Thank You's, Goodbye's, and Archives

Four years, three months, and 530 posts. Also a move from California to Utah and two new books published. But life gets crunched up sometimes, and what I really need is more time for my own writing. So Book Aunt is coming to a close, and I just want to thank you all for sharing the joy of talking about children's books with me.

Yesterday I was standing in a bookstore and overheard a woman trying to pick out a book for her nine-year-old niece. Naturally, I entered into the fray. My only difficulty was that when I asked the child questions about her reading habits and interests, the aunt kept trying to answer for her (incorrectly). I finally got a few words from the girl herself and managed to seal the deal with Half Magic by Edward Eager, though we decided that E.D. Baker's books would be a good option to look for at the library. And so it goes: Book Aunt may not be posting, but she's still lurking in the shadows of the local bookstore, leaping out to hand books to unsuspecting and presumably grateful children plus the adults they haul along with them for purposes of paying for things.

I will keep the site up for a while so that people can access the archives, most notably my large posts overviewing a genre or different versions of the same well-known story or book. Here are some of the more useful posts in various categories:


About Fairy Tales and Folktales

Standout Fairy Tale Books, Collections, and Retellings

Fairy Tales and Books about Witches (A Halloween Post)

Classic Fairy Tale Retellings

An Overview of Trickster Tales


Versions of a Well-Known Story or Book

Versions of A Child's Garden of Verses

Versions of Mother Goose

Versions of Cinderella (Plus Notes on the Possible Demise of Picture Book Fairy Tales)

Versions of Beauty and the Beast

Versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Versions of the Snow Queen


Picture Book Themes

Picture Books for Grieving

Picture Books to Sing

Picture Books about Water

Picture Book Lessons about Being Yourself

Thoughtful Picture Books You've Never Heard Of

Oddball Picture Books:

    --Not Your Grandma's Picture Books

    --Picture Books with Bite

    --Feeling Kinda Crazy: Three Unusual Picture Books


Other Book Batches

Many Mouse Books

Poetry Anthologies for Small Children

A Selection of Christmas Books

Books by Authors about Writing for Children


Best Book Lists

Best Picture Books Ever (2009)

Best Middle Grade Books Ever (2009)

Final Favorites Lists (2013)


How to Pick Books for Kids

Secret Weapons: Choosing the Right Books

Ten Books at a Time


The Pistachio Awards

First Annual Pistachio Awards (March 2011)

Second Annual Pistachio Awards (April 2012)


In Case You Didn't Know...

Why I Love Picture Books (Anarchy of the Imagination)

Again, thank you to all of my visitors. I've made so many nice blog friends. I hope to be able to keep in touch through comments, tweets, and e-mails. And of course, let's continue to rejoice in children's literature and the love of reading!

For those of you who follow my books, I have a picture book called The Tooth Fairy Wars, illustrated by Jake Parker, coming out in Spring 2014 and a poetry collection called Monster School that will probably be out in Spring 2015. No middle grade fiction at the moment, but I'm working on something, so we'll see what happens next. (Isn't that always the case with life and everything?)

Note: The first image above is a detail called "Young Woman Writing" from a wall painting in Pompeii. The second image is a detail from "Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid" by Vermeer. The third painting is "Three Reading Girls" by Walter Elmer Schofield. A print of it used to hang in my grandmother's home. She was a very good first grade teacher and reading tutor as well as a voracious reader who passed the love of books on to her children and their children. The picture now hangs in my office.

Buffy Says Read

Sarah Michelle Gellar makes some very nice points about reading with your kids in this video from Yahoo MOM (Moments of Motherhood).

I used to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a regular basis; the show was fantasy/paranormal, one of my favorite genres, and it was so darn well written. Which means that of course I had to check this clip out, and I was pleased to note that Sarah did a good job. In particular, her story of turning daughter Charlotte into an avid reader is inspiring as well as cute.

Not that you have to be an actress to care about getting children to read... So what's your story? How have you hooked your kids (or students) on books? Leave a note in the comments and I'll list some highlights below!

Comments:

E. Louise: For us, it's important not just to read TO our kids, but to let them see us reading. My husband was often read to, but he never saw the adults around him reading, so he still grew up not valuing reading (until he married me - HA!). I, on the other hand, grew up in a family that had "library nights" where we would all go, pick out a stack of books apiece, and come home and sit around the living room reading together, sharing popcorn and soda. It was our favorite night of the week, and since my sister and I saw our parents loving books as much as they wanted us to, it happened quite naturally for us. My husband and I read to our girls, and we let them see us reading, too, and at two and three-and-a-half, they are both already hooked on books!

Kim Aippersbach: I agree that modeling reading is important, and having lots of books in the house, and taking lots of trips to the library. (But that could just be me making a virtue of my own habits!)

Both my oldest kids transitioned from being read to to reading independently with a single book. I can't remember which one it was for my oldest, but for my daughter it was Harry Potter. Chapter ended on a cliffhanger, my husband refused to start the next chapter, so she begged to be allowed to take the book to bed with her. 'Oh, I suppose so, just this once,' we said, secretly giving each other high fives behind her back!

First Lady's Advice on Reading and Writing

I was pleased to see that our president's wife gave a shout-out to reading and writing in a recent Q&A at a girls' academy, Elizabeth Anderson Garrett School. Better still, she emphasized revising!

Here's the quote, in response to a question about what she and her husband tell their daughters to encourage them in their studies:

Read, write, read, read. If the president were here--one of his greatest strengths is reading. That's one of the reasons why he's a good communicator, why he's such a good writer. He's a voracious reader. So we're trying to get our girls, no matter what, to just be--to love reading and to challenge themselves with what they read, and not just read the gossip books but to push themselves beyond and do things that maybe they wouldn't do.

So I would encourage you all to read, read, read. Just keep reading. And writing is another skill. It's practice. It's practice. The more you write, the better you get. Drafts--our kids are learning the first draft means nothing. You're going to do seven, 10 drafts. That's writing, it's not failure, it's not the teacher not liking you because it's all marked up in red. When you get to be a good writer, you mark your own stuff in red, and you rewrite, and you rewrite, and you rewrite. That's what writing is.