calvin and Hobbes said better than anyone else.

Are you still keeping up with The Tournament of Books?  My early pick, The Art of Fielding was eliminated this week, but it appears to be poised to return in the Zombie Round.  My new favorite book, The Sisters Brothers knocked off Swamplandia!, and I think it could be the dark horse to win it all.

And don’t forget to listen to Christopher Walken reading Where the Wild Things Are.

Happy St Patrick’s Day

What says St Patrick’s like a leprechaun-eating Ulysses-reading cat?

(Photo:  Journopal, Brooklyn, NY)

Friday Links

My new favorite blog: Least Helpful.   The site serves up a steady stream of the least helpful customer reviews on Amazon.  Hilarity.

Finalists have been chosen for the NYC Public Library’s Young Lions Award

The Children’s Choice Book Awards have also announced their finalists

The Wall Street Journal examines what women read…when no one can see the cover.   Us dudes, on the other hand, are all Proust, all the time.

Check out this awesome US literature map from the thirties.  Back then it wasn’t all Brooklyn.

Gandalf comes out in support of pub against copyright bullying

List of the best novels of all time. Hasn’t this been done?

Kids’ books that take the scary out of science

Author parleys with the e-book pirates

Don’t forget to check in daily at the Tournament of Books now underway

The Sisters Brothers

There was no post here yesterday because I was up waaaay past my bedtime the night before finishing The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt.  I wanted to be sure to finish before yesterday’s Tournament of Books match-up between The Sisters Brothers and Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder.  (Spoiler: The Sisters took it handily.)  I started reading the book on Monday night.  I would have read it in a single sitting if it weren’t for pesky work, having to be alive in the morning to get kids to school, etc.  Holy crap, what a good book.  I can’t believe it took me so long to read it.  To start with, check out that flippin’ sweet cover:

Charlie and Eli Sisters are brothers, “the mean one” and the “husky one”  as one unfortunate soul describes them.  They are also hired gunmen feared throughout the west.  The story begins with the brothers leaving their home in Oregon City for their latest assignment for their book The Commodore.   First stop is to check in with The Commodore’s hired detective who has been tailing their target around Gold Rush San Francisco. What should be an easy assignment turns out to be anything but.   The adventure will change the brothers lives forever.

It’s a cracking adventure, too.  The novel has been compared to True Grit and the author has been described as “like Cormac McCarthy with a better sense of humor.”  The novel was also short-listed for last year’s Man Booker Prize.  Those are big boots to fill but deWitt pulls it off admirably.  It speaks volumes about the author’s ability that a Western historical novel that is at turns violent, crude, and “ribald” can also be sentimental and literary.

Getting all lit-101, the brothers/sisters dichotomy serves to highlight the internal struggle of the brothers to find peace with who they really are, underneath the yoke of their unusual occupation,  The job colors how others see them, and it weighs heavily upon them to live up the billing.  The novel is set during  the Gold Rush, but it’s take on San Francisco could also be used to describe the city during the modern Gold Rush of the internet boom or the greed that has taken over Wall Street. The brothers meet a stranger who, sensing their new arrival, tells them about the madness that has gripped the city with the influx of so much sudden wealth:

“The whores are working fifteen-hour shifts and are said to make thousands of dollars per day.  You must understand, gentlemen, that the tradition of thrift and sensible spending has vanished here. It simply does not exist any more. For example, when I arrived this last time from working my claim I had a sizable sack of gold dust, and though I knew it was lunacy I decided to sit down and have a large dinner in the most expensive restaurant I could find…So it was that I ate a decent-sized, not particularly tasty meal of meat and spuds and ale and ice cream, and for this repast, which would have put me back perhaps half a dollar in my hometown, I paid the sum of thirty dollars in cash.”
Charlie was disgusted.  ”Only a moron would pay that.”
“I agree,” said the man.  ”One hundred percent I agree.  And I am happy to welcome you to a town peopled in morons exclusively.  Furthermore, I hope your transformation to moron is not an unpleasant experience.”

When the brothers finally meet their target, he turns out to be the sort of old coot/poetic madman that populates the best films and books of the old west.  When he tells Eli that “most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives,”  Eli can’t help but take the words as the most apt description of his own life.

