Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 731
October 20, 2009
Tears and snots for just one book so far
The Books on the Nightstand blog recently featured a post asking about the books that cause readers to cry. I am not one to cry while reading a book, with one notable exception.
LOVE THAT DOG, by Sharon Creech, is a children's book about a boy named Jack and his dog, Sky, and just thinking about the story gets me a little weepy. It's a book that's written in journal form and can be read by an adult in less than an hour, and it's simply brilliant. The book tells the story of Jack as he...
Life magazine for free!
Life magazine, 1935-1972, is now available online through Google Books.
It joins Life magazine's photo archive, also available courtesy of Google.
I just spent an hour reading through issues from the 1940s and found the advertising to be most interesting. Sexist, straight-forward, scantily-clad, and almost always sentimental, it's hard to imagine a time when magazine advertisements such as these were effective.
October 19, 2009
This artificially-flavored book is not dedicated to you.
Sandra Boynton has become my favorite children's author. Nothing makes me happier than reading one of her Pookie books to my daughter.
One of our new favorites is her non-Pookie board book, BUT NOT THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.
I think the story and illustrations are incredibly cute, and Clara seems to be enjoying the taste of the book a great deal, which led me to this thought:
Artificially-flavored board books. Awesome… right?
I'll have to see what my agent thinks.
My favorite part about BUT...
October 18, 2009
Zombies!
Check it out. A zombie wedding cake! Do you like it?
In terms of unconventional and nonconforming things like this, I believe that people fall into one of three camps:
1. I love it! It's amazing! I wish I had done something like it at my wedding.
2. It's definitely not for me, but isn't it great how people are willing to go out on a limb to do something unique and different and buck conventional wisdom?
3. This is stupid and tasteless. What could this couple been thinking?
I...
Water Street Books
I spent last night at Water Street Books in Exeter, NH, discussing SOMETHING MISSING with a group of enthusiastic readers. It's a wonderful independent bookstore located along a quaint little street lined with shops and restaurants, and its owner, Dan, is as enthusiastic about books as they come.
Among the audience members was Brooks Sigler, author of FIVE FINGERED FICTION, and the person most responsible for arranging my appearance. Even though we had not met until last night, she has...
October 17, 2009
Not all books should be recorded
WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, a book I have never read, consists of only ten sentences, yet it is the second most popular audio book in the iTunes Music Store.
Who purchases a ten sentence audio book, even if it's only 95 cents?
According to the product description, the recording is six minutes long. Six minutes to read ten sentences? I may just have to purchase the audio book to figure out what the hell is going on during this recording.
As if to highlight the lunacy of a...
Giving hotdogs a bad name
Hotdogs are my second favorite food, but some things should not exist.
Raven
A while ago, I wrote about group descriptors in the animal world. Words like a murder of crows and a pride of lions.
I also proposed a few of my own, which I did not like very much at the time but have grown rather fond of in the warm glow of hindsight. They include:
A gamble of poker players
A concern of mothers
A fumble of left-handers
Not bad, I must say.
Recently, I became aware of a group descriptor that I adore:
An unkindness of ravens, also sometimes referred to as a...
October 16, 2009
Ten-year-old genius
In the spirit of Connie Wanek's Radiator and William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow, I challenged my students to identify a topic that no poet has ever written about before.
One of my kids came up with this:
The line sometimes used to distinguish between a 6 and a 9.
I was jealous and wanted to steal the idea immediately.
Old fashioned book burning
A Baptist Church in Canton, NC is hosting a good old fashioned "Halloween book burning" in order to purge the area of Satan's works, which include all non-King James versions of the Bible, popular books by many religious authors and even country music.
In all fairness, I am not religious (and could do without most country music) and therefore am less concerned about the burning of religious texts than I am books like Huckleberry Finn, but it would seem to me that the burning of any book is...
