Home » 2012 » September (Page 2)

Halloween Is Coming! Bring on the Poetry!

I have heard so many people say “I hate poetry”! To quote Erasure “It doesn’t have to be like that”. There are AWESOME poems out there to make you sit up and take notice– words brought to life on the page, spoken or sometimes sung to you, or by you, or with someone else. Some are long, others short. Some will rhyme, and others don’t. Maybe you’ll find one to scare you, or make you laugh, or inspire you to create something of your own. Here are a few of my favorites. Some I’ve shared with my kids, and others they haven’t yet grown into. But with poetry alive in our home, they’ll get to experience them here (and maybe at school– you don’t have to hate it just because you learned it at school) and I hope you will take a chance on a few of them, too.

 

The Bat by Theodore Roethke

I first remember reading this poem in Cricket magazine when I was about nine years old. It was accompanied by a terrifying black and white pencil illustration. I’ve never forgotten it. I can still picture that page in my head and it still creeps me out.

 

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

One of the great things about this poem is that most of the words don’t make any sense. So when someone complains to you that it makes no sense, you can tell them it’s really not supposed to. It evokes a intense visual response– with a line like “the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame”, how could it not? And it’s fantastic to read aloud, especially with someone else. In spite of, or maybe because of, the complete nonsense of the vocabulary, my son could recite it (and did, with glee) when he was four years old.

 

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Edwin Morgan.

I had a hard time finding the text of this online, and when I did, I was surprised at how it looked (I didn’t like how it was presented, so there is no link). I first encountered this in a book of children’s poetry meant for reading aloud, called A Foot in the Mouth (edited by Paul Janeczko and illustrated by Chris Raschka), and I remembered it as looking different in terms of spacing and placement of words on the page. When I looked back, it was amazing to see what a difference page design made in my ability to read and enjoy this poem, so go find the book. It is a relatively new one. The Song of the Loch Ness Monster is a “sound poem”, meant to be read out loud, but you will spend a lot of time tripping over your tongue as you attempt to do so. Again, complete (if enjoyable) nonsense, but any adult who attempts to read it to a child is guaranteed to cause giggles. Luckily, Morgan recorded it (link) so you can hear the way the poem is intended to sound, and it does sound very much like the song one might expect from this watery cryptid.

 

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

Okay, The Highwayman is a really long one and it is found sometimes in high school English textbooks. And it does have some challenging vocabulary, and it does take place well into the past. But it’s also a tremendous ghost story with tragedy and romance. I was sold on it after Loreena McKennit recorded it to unearthly music on her album Book of Secrets. Here’s a video illustrating the song. It was also the inspiration for a racy romance novel called The Landlord’s Black-Eyed Daughter, but that’s neither here nor there.

 

Little Orphant Annie by James Whitcomb Riley

Yes, absolutely, I have recommended this poem more than once. It is delightful and scary, and Riley’s true love for all children shines here. This is another to read aloud, and it too is fairly simple to remember if you do it enough. Riley wrote in dialect but he used simple language, and he sure knew how to tell a story. Sadly, there isn’t a good in-print copy of this poem (Joel Schick’s The Gobble-uns’ll Git You Ef You Don’t Watch Out is out of print), but if you whisper it around a campfire, you won’t really need one. Anne Hills put the poem to music in this video. It appears on her 2007 album Ef You Don’t Watch Out. It does not look like it’s easily available through Amazon but she does have a MySpace page– here is a link to the song there. (I’m psyched that she has recorded an entire album of Riley’s poems. Indiana fourth grade teachers, take note.)

 

The Tyger by William Blake

I first encountered this poem in the 1975 edition of Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? by Kenneth Koch. I might have been five or six at the time, and I read it over and over. It does have a companion poem, The Lamb, but The Tyger was the one I read again and again. The vision of the tyger “burning bright/through the forests of the night” is powerful, a spark for the imagination to illuminate the darkness (Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ first YA vampire novel, In The Forests Of The Night, clearly referenced this). This could be a really frightening read-aloud for some kids, so step with care… but hey, it’s Halloween soon.

 

The Hearse Song by Anonymous

Also known as “The worms crawl in”. Yes, it is completely gross and morbid, and I am not the world’s biggest fan of this one. But kids seem to love it. It is rooted in folklore and the oral tradition, and a version can be found in Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark.

 

Check one (or more) of these out as a Halloween treat. Tell me if you like it. And if you have other suggestions, let me know!

 

 

Posted on September 25, 2012 by , Reply

Integrity in Writing Reviews

Integrity is so important. It is the value of emphasis that the master teacher is reinforcing with my kids in tae kwon do. Truthfulness, along with kindness, are the things that we want them to know we value. And it’s also something we work hard to model, both in our lives and in the kinds of reviews we write and publish.

