Nancy Pearl's Blog, page 4

Skating Shoes

by Noel Streatfeild

I have a new friend—she's nine years old and her name is Sydney Armstrong.  She loves to read (of course—how could I ever have a friend who didn't love to read?).  She told me (and her teacher) that she sometimes hid the books she was reading inside her math book!  I used to do the same thing when I was nine (and ten and eleven and so on).  We discovered that we loved many of the same books, and we're planning to get together to discuss a book that we're both reading: The...

World Cup Fever

The 2010 World Cup (the international soccer tournament, spanning an entire month, held once every four years) is now over. New librarian and soon-to-be world traveler Andrea Gough describes herself as 'the obsessive kind of fan who fills out competitive brackets, tapes a broadcast schedule to the fridge, and rambles endlessly about the game to anyone who will listen." Not surprisingly (and happily for us), she has more to say:

Guest Blog

by Andrea Gough

During this year's World Cup soccer...

Don't Be Afraid of the Passive Voice

I love books about punctuation and usage—Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed are two of my favorite books, along with the new edition of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (winsomely illustrated by Maira Kalman).  Plus, the only instance of my ever doubting I was going to be a librarian had to do...

The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

The Good Son, by Michael Gruber (Holt, 2010), is one of those few and far between complex, intelligent, and insightful thrillers.  The main character, Theo Bailey, is a Special Operations soldier who decides to take a more-or-less unauthorized leave from the Army to locate his mother, Jungian psychotherapist Sonia Bailey Laghari, who's disappeared near Kashmir.  Sonia, who'd become a practicing Muslim when she married a Pakistani, was in South Asia to convene a symposium on "...

Miss Hargreaves

by Frank Baker

Frank Baker's Miss Hargreaves (The Bloomsbury Group, 2010) is a perfect exemplar of my as yet unnamed proposed new genre.  It is, according to the blurb on the back cover, one of the first in "a new library of books from the early twentieth century chosen by readers for readers."  The story is this: Norman Huntley is the sort of young man who has "…never lied in order to get out of things, so much as to get into things," a condition that leads his father to warn him to "Beware o...

Words for Empty and Words for Full

by Bob Hicok

I keep changing my mind about which of Bob Hicok's books of poetry is my favorite.  Is it Words for Empty and Words for Full (Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2010) or This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh, 2007)?  I finally decided to write about the former title, his latest book, although right up until I started this post I was undecided.  What I love about Hicok's writing is its conversational tone and ways of unexpectedly turning the world inside out and making me think...

Three Favorites

Three of my favorite novels are Oh, Be Careful by Lee Colgate; At War As Children by Kit Reed;  and The Lion in the Lei Shop by Kaye Starbird. The first two were published in the early 1960s and the last one in 1970.   When I think about what always links these books together in my mind (I almost never think of them separately), it's that I must have read them within a few years of each other; although I don't remember in what order, or what was happening in my life when I discovered them.  I...