Wil Wheaton, the judge of yesterday’s Tournament of Books match-up has this to say about the two books:

If State of Wonder made me feel like I was struggling to stay awake during The English Patient, The Sisters Brothers made me feel like I was sitting in a movie house in Red Dead Redemption, watching an episode of Deadwood that was written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by the Coen Brothers. If I was the wrong audience forState of Wonder, I’m pretty much the perfect audience for The Sisters Brothers.

I’m pretty much the perfect audience for The Sisters Brothers, too.  It may not be for everyone, but if it sounds like it’s your thing, don’t put it off another minute.  A great novel awaits.

Guitar Zero

I recently caught the end of an NPR story about a book called Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning by Gary Marcus that sounded fascinating.   As the NPR story says, Marcus  ”took up guitar at the relatively ancient age of 38, by starting with the video game Guitar Hero.”  In the book Marcus uses his experience to discuss the science of learning and why certain tasks like learning to play a new instrument or learning a language become harder as we get older.  As a student who took up guitar later in life than Mr Marcus and a science nerd to boot, I had to check it out.

I once heard a younger acquaintance remark “well, any monkey can go off and learn how to play guitar.”   Marcus and I are here to tell you that’s not the case.  At least not well.   An old canard popular in the telling of the punk rock movement  is that the bands barely knew how to play their instruments.   While it’s true that they may not have had the mastery of some musicians, I recommend that you try to play along if it’s so easy.  Playing basic chords really fast and in time to create a song that actually sounds (arguably) good are actually several different cognitive skills that are all relatively difficult to master.  That anyone ever does borders on the miraculous.

Marcus walks through the cognitive processes involved in learning the tasks of having your left hand (for righties) bend into impossible shapes on specific strings at just the right moment, while your right hand is doing something entirely different.  Being able to create your own songs, Marcus explains, is its own separate skill.  It’s a relative rarity that some people are able to both learn an instrument and compose new songs on it.   Depressingly, he discusses the barriers to this kind of learning that come with age.

Marcus notes that cognitive scientists estimate that to become proficient at some new skill (like playing an instrument) requires roughly 10,000 hours of focused practice on average.  Some folks may never become proficient, while others may be rock stars in significantly less time.  Marcus investigates why this rule generally holds true, and what happens with those who accelerate the timeline.

In the best sections of this book, Marcus masterfully breaks down the elements of learning to play guitar and puts it in the larger context of how our brain learns new tricks, especially extremely difficult new tricks.   A chapter on what expert musicians know that you don’t is also insightful.  The book strays when it wanders afield of its subtitle.  The chapter on why some music sounds better than others and what the worst (theoretical) song in the world sounds like was a chore for me to work through.   This is, overall,  an interesting read for the mature budding musician and others that are interested in the science of how our how brain learns to make music.  It may come off as  complete mumbo jumbo for  readers lacking a strong interest in at at least one of those subjects.

Friday Links

The Tournament of Books is back!  Catch up on Round 1 and Round 2.  Click the link on the bar at the top to see the brackets.    My pick to win it all…The Art of Fielding.  I will be wrong.

If a tournament of books isn’t your thing,  visit Grantland’s Smacketology to determine The Wire’s greatest character.

The 2011 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced.  My streak is intact!  None of the books that I nominated won.  Again.

This just in…The New York Times says that e-book readers that do other things, like play Angry Birds, may distract some of us from reading.

The Wall Street Journal counters with  the 10 things that e-book readers won’t tell you.

The 100 Best Opening Lines From Books

The 10 Best Fictional Bookstores

The Ithaca NY Library, home of Eleanor Henderson, has compiled a link-tastic guide for her novel Ten Thousand Saints

Video:  The  Shutesbury, MA Public Library turns to ukuleles and YouTube to raise over a million bucks for a new building.

Another video:  Muppets spoof The Hunger Games

Recommended Reads

One of the benefits that I’ve enjoyed, now that I’ve switched over to the dark side and own a Kindle, is reading long-form non-fiction pieces that until recently had no place in the market.  These pieces are too long for any but the most profit averse magazines and too short to be sold on their own.  Enter the e-book to save the day.  I’ve recently read two such pieces that I highly recommend.

