Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 24

Offered without comment

Happy students at Ballou HS Library

I know people wonder if their donations matter; if what they do is appreciated by others. I wanted to be sure you all saw this picture of students going through the newly arrived books from Powells so we could put that fear to rest. The books that are sent to Ballou as part of the Guys Lit Wire book fair are a big moment in their day this week. Along with librarian Melissa Jackson, the kids are tracking the wish list to see what is purchased and eagerly awaiting the boxes. More than a few books are being checked out before they even hit the shelves.

You did this. You made this happen. You put books into the hands of grateful readers who would not have them otherwise. This matters - alot - and you all should know that.

The book fair for Ballou High School in Washington DC continues. The wishlist at Powells Books is still open. There are more books to buy and more moments like this one to savor. Thanks everybody, and keep spreading the word!

If you have any questions, or have never participated in the book fair for Ballou, please follow the first link. For a list of books we'd really like to see purchased, please see this recent post.

Some book buying ideas for Ballou High School

The Book Fair for Ballou Sr High School has been great - about 150 books bought off the Powells Books wish list all of which will be much appreciated by Melissa Jackson and the many students who use the library everyday. There are still plenty of books left to be purchased and in case you are still thinking to buy, we wanted to provide you with a list of titles that would be especially useful this semester. Ms. Jackson is working on an International Day for the school in December and so these books would work really well for that theme:

What the World Eats ($22.99 in HC)

Lonely Planet Badlads: A Tourist in the Axis of Evil ($14.99 PB)

Kids of Kabul by Deborah Ellis ($15.95 HC)

Eating Mudcrabs in Kandahar ($29.95 HC)

A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain (SALE - $7.98 in PB)

The Bizarre Truth: Culinary Adventures Around the Globe ($14.99 PB)

Also these novels:

The Queen of Water by Laura Resau ($16.99 HC)

The Poet Slave of Cuba by Margarita Engle ($16.25 HC)

Out of Shadows by Jason Wallace ($17.95 HC)

The Good Braider by Terry Farish ($16.99 HC)

And we have a situation where the later titles in a series were purchased, but not the first book - which makes the reading kind of tough! So please consider this title:

Kekkaishi #1 ($9.99 PB)

There are also some great sale titles still on the list as well as several fairly inexpensive paperbacks. We're keeping it open a couple of more days in hopes that some of these international titles in particular are scooped up. THANK YOU SO MUCH for your support thus far!!! For all the information on the book fair (as well as some great pictures of the library and students) - see our initial post.

The books are arriving at Ballou....

....and these tweets are made of awesome!

Thank you anonymous for the book Something Wicked This Way Come...we appreciate your generosity!!

— Melissa Jackson (@BallouLibrary) October 10, 2012

Thank you Sara R. for the books Certain October and Looking for Transwonderland. Your love was sent to us all the way from Portland, OR.

— Melissa Jackson (@BallouLibrary) October 10, 2012

Thank you Holly for the books 12 Things to Do before You Crash and Burn and Okay for Now!!! The students loved them!!

— Melissa Jackson (@BallouLibrary) October 10, 2012

Thank you Kathryn S. for the book Paleo Sharks.We appreciate you!!!

— Melissa Jackson (@BallouLibrary) October 10, 2012

For more, check out Ballou Library on twitter and don't forget the book fair continues; we have hundreds of books still to purchase from the Powells wish list. For all the information see our main post from last week. THANK YOU!!!!

"If you ever see a girl with eyes the color of a swordfish you'll leave whoever you're with for her immediately."

James Prosek's upcoming Ocean Fishes also showed up in the current Garden & Gun (this one is not online though) but not as a review. The article was about one of the locations he visited while making the book which is not a standard collection of his paintings but rather a record of his work to be right at the place when his subjects are brought out of the water. He wanted to catch them in their most brilliant - as the fishermen see them - prior to the dulling that comes with death. This makes for some gorgeous art, I'm sure (Prosek is nothing if not talented) but some of the fish are actually only brought up via bycatch and not legally fished anymore due to diminishing numbers*. Prosek has a point that the fish were going to die with or without his participation (he's there in those cases because they are commonly bycatch in certain locations) but still, I wonder how he felt seeing something that is likely to disappear in his lifetime without colossal efforts on the part of the world to save them. That's an article (or book) I'd like to read.

A trailer was made for Ocean Fishes, as part of a larger film project "Picture the Leviathan", that includes a nice interview with Prosek about why he wanted to be onsite to see the fish before painting them. It's a great video and the whole project sounds significant but in almost in a "whistling in the dark" kind of way. Prosek makes a point of saying why he feels these animals are important and need to be saved but still I wonder - we do so much to document the world as it disappears; why can't we (all) try harder to save it in the first place?

