Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 187

This Week in Books

I like to make these lists now and then, snapshots of what everyone in the family was reading at a given point in time. Lately I've been trying to take note of what the kids are reading and jot the titles down in my notebook. I don't catch everything, of course; a good deal of their reading happens in bed at night when I'm not around to make notes.

Here are books I've spotted in kids' hands in the past week:

Jane (age 14):

* A Man for All Seasons (the play) — this one at my request, so we can...

Meow

In case you missed this at the bottom of a long post earlier this week: A hilarious performance of Rossini's Cat Duet by sopranos Felicity Lott and Ann Murray. This is the same duet that Betsy and Tacy performed in the school concert every year to the delight of their friends. Easy to see why!

Heaven to Betsy

Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for Betsy-Tacy Convert Week.

If you'd like to participate but don't have a potential convert in mind, Bonny Glen commenters Lenetta and Anna would love to be adopted.

I'm re-re-rereading Heaven to Betsy right now. How could I resist, after all these Betsy posts? It's the first of the high-school books, chronicling Betsy's freshie experiences with a new Crowd of friends—irresistible! The setting is early 1900s Deep Valley, Minnesota, aka Small Town America. Be...

Betsy-Tacy Converts

Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for Betsy-Tacy Convert Week.

If you'd like to participate but don't have a potential convert in mind, Bonny Glen commenters Lenetta and Anna would love to be adopted.

Why am I sounding the Betsy-Tacy gong so loudly? Because I've seen these practically-perfect-in-every-way books come in and out of print twice since I discovered them in 1995. Let's keep them in print this time!

(The way we do that is by, um, buying them. That sounds obvious, but what I've learned i

Catching Fire: Open Thread

Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, the sequel to The Hunger Games.

I don't care if this book got a zillion volts of buzz. I loved it anyway.

(Heh.)

What I thought before reading  The Hunger Games, upon hearing the premise (dystopic society sends lottery-selected teenagers to horrific danger dome where they must battle to the death on compulsory national television): Really? Sounds sick, twisted, so grim, so brutal…and it's YA? Really??

What I thought after reading The Hunger Games: BRILLIANT. Compe

Heads of the Class

I shared this story in the comments on Sarah's lovely blog…it's so funny I can't resist telling it here too. Several years ago, when we lived in Virginia and my oldest child was about 8 or 9, I took the kids to a living history museum (the ten-awesome Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, VA, which you do NOT want to miss if you're in the area). That was the first of many happy visits, and a glorious spring day it was: new lambs for the holding, amiable cottage cat jumping into our stroller, Jemi

"Living Arduously in the Quiet"

"There are quiet places also in the mind," he said meditatively. "But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately—to put a stop to the quietness….All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head—round and round, continually, What's it for? What's it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn't there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night—not restlessly, but se

It's a Small Internet After All

After I posted my Robert Pinsky story, I sent the link to Facebook and got this comment from Sally T., a Facebook friend I know through homeschooling—not writing—circles:

Heh — that would have been about the same time that I was poetry editor at Quarterly West, at the U of Utah. Robert Pinsky didn't visit us, though.

To which I replied, hastily and with much excitement:

SALLY!!!!! I was one of the AWP Intro Award winners in poetry in 1993. My poem appeared in the Summer/Fall 1994 issue of Quarterly

Betsy-Tacy Convert Week Redux

Due to the enthusiastic response, the sign-up period for Betsy-Tacy Convert Week has been extended to Sept. 4th. Remember, HarperCollins will send you a copy of Heaven to Betsy/Betsy in Spite of Herself to give away to the unBetsyed friend of your choice.

The first copies have just arrived in the HarperCollins offices. Squee!

Excited much? You bet I am. These books were out of print, and now they're back. Best book news of the year, if you ask me.

The relaunch coincides with a fresh burst of Betsy

Speaking of Robert Pinsky

I got to chauffeur him once. He gave a reading at UNC-Greensboro while I was an MFA student there—this would have been around 1992—and as poetry editor of The Greensboro Review it was one of my jobs to help get our visiting authors from place to place. In this case I was asked to pick Mr. Pinsky up at the Charlotte airport (I think it was Charlotte—it was about an hour away, I remember that) and drive him up to Greensboro for the reading. My classmate David Scott (now married to our fellow class