The first is a Kindle Single that I had to read because it is written by one of my favorite authors Dara Horn.  I’ve interviewed Dara Horn twice (see the sidebar on the right) and we have not coincidentally reviewed two of her novels, All Other Nights and The World to Come.  Horn was also named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

The Rescuer is a non-fiction account of the life of Varian Fry.  Fry was responsible for rescuing many famous Jews, including Marc Chagall, from occupied France during World War II.  Horn explores why this courageous man is virtually unknown.   Horn is clear that this will not be the typical  Hollywood version of Holocaust rescue stories:

I’ve long been uncomfortable with stories of Holocaust rescue, not least because the painful fact that they are statistically insignificant — as are, for that matter, stories of Holocaust survival. But for me, the unease of these stories runs deeper.  When I was 23 and just beginning my doctoral work in Yiddish, I barely understood the world I was entering.  It is a very distant world from what we are taught to assume in American Culture, where happy endings are so expected that even our stories of the Holocaust somehow have to be redemptive.  In Holocaust literature written in Yiddish, the language of the culture that was successfully destroyed, one doesn’t find many musings on the kindness of strangers, because there wasn’t much of that.  Instead one finds cries of anguish, rage, and, yes, vengeance.

It’s  a quick and fascinating read. Check it out.

The second e-book I’d like to recommend is Vanity Fair’s How a Book is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding by Keith Gessen.  The author founded the hot literary mag n + 1  along with Chad Harbach.  Harbach is the author of a BGB favorite,  The Art of Fielding (my review).  Gessing and Harbach became friends when the two took “an intense, five-person seminar of Herman Melville” their sophomore year.  This e-book is an “inside baseball” look at how books get published.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is just incredible to read that the novel was rejected.  Repeatedly.  Some of those that didn’t see the promise are named.   And then a bidding war breaks out for the suddenly red-hot novel.  Especially fascinating to me are how Gessing’s impressions of his friend’s novel change over time.  He goes from…:

So the shortstop couldn’t make a throw to first.  So?  I didn’t say it at the time, but it felt a little like a Disney film.  (The Bad News Bears go to liberal-arts college.)

to…

Reading the galley, I saw that Henry’s anguish about perfection, and his sudden inability to make the throw to first, mirrored Chad’s difficulties completing the book, especially with so many people around him demanding that he just do it.  I saw other things, too.  But mostly I was just delighted.

This is absolute required reading for anyone who loves books.

Book Club Cook Book & Book Clubs

Every once in a while, something unexpected shows up at BGB Headquarters that we weren’t expecting but are happy to check out once it’s here.   The Book Club Cook Book by Judy Gelman and Vicki Levy Krupp (creators of bookclubcookbook.com) is one such book.

The book is a great starting off point for new book clubs or clubs looking to shake things up.  The book matches recipes with books.  The recipes are sometimes supplied by the author, other times the food is mentioned or inspired by the book.  Each book/recipe combo also includes a brief discussion of the book.  The recipes look good and doable. (I haven’t attempted any yet.)  Sadly, there are no glossy color food porn shots of what the finished product will look like for any of the recipes.  In fact, there are no pictures of food at all.  That’s ok though.  Stay for the books.

The book selections are varied and intriguing – not just what I would have thought of as standard book club fare.  The book includes recipes for books by Faulkner, Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Sebastian Junger, Dennis Lehane, and many others that would not have topped my hypothetical list.  That’s a good thing.   This isn’t neccessarily your mother’s book club, which I think is the point.  The cook book had me wanting to join a book club and discuss some of the books over the smells of delicious foods cooking in the oven.  However, being male, I may be left to read along and make these recipes at home with a smaller audience.

I know that there are book club’s that exist out there with men in them.  I just don’t have much experience with them.  (Hop in the Wayback Machine and check out this post from 2007 on book clubs in general and the only book club that I ever belonged to specifically.)   Given that lack of male book club opportunity, I was surprised to come across the story of this all-male book club which seems tremendously dorky and excellent all at once (even if the highlighted book is total shite).