*I want to stress I am not bashing Prosek at all for this - the bycatch happens with any deep sea fishing with nets and he is not on crazy huge factory ships that are the major reason why so much of our fishes are being decimated. I'm just sad about it happening at all.

[Post title from "Picture the Leviathan" book trailer for Ocean Fishes. This title is on the Ballou Library High School wish list.]

"Actually my South didn't lose the war. We won."

I am sorry to say that I did not know Natasha Trethewey was our poet laureate. This terrible oversight was rectified with the arrival of the current issue of Garden & Gun. (You aren't reading G&G? You must - it is both beautiful to look at and full of great articles on southern people, places, hobbies, cooking and more. I adore it!) Trethewey talks about memory and history and the deep storytelling tradition of the South. There's also a killer article about her in this month's Poets & Writers (not online I'm afraid), which I scooped up the minute I saw her on the cover, but I wanted to give you a bit of the G&G interview:

You call memory "our minds' dark pantry."

It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.

So you see yourself as a bit of an unreliable narrator.

[Laughs.] Even as I think of myself as a rememberer, I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better. In my new book, Thrall, there is a poem, "Calling," where I am dealing with these ideas. Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions? My earliest memory from childhood, I don't know whether it is real or a conglomeration, and I have to challenge the nature of it. And explore why I've kept what I kept.

I was so impressed by Trethewey that I added a couple of her books to my holiday wish list (and also her latest to the Ballou wish list - I'm sure the poetry club will love it). I'm also eagerly awaiting her memoir. I like that she writes about the messiness of the south, and also her own complicated family* (she's biracial). I also think that it takes a southerner to really get that messiness of the south - how it can be so wrong and yet so right at the same time (but in different ways obviously). I just found her words quite compelling and can't wait to read her poems.

*I am deep in the weeds of my own complicated family as I scan in and upload my great grandmother's photos. It never goes away, even when it didn't happen to you - the stories live forever in your blood which is something Trethewey really seems to get.

[Post title from Tretheway interview in G&G.]

A Lesson in Literary Humbleness

In the midst of running the Guys Lit Wire Book Fair for Ballou High School in Washington DC, I am reminded again just what it means to be humble. I've done this four times now for Ballou (and three times before for other schools) and while we started out with a bang a few years ago, it is now a vast struggle to cut through the collective social media noise and get noticed. Based on twitter retweets, for roughly every 1,000 followers one book is bought. When you add blog posts to that, I imagine the number is more like 10,000 followers/readers for every single purchase. It could require even more; I have no way of knowing.

This year has been the hardest yet for the book fair. We are way down in books bought - only a couple hundred this spring and not even 50 yet this week. Harder still has been persuading folks to spread the word in blogs, facebook and twitter. Maybe it is election fever gripping us but while people like the idea of a book fair like this one, getting them to move towards concrete action of posting (let alone purchasing) is very difficult. I am not competing with other charitable efforts on this score but simply indifference which, as we all know, is the toughest competitor of all.

All of this has made me reconsider my own book sales in a different light. There is a lot of talk with publishers in the initial flurry of a book's release and yet it quickly becomes apparent for most of us authors that other than a lot of marketing emails there isn't much else that's going to happen. (Unless you have a big push from your pub but that is the exception not the rule.) If you want to do readings/signings then you'll need to set them up and get there on your own. If you want to participate in a festival then you need to make the contacts on your own and get there. And if you want to move beyond the standard marketing destinations (like aviation museums/college classes for me) then you're really on your own in terms of making contacts and persuading the people in power that your book is worth their time and attention. Every new author thinks the world will pause when their book is released, which is okay, and every new author learns that, well, the world never pauses. Necessary humble pie is eaten that's for sure.

Where I'm sitting now with MAP, the first printing of 6,000 copies has sold out and a second print run of 1,000 came out in July. The paperback is due in May. I am delighted with the 6,000 sales and determined to sellout the 2nd print run as well. (That's part of the impetus for the outreach to colleges and museums - I hired an independent publicist to help with all this and she's been great.) But what I have learned from marketing MAP is the same thing I've learned from the GLW Book Fair - cutting through the noise is enormously difficult and if you don't keep the long game in sight every single second then you will be easily defeated.

It's one book at a time folks, one single book.

There are 435 books on the Ballou wish list at Powells. I do hope we sellout as I know the kids are watching the list, I know the district has cut budgets yet again, and I know how very important this library is to the school. (Have you seen the pictures on the GLW post of what goes on in the library? Check them out!) But the most significant thing for me about this entire experience is the perspective it has given me on my own book's sales. If it is this crazy hard to get booklovers to buy a book for a school library with established need, then persuading them to take a chance on a debut author they've never heard of writing about Alaska is truly monumental. All you can do, in either case, is try.

