Tiny Treasury

I saw this at Zoot’s and it looked like fun. Any other book bloggers interested?

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange*
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest*
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita*
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Five links for the weekend

1. The Book Stacks lists some reasons why books have been banned or challenged.

My favorite? Where’s Waldo? was removed from the Springs Public School library in East Hampton, N.Y. (1993) because there is a tiny drawing of a woman lying on the beach wearing a bikini bottom but no top.

I remember hearing the rumors of that back in the day and I remember looking. But like goofy Waldo, the topless woman eluded me.

2. Nikki Grimes author of Bronx Masquerade, one of my favorite books for reluctant high school readers, is chatting tomorrow night at the Readergirlz forum. If you haven’t read Bronx Masquerade put it on your list. Here’s what Grimes writes about her book on her website

Bronx Masquerade is a novel written in 18 voices. It follows a classroom of high school students over the course of a year, exploring who they are behind the masks they wear, and using poetry to do it.
Bronx has no single main character, in the traditional sense, but there is one character whose point of view is represented throughout: Tyrone Bittings. Tyrone serves as Greek chorus, commenting on every character in the book. He helps the reader connect the dots from character to character and from one subplot to the next. Each character has his own story to tell, but Tyrone is privy to them all.

3. Judy Blume wrote an editorial back in 1999 asking, “Is Harry Potter Evil?” Sadly, eight years later, it’s still relevant.

4. Since I don’t live in the UK I failed to notice that it’s Children’s Book Week there. Booktrusted has the inside scoop.

5. And lastly for the vintage book lovers, here’s a digital collection of 20 children’s books.

I was curious about how many of the top 100 most challenged books I’ve read. Here’s the list in its entirety. The titles I’ve read are in bold. Feel free to play along if you have a blog and link back so I can check it out.

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

more about banned books week here and here

The 26th annual Banned Books Week is celebrated this week, September 29- October 6. (I know I’m late, but I was a teacher and weeks still start on Mondays in my head.) The ALA has a number of interesting links for parents, children, teachers, students, and aficionados of controversy.

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to read reminds us that we can’t take our democratic freedoms for granted. People all over the country, want to “protect” children from language and sexual content they find offensive and thoughts they disagree with. While I agree that parent should monitor what their children read I don’t believe they should have the power to prevent other children from reading books.

The Ten Most Challenged Books of 2006

Last night while I should have been writing a review of Soupy Saturdays with the Pain and the Great One I went over to a friend’s house to watch the second episode of the Gossip Girls. (Yes, I know it’s Gossip Girl, I just can’t quite separate it from Gilmore Girls yet!) I have to admit that I love the show. It’s a guilty pleasure admittedly, but it’s so much fun. I may have to check out whatever’s left of the series from the library this afternoon. I think I’ve only read the first two.

A bunch of creepy weirdos are stealing people’s photos of their children from Flickr and posting them on Orkut, a social networking site. The thieves are setting up fake accounts for the children so other weird lonely people can add them to their friends. Many of the pictures being stolen are copyrighted so the thieves can’t download them. Instead they’re taking screenshots and saving them to their computers and uploading them to Orkut.

You can read more about the thefts and the ick-factor of it all from mothers who learned their children’s photos were used here and here. You need to be an Orkut member to see profiles, but here’s one of the actual fake profiles featuring someone’s little girl.

Orkut, owned by Google, has not responded to any complaints about the picture thieves and fake profiles even though their user policy says you must be 18 years old to create a profile. If you’re outraged or sickened like I am, please go here and see how you can help. If you are a member of Digg please Digg this story so it gets the attention it deserves. And here’s a petition to shut down Orkut, a site that refuses to help parents who demand their children’s pictures be removed.

This makes me sick. I’ve just privatized my more than 2000 photos on Flickr. I suggest that you do too.

Last year I discovered that library system in the township adjacent to mine has a number of different story hours for the preschool and under crowd. My son and I found two we love that meet on Mondays and Tuesdays and one we attend if the Tuesday librarian cancels or if we’re running too late to get there.