I Heart Kelly Hogan

As I like to repeat over and over here at BGB, I love when the books and the music collide like a big ‘ol Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.  I am a huge Kelly Hogan fan.  When I first moved to Atlanta, the singer floored me with her incredible voice and range.  I was heartbroken when she left for the bigger pond of Chicago but heartened when she emerged as a back-up singer on my favorite Neko Case albums.  Neko Case!   So I was very excited to read that Kelly Hogan has a new album coming soon that includes songs written by some of my favorite music-type people.  Check out this list of collaborators:  the late Vic Chesnutt, the Magnetic Fields, Andrew Bird, M. Ward, Jon Langford, and Robyn Hitchcock.  The most interesting collaboration – which gets to the music and books intersection – is a song co-written by Andrew Bird and author Jack Pendarvis.  You can listen to the song here and check out my review of Awesome by Jack Pendarvis here (spoiler alert: it’s awesome).

Friday Links

Pictionary: The Cormac McCarthy Edition -

A BGB favorite Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad has been named a finalist for Best Translated Book Awards.  Hurray!  Read our reviews here and here. Then read the book.

The co-author of the Berenstain Bears passed away this week.  This writer at Slate has some issues that may go beyond the annoying bear family – “Among my set of mothers the series is known mostly as the one that makes us dread the bedtime routine the most…What I do recall is throwing the book away in a fury during my second pregnancy, lest my subsequent children find it and become as attached as the first one did…”  Calgon?

Is your new local indie bookseller your library?

Fantastic novels with disappointing endings

Cool:  beloved children’s books as minimalist posters

Pulp Shakespeare

Oprah’s Book Club Fight Club

Cooking with Poo! and other poorly-titled tomes

Nick Flynn on Fresh Air

Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was on Fresh Air last night.  The book has been adapted into a movie called Being Lynn.  Nick Flynn and director Paul Weitz are interviewed by Not Terry Gross.  Sadly.  It’s a fantastic interview.  (Maybe Weitz calls DeNiro “Bob” too much, but still…)

Multimedia overload: Read the book.  Check out the interview and check out the film trailer below:

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

If you don’t buy one e-book this year for reading on your electronic reading device – let it be Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.   My wife and I were looking for a book that we both might want to read to download onto our brand new Kindle.  We clicked through some menus, came across a familiar title – which we both vaguely remember hearing something interesting about – and hit the buy now button.  In mere seconds we were reminded that it was the cool collection of found vintage photographs presented throughout the book that was the interesting thing that we had heard about the book.  Cool found vintage photographs that look like ass on a Kindle.  Dammit!

The found pictures are a grandfather’s proof to his grandson that the fantastic stories of taking refuge during World War II on a Welsh Island are all true.  According to the grandfather’s telling, the island was home to a children’s home filled with kids with fantastic abilities and pursued by evil monsters are all true.  When the now high-school aged grandson sees his grandfather attacked but what seemed to be a monster (large animal?) of some sort, he becomes more sure that his grandfather’s stories were true.  Everyone else begins to doubt his sanity.

In therapy, the grandson plans a trip to Wales to visit the island.  Everyone agrees that having the boy see that the setting  of his grandfather’s stories is a non-magical island in the middle of nowhere will be a step to getting over his delusions.  Of course, the trip proves just the opposite, and the boy learns that his grandfather’s life was more dangerous and complicated than he ever knew.

The story is marketed for a young adult audience, and it often reads as a modern fable.  The grandfather’s stories are a tidy metaphor for his escape from the horrors of WW II to the bucolic island.  The monster’s pursuit of the “peculiars” through time highlights the inherent danger of being different.  Miss Peregrine explains the dangers of being “peculiar” at its most basic level – “Can you imagine, in a world  so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”

These themes of otherness are sure to resonate with the angst-y teen reader.  For this adult reader, the story sometimes comes across as a little forced and chances to develop the thematic elements on a deeper level may have been missed.  Still, it’s not a bad book, and it’s worth checking out for the unique use of found vernacular photographs into a coherent and magical story.  But whatever you do, DO NOT read this novel as an e-book; spring for the hardcover.

Fantastic is Right

The short animated film The Fanatstic Flying Books of Mr Leonard Lessmore won an Academy Award.   It sounded like the king of thing I should check out.  As it turns out, last night the movie was available for FREE from the iTunes store (no longer the case).  The price was right.  (It turns out the movie is available in its entirety – at least for now – for free on YouTube.)  It is an amazing little film that book lovers will love.   The story is by children’s author William Joyce, and it is also available as an “enhanced e-book iPad app.   Check it out already.