And stay humble and grateful for every forward step you take toward your goal.

What I learned after reading Libba Bray's THE DIVINERS

1. Haunted houses are scary, really really scary.

2. Ditto remote graveyards, religious cults, evil songs sung to a nursery-rhyme tune (which I already knew from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies) and dark places under bridges.

3. Oh but holy crap the haunted houses! Do not enter them unless you are carrying crosses AND weapons and accompanied by a Vampire Slayer (or two!). And Spike. And Willow. And Oz. Hell, even Xander! Oooh and especially Giles. MUST HAVE GILES.

4. The 1920s is a period vastly under explored in speculative fiction and yet it seems perfectly suited for the haunted story Bray told here. It's modern enough to be recognizable (as opposed to the 19th century) and yet includes a lot of intriguing quirks in language, clothing and social convention.

5. You can write a strong heroine who does not seem outside the time she lives in. Evie is a smart ass with a secret who feels like (in many ways) she has nothing to lose - perfect set up for her later feats of bravery. Ditto Theta who has plenty of backstory to support her bravado.

6. There is no excuse for not crafting multi-ethnic novels if you want to. Ditto gender balance, socio-economic balance and inclusion of GBLT characters. Bray pretty much has it all in this book and it all makes sense because - wait for it - the book is set in fucking New York City! (Take that writers for every all-white television show to be set in the Big Apple in the past 30+ years!)

7. The idea of a bunch of amateur crime solvers sitting around a table covered in books in a big library never gets old. Ever. Laptop research will never get that kind of visually appealing.

8. You don't need vampires or zombies or werewolves to tell a thrilling story. Consider this fact to be my gift to the world.

9. A slow burn romance is the best kind, especially in a thriller. (It's way more believable that two characters would be more focused on stopping a serial killer than making out.)

10. As Stephen King fans know all too well, nearly 600 pages of reading material flies by when the story is tight, the characters fully formed and the scary brought on hard and fast.

11. And that Stephen King name-dropping - I did that on purpose. Bray has written the new IT as far as I'm concerned with the added bonus that the ending doesn't let you down like that giant spider did. Bray balances a wide but distinctive group of characters, moves across several POVs with ease, ratchets the tension in a steady arc, does not shy away from the blood thirsty nature of her evil, does not waste a word or scene in her plot and - Booyah! - throws in some believable girl power to boot. My only complaint would be that a key character seems to wimp out at one point just so the girl can have her moment of power. But even Giles had his moments of indecision so I'll give Bray this one. Overall, as Robin Wasserman's Book of Blood and Shadow is a teen improvement on The Da Vinci Code, so is The Diviners all the good and more from IT. Two must buys for your book loving teens (male or female) this holiday season and my favorite reads of the year, hands down. (Formal review of The Diviners to follow in December column.)

[Post pic of killer UK cover.]

What I learned after reading Libba Bray's THE DIVINERS

1. Haunted houses are scary, really really scary.

2. Ditto remote graveyards, religious cults, evil songs sung to a nursery-rhyme tune (which I already knew from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies) and dark places under bridges.

3. Oh but holy crap the haunted houses! Do not enter them unless you are carrying crosses AND weapons and accompanied by a Vampire Slayer (or two!). And Spike. And Willow. And Oz. Hell, even Xander! Oooh and especially Giles. MUST HAVE GILES.

4. The 1920s is a period vastly under explored in speculative fiction and yet it seems perfectly suited for the haunted story Bray told here. It's modern enough to be recognizable (as opposed to the 19th century) and yet includes a lot of intriguing quirks in language, clothing and social convention.

5. You can write a strong heroine who does not seem outside the time she lives in. Evie is a smart ass with a secret who feels like (in many ways) she has nothing to lose - perfect set up for her later feats of bravery. Ditto Theta who has plenty of backstory to support her bravado.

6. There is no excuse for not crafting multi-ethnic novels if you want to. Ditto gender balance, socio-economic balance and inclusion of GBLT characters. Bray pretty much has it all in this book and it all makes sense because - wait for it - the book is set in fucking New York City! (Take that writers for every all-white television show to be set in the Big Apple in the past 30+ years!)

7. The idea of a bunch of amateur crime solvers sitting around a table covered in books in a big library never gets old. Ever. Laptop research will never get that kind of visually appealing.

8. You don't need vampires or zombies or werewolves to tell a thrilling story. Consider this fact to be my gift to the world.