The Monday librarian knows how to tell a story. She hops on chairs, uses a variety of voices and gestures and circles the room so all the kids can see. She remembers the children’s names from week to week and makes sure she uses them in different songs and felt board activities. On the down side she’s a bit scattered sometimes and lets the parents and nannies talk too much. She’ll let the wheels on the bus go on for entirely too long and gives every one a turn when there are way too many kids in attendance for it to be feasible. We are talking about a story hour that’s attended by toddlers who are mostly under age two. (She sometimes reminds me of me when I was teaching and unprepared. I’d let the kids share their stories for the entire class period if it meant they’d be occupied.) But she’s wonderful. She always gets the kids up and moving and can usually rein them in when they get too out of control. She also knows when to give up on a story and sing.

The Tuesday librarian is far more organized. She’s got her routine down pat. She tells the moms and nannies to keep quiet before she starts and chastises them when they start to talk among themselves. Her routine is predictable, starting with the same song each week. She usually reads the same familiar books to the kids, bringing out puppets to help her with the stories and songs. She lets the kids (and adults) know when she’s reading something new so they can be sure to pay attention. All of the books she reads are engaging and allow for some level of audience participation. The kids love her story hour and so do the parents. If you get there too late it’s standing room only.

Sadly my local library doesn’t have a story hour. The children’s librarian hosted a series of morning story hours for children ages 3 to 5 last year, an age group that seemed odd to me because most of the children she hoped would attend were in school in the morning. We went the first week and arrived a few minutes late. There were songs and stories but the librarian didn’t have the same enthusiasm as the librarians we visit regularly. After we’d been there for about 10 minutes she popped in a video. Kipper. Sure Kipper is cute and British and all, but it was a video. At the library. She let the VCR do her job for her. I was disappointed and we didn’t go back for the following week’s story hour. She’s retiring at the end of this year and I don’t know that our library will have the budget for another full-time children’s librarian. I wonder if they’d let me run a story hour of my own.

Be sure to check out The Book Stacks’ A Book by Any Other Name game. The word of the week is “big.” How many books can you think of with the word “big” in the title?

A (crazy) Maine woman, in her anti-pornography crusade, checked out two copies of the book “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health” from two different libraries and refuses to give them back. The Associated Press reports tha JoAn Karkos enclosed $20.95 to cover the cost of the book to each library along with a letter explaining why she won’t return them.

“Since I have been sufficiently horrified of the illustrations and the sexually graphic, amoral abnormal contents, I will not be returning the books.”

She also wrote

“The truth is the contents of the book in question leads to a lot of misery, pain, lack of freedom, and often death.”

The library director returned her check along with a form she could use to request the book’s removal but may need to police assistance in retrieving the stolen book.

“This has never happened before,” said Rick Speer, director of the Lewiston Public Library. “It is clearly theft.”

Yes it is theft and stealing books from libraries won’t make them disappear. Published more than 10 years ago, the book has become so popular since Karkos’ crusade was reported that Speer has ordered two more copies for the library.

censorship, pornography, ill-advised theft

I’m one of those parents who doesn’t like to buy character merchandising from movies or television. You won’t see me buying anything with an Elmo, Dora, or Diego on it. But I’m not too uptight to accept and use gifts that are character related, so Sam does have some Thomas plates and bowls, and some other character items. The good news is that Sam doesn’t recognize Elmo when we pass the creepy photography studio that uses him to lure people in and he doesn’t actually know that Dora is everywhere- on cups, sneakers, blankets, pencils, T-shirts, etc. He doesn’t watch enough TV to know he’s supposed to WANT these things yet.

Want aside, now that the weather is most decidedly fall like here on the east coast, Sam’s fallen in love all over again with the book A Day at the Beach, a Dora the Explorer book. With colorful pages, a few Spanish words for good measure, and lots of items to find and label, Sam loves the book. He likes pointing to and naming the birds and balls on each page and as his vocabulary increases he’s discovered the turtle and fish. Dora and her (creepy, though I’ve never really watched the show so maybe he’s not quite as creepy on TV?) friend boots put on sunscreen, buy lemonade, and throw out their trash. I didn’t want to like it, but A Day at the Beach is a great picture book for the toddler set. It’s brightly colored, interactive, and Sam finds new things to talk about each time we read it. I imagine that kids who watch the show will love it even more.