There are a lot of review sites that will only publish positive reviews. If the reviewer doesn’t like the book he doesn’t write the review. That’s okay, everyone has a different philosophy, but here we think that to serve you the best you ought to know what isn’t worth your time or money as well as what is so astonishing that it’s worth it to pay the extra money. We try to be professional and tell you what we think, but without being nasty. There are librarians who write reviews for us, and people who truly love the genre, and we support them in their views. It’s hard to give out a negative review, especially a respectful one, and I so respect those of our reviewers who are honest when it comes to writing a difficult review (sometimes those reviews pay off in unexpected ways– like a writer revising his book, or a reader who really appreciated the review).

I know there are a lot of fake reviews out there– reviews that rave about how great a book is, or are really negative about one, that are with cynical intent, or even to drive (or decrease) sales. It saddens me that there are so many, because the way most books end up in someone’s hands is when someone they trust recommends the book to them. But with so many fake reviews, who can you trust? If I only bought the books the book critic at the Wall Street Journal recommended I’d end up frustrated because her tastes are different from mine… but at least I can trust her to give her honest opinion. I’d like to be able to trust that the opinions I see in reviews are genuine, too, since they’re more likely to live on the same planet with me.

But even if a review isn’t written with integrity, and the number of these that aren’t is expected to increase, Digital Book World reports that reviewers who are compensated for writing positive (or negative) reviews may be committing a crime. Incentives to write positive paid reviews are expected to increase as companies attempt to increase their market share, but every time someone writes a paid review he or she deprives the rest of us from making an informed choice.

We don’t take compensation here. Although we are sent review copies, anyone who contacts us ought to know that sending us a book doesn’t guarantee them a positive review. But we write honest reviews. You can count on that.

Posted on September 24, 2012 by , Reply

Is Any Book A Good Book?

Well, the answer to that question is obvious, I think. Of course not. Some books are just not very good. As a review site, of course we discriminate between what makes a story worth reading, and what doesn’t. Otherwise, what good would we be as a resource for readers and librarians? We all have limited time and money for books.

But MonsterLibrarian.com is just that. A resource. People see what we have to say and make their own choices based on that, and probably also recommendations from friends, colleagues, Goodreads, and other review sites, advertisements on the Internet, catalogs and flyers in your mailbox (if you’re a librarian) and reviews in magazines and publications of various kinds. You choose where you’ll go for recommendations, and who you’ll trust to direct you to the “next good book” as we like to say here. I hope you choose to come here and take advantage of our hard work.

To go a little further, is any book that gets people reading a “good book”? I think Dylan, the Monster Librarian, would say yes. And this is a philosophy that I see a lot. Are the Twilight books good books? They got a lot of people reading. That’s a good thing… but are they good books? I think the writing is pretty bad, so I’m going to say no, I don’t think they are. Would I buy them for my YA collection, if I were buying for one? With such high demand, you’ve gotta give them what they want. You don’t take books out of the hands of people who are desperate to read them, especially if this is the first time they’ve ever really wanted to read a book. And I do know people for whom Twilight was the first book they read from cover to cover. But not the last.

I don’t especially like the school of thought that says “well, it’s okay to let them get the bug with R.L. Stine, because at least they’re reading, and that will transfer into a love of great literature in the future”. Maybe, but that’s condescending to those kids. Stine doesn’t even pretend that his books have classic literary value. Like a lot of series books, his books use fairly simple language, predictable structure, and cliffhangers at the endings of chapters to keep kids going. Not everything kids read is great literature, even in the classroom. If you have seen some of the little phonics readers kids use you know that is not even expected. “I put my hat in the van. I put the map in the van. Dad gets in the van”. Simple language, predictable structure (no cliffhangers, though, sadly). We can share the cool books that aren’t Goosebumps or Twilight without seeing them as just a stepping stone. They’re where the reader IS. And maybe the reader will be there for a long time. There are enough Goosebumps books and knockoffs to last the kid who wants them or needs them for a very long time.

But there are also a lot of other books– fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novels for kids that are funny and suspenseful and unbelievable. And someday kids will be done with Goosebumps, just like kids from 30 years ago eventually outgrew the series adventures of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield and kids from 60 years ago eventually outgrew Nancy Drew to go on to other kinds of books. Maybe their interests will take them in the direction of new, similar series and genre fiction(which is often, despite its disreputable status in literary circles, extremely good) and maybe their reading will be shaped by other interests and experiences. Some of those books might be food for thought– but maybe not the ones we might expect. And some may be pure escapism (also maybe not the ones we might expect).

Not every book is a good book. But sometimes it’s enough to tell a good story, one that fits readers at their particular time and place. But those books don’t exist in isolation, even if the reader has a narrow view. Put those stories in the midst of many, and let serendipity take us on its meandering course on the shelves and through the stacks, whether that’s in the classroom, in the library, or at home.

Posted on September 19, 2012 by , Reply
First « 12345 » Last