9. A slow burn romance is the best kind, especially in a thriller. (It's way more believable that two characters would be more focused on stopping a serial killer than making out.)

10. As Stephen King fans know all too well, nearly 600 pages of reading material flies by when the story is tight, the characters fully formed and the scary brought on hard and fast.

11. And that Stephen King name-dropping - I did that on purpose. Bray has written the new IT as far as I'm concerned with the added bonus that the ending doesn't let you down like that giant spider did. Bray balances a wide but distinctive group of characters, moves across several POVs with ease, ratchets the tension in a steady arc, does not shy away from the blood thirsty nature of her evil, does not waste a word or scene in her plot and - Booyah! - throws in some believable girl power to boot. My only complaint would be that a key character seems to wimp out at one point just so the girl can have her moment of power. But even Giles had his moments of indecision so I'll give Bray this one. Overall, as Robin Wasserman's Book of Blood and Shadow is a teen improvement on The Da Vinci Code, so is The Diviners all the good and more from IT. Two must buys for your book loving teens (male or female) this holiday season and my favorite reads of the year, hands down. (Formal review of The Diviners to follow in December column.)

[Post pic of killer UK cover.]

Because buying books for Ballou Sr High School is the best thing you can do

Cross posted from Guys Lit Wire, the group blog I moderate and co-created with the amazing Sarah Stevenson.

Students in the library with books bought this spring by Guys Lit Wire readers

We here at Guys Lit Wire keep our fingers pretty close to the pulse of the DC school system as the Ballou Sr High School library is near and dear to our hearts. After three previous online book fairs to help stock the shelves, we were already planning to return to Ballou but the news that libraries in particular were facing major cost cutting measures in the city has just strengthened our commitment. When we began with Ballou in 2011 there were just over 1,500 books in the library, or 1.25 for each of the nearly 1,200 students. Now, they have 5,484 which means we are about a third of the way to our goal of meeting the ALA standard of eleven books for each student. The three book fairs for Ballou to date have resulted in over 1,000 books bought from Powells Books and many others donated directly to the school through the publicity we have helped generate. Now, we are back to Ballou for another round of gift giving from a list of 450+ great new books that has us all really excited.

For those who have participated with our book fairs in the past, this explanation will be familiar: there is a wish list at Powells Books for the school that was created with input and final approval of Melissa Jackson, the Ballou librarian. (If you want to embed it in your own posts about the book fair, here's the link: http://bit.ly/GLWBookFair.) The list includes novels and poetry as well as nonfiction titles on colleges, travel, finance, nature, art and more. There is also a healthy selection of manga and graphic novels.

It is perfectly fine to purchase used copies of a book (more bang for your buck) but please check and make sure the book is in "standard" used condition and not "student owned". (You will have to click on the title and leave the wish list to check this). The "student owned" copies are very cheap for a reason - they are written in and thus not a good choice for this effort. Also, be on the look out for "sale" prices of new books which are really a fantastic deal. (And of course if you can buy new, we really hope you will!)

Once you have made your selections head to "checkout" and you will be prompted to inform Powells if the books were indeed bought from the wishlist. This lets the store know to mark them as "purchased" on the list. After that you need to provide your credit card info and also fill in the shipping address. Here is where the books are going:

Melissa Jackson, LIBRARIAN

Ballou Senior High School

3401 Fourth Street SE

Washington DC 20032

(202) 645-3400

It's very important that you get Melissa's name and title in there - she is not the only Jackson (or Melissa) at the school and we want to make sure the books get to the library. And please know we appreciate you jumping through a few extra hoops for the wish list at Powells - this is a chance for us to support an important bricks and mortar independent bookstore and while it takes a little extra effort, we really think it's worth it.

Finally, here's a look inside Ballou, from students speaking about the Jobs for American Grads program. It gives you a good idea of just how much these kids are up against and how incredibly motivated they are to improve their lives.

If we're going to make an effort to change the lives of anyone, it should be the kids at Ballou Sr High School - helping them in fact should be the easiest decision in the world for any of us to make.

How often do you tell yourself you'd make a difference if only you knew how? Well, here is your easy inexpensive nonpartisan apolitical (yea!) chance to make the best possible sort of difference, and one all of us as booklovers can certainly identify with.

So, please, go to the wish list, buy a book and make one school at our nation's capitol a better place. Thanks so much for your efforts and if you can, spread the word on the book fair as far and wide as possible. Follow @BallouLibrary on twitter where Melissa will thank folks as the books arrive and for more pics of the library and check out their facebook page. And here are a few more pics of kids enjoying the Ballou Library:

The Ballou Scrabble Team!

Celebrating African American authors!

Poetry Club at the DC Youth Poet Slam!

Chess Team!