We took a bunch of books out of the library last week, and to my husband’s dismay “My Book of Trucks” was not Sam’s immediate favorite. Instead he went straight for “I Can, Can You?” and hasn’t yet picked up any of the others.

“I Can, Can You?” is a board book featuring full color photographs of children with Down Syndrome going about their day. Each page shows a different child engaged in a different activity like eating, drawing, and going down a slide. Sam’s particularly interested in the baby building with blocks. Each time he picks up the book he turns right to that page, points and says, “Baby! bock.”

The children featured are mostly white, though two Asian children and one African-American child are also shown. The text is repetitive, engaging and subtly encouraging. It’s perfect for a toddler or a preschooler with or without Down Syndrome, though I’d imagine it would be most reassuring for a child with Down Syndrome, who probably doesn’t get to see to many books with pictures of kids like them.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reviews Walter Dean Myers’ newest short story collection What they Found: Love on 145th Street, where he revisits the characters in love he first wrote about in 2000’s 145th Street.

The Washington Post reviews the first American Girls novels in five years: Meet Julie and Good Luck Ivy. Both Julie and Ivy’s stories in the six part series take place in 1974 San Francisco. And yes, there are dolls to go with them.

The New York Times reviews three new back to school books about teachers and their students, It’s Time for School With Tallulah, Kindness Is Cooler, Mrs. Ruler and Wow! School!

The Tale of Despereaux will be released on film in December of 2008 which feels like forever. If you haven’t read Kate DiCamillo’s wonderful Newbery Award winning novel The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spol of Thread stop now, head to your library and check it out immediately. (You could also buy it, as it’s worth reading time and time again, but I’m a library girl, and like to read first and buy later.) The cast of film looks amazing- Dustin Hoffman, William H. Macy, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Walken are just a few of the voices in the cast.

It’s rare that I look forward to a movie that’s based upon a book. The film versions tend to disappoint. I’ve been thinking about the children’s books that became movies, that succeed? Some of my favorites, even though they may have deviated from the book, are:

Anne of Green Gables (the Megan Followes version)
The Witches
The Little Princess (total tearjerker)
Holes
Alice in Wonderland (Disney)
Peter Pan (Disney)
The Wizard of Oz
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (I liked Johnny Depp’s version, but not as much as the first)

Which movie versions do you love?

children’s books, book to film, film versions of children’s books, movies based on kid’s books

Happy 5768! May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.

Read more about Rosh Hashanah at Judaism 101.

“Hola! We’re playing at the beach today,” is the first sentence of my son’s current favorite book called, yup, you guessed it, A Day at the Beach. That has nothing to do with anything, other than I’m Jackie, the new writer for Tiny Treasury and the first thing that came to mind for my first post was to say ‘hi.’

The first book I read by myself was Meg and Mog and it’s gotten better and better since then. I love to read. I love reading so much I became a Reading Specialist. I love books so much I’m the treasurer of my local Friends of the Library organization. I’m looking forward to reading more books and writing about them here.

Seriously, I love books. Whenever my dad talks about my soon-to-be 18-month-old son Sam he asks, “Do you remember what you could do when you were 18-months-old? You knew the whole alphabet. It’s because I read to you every night.” I honestly have no recollection of knowing the alphabet, but I remember begging my dad to read ten more chapters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz before I went to bed and I quite clearly recall asking my stunned father what a period was when I read about them for the first time in Are you there God? It’s me Margaret . My father’s greatest gift to me was teaching me how to value books and the stories they contain.

I love children’s literature and I’m thrilled to have an excuse to read more of it. Storytelling, more than anything else, is what makes us human.

Okay, this I don’t get: one in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an AP-Ipsos poll. The survey went on to say that the typical person claimed to have read four books last year. Of those who had read at least one book, the usual number read was seven. Yet, 27% of people hadn’t read a single book in the last year.

Interestingly, folks from the West and Midwest are more likely to have read at least one book in the past year. Southerners who do read, however, tend to read more books, mostly religious books and romance novels, than people from other regions. Additionally, Democrats and liberals typically reading slightly more books than Republicans and conservatives.

I wonder whether this is an adult thing - or whether children pick up on this on a young age. So, here’s an informal poll: Did you read a book last year? If so, what genre? And more importantly, tying it into this blog, did your children read a book last year?