Betsy Bird's Blog, page 213

New Fuse 8 n’ Kate Episode: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown

Though I acknowledge the danger of running through the most popular picture books too early in my little podcast’s lifespan, for whatever reason I couldn’t resist going for the gold (so to speak). This one’s quite a bit of fun. Kate manages to drive me crazy within the first 30 seconds by calling Harry Potter YA . . . AND WE’RE OFF!  Then she has an interpretation about some of the more horrific aspects of the book that I honestly didn’t see coming.

You can download the entire episode on Soun...

A Trip to the Used Bookstore

Over at Comic Book Resources, a fellow by the name of Greg Hatcher used to report regularly on all the used bookstores he’d encountered in his travels. Here’s an example of what I mean.  They were fun round-ups with plenty of details and photographs. Back when I lived in NYC I’d read them almost wistfully. NYC has a couple used bookstores remaining, but they’re nothing like the ones you can sometimes stumble on in other parts of the country. I yearned to find my own one day.

This week, I went...

The End of child_lit: The Literary Listserv Era Comes to a Close

I go away for five measly days and look what happens! We briefly lose the sun, questions about ALSC and social media are raised, and then to top it all off the child_lit listserv comes to an end.

I found out about it through Facebook, actually. For the past three days I’ve been holed up in a lovely little house in the middle of Michigan without any Wi-Fi access, for the sole purpose of writing something above and beyond blog posts. Occasionally, though, my writing partner and I would step int...

New Fuse 8 n’ Kate Episode: The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton

You know how folks talk all the time about how more men win the Caldecott Award than women? Well, I’ve always sort of ignored that statement, citing in my head all kinds of women from over the years. Then, this week, I decided that we just haven’t done enough women illustrators on our show. Authors, yes, but the only woman we covered was Diana Souza (extra points if you can remember which famous book she illustrated).  Also, Kate hasn’t had a chance to look at a real Gold Medal Caldecott Awar...

Video Sunday: Don’t feed the plants

Happy Day Before the Eclipse! We’ve a couple interesting videos to peruse today, so take your pick! First off, two recent ones from the live feed show I do with the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop. The first is a bit of an aberration since it involves me being interviewed, not the other way around. The lure? The interviewer is the greatest in the field. Yes! By some act of provenance, Andrew Medlar of Chicago Public Library actually agreed to interview me!! The man is a genius in the field. Plus I l...

Review of the Day: How Many Guinea Pigs Can Fit On a Plane? by Laura Overdeck

How Many Guinea Pigs Can Fit On a Plane? Answers to Your Most Clever Math Questions
By Laura Overdeck
Feiwel and Friends (an imprint of Macmillan)
$17.99
ISBN: 978-1-250-07229-0
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

Geez. How I ended up in this position I’ll never know. Me. A born and bred liberal arts major. The kind of person who managed to go an entire four years in college avoiding any classes that had even the faintest whiff of math to them. I wasn’t one of those kids traumatized by it or anyth...

The Artful Book Display: Getting It Right

The other day I posted my most popular tweet of all time. I didn’t really mean to but, as with most things on the internet, it’s never the tweet or the post that is most important to you that catches on like wildfire. In this particular case I was at Anderson’s Bookstore in Naperville to see Jason Reynolds speak about his new Spiderman/Miles Morales book series. Naperville isn’t particularly close, but these days that man’s worth driving hundreds of miles to see. Until this day I’d only ever...

Surprising Jolts of Children’s Literature: Of Bunnies, Cats, Monsters and More

It continues! As ever, folks just can’t seem to write books without slipping references to children’s books into them, left, right, and center. And while it seems an odd exercise to collect these titles, it’s also oddly informative. I’m still trying to piece together a unified theory about why this happens at all. No answers thus far but I live in hope. While I’m pondering and postulating then, here are some surprising jolts of the month:

My Mother, the Bunny, and Me by Edith Kunhardt Davis

...

Book Trailer Premiere: Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos by Monica Brown, ill. John Parra

Every generation gets the Frida Kahlo picture book biography it deserves.  Now at some point here I’m going to write an article about why some female figures get picture books biographies while others do not, and what trends in the greater pop culture landscape control these choices.  Happily, I am of the opinion that the more Frida Kahlo bios we have, the better.  Up until now my heart was squarely in the camp of Frida by Jonah Winter, ill. Ana Juan, as well as Viva Frida by Yuyi Morales. Th...

New Fuse 8 n’ Kate Episode: Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman

Sometimes in the course of running through the classics Kate and I are in danger of looking at books for kids with too clinical an eye. For example, I might easily forget that Are You My Mother by P.D. Eastman is, at its core, a very sad little book. Fortunately Kate’s there to remind me, so we ratchet up the sadness quotient to 11. For the first time we’re considering an Easy Book. Should we have started with Go, Dog, Go instead? I’ll leave that up to you to decide.  You can listen to our la...