ISO a good book

From the classifieds of the Jacqui's Room Tribune:

MWF ISO a good book. Recent literary relationships all disappointing. Looking for an intelligent book with humor, depth, and a gripping, complex plot. Age not important. Must not open with landscapes. Also, graphic violence, kidnapping of small children, and jokes that hurt people's feelings need not apply. Satisfying, yet surprising ending essential. Join me for curling up on long winter nights or walks on the beach.

Any good literary matchmakers out there have that somebook special for me?

You're only seven once

In which I explain why Tinkerbell has not read Harry Potter even though she is a super-genius.

As if I needed more of a reason than Percy Jackson to love Rick Riordan, he has echoed my thoughts EXACTLY on making sure kids have age-appropriate books to read, not just in terms of reading ability, but also in terms of content. Go read and come back. I'll wait.

Like Riordan, it never impresses me when parents brag about the big, fat, way too old books their super-genius first grader can read. I always wonder what their kid's been missing out on; was he too busy reading all seven books of Harry Potter to read Monkey and Me and taste playdough in preschool? Because that is just sad for him. "Wasn't he scared of, um, he who must not be named?" I ask, shivering. And when they say no, I wonder, "Why not? How much horror has this kid seen to already at 6 be immune to the scariness of an undead, shape-shifting force of pure evil who kills people's parents?!"

I remember Linda Sue Park (I think) talking somewhere about bad books, and how reading bad books takes time -- time that could have been spent reading high quality books. I guess I feel the same way about reading books before you're ready for them -- why do it when there are way too many fabulous books at your own level to ever read them all?

As my mother used to say, you only get one chance to be seven; don't go trying to be eight before your time.

Three Books You Should Love

Remember when I used to blog about other people's books instead of whining about MY book all the time? No? Me neither. In any case, though, I read three FANTASTIC books this week that you must love.

1. The Spanish Bow, by Andromeda Romano-Lax

This book for grown-ups was recommended by MoonRat back in the fall (click on her site for a good summary); I bought it for my mom sight unseen on that recommendation and she loved it, so I stole it. Ms. Romano-Lax seems very cool and is the inventor of Project Fill-in-the-Gaps, which is like my 15 Classics in 15 Weeks project, but gigantic-er.

Why you must love it: It is sweeping and epic and beautiful. It rides from elation to secrecy to love to hatred to bitterness and takes you every step of the way. Plus, it delves bravely into the question of WHY we bother to create anything and whether any of it is worth it. Also, it will make you want to bust out that violin you haven't touched since third grade.

Caveat: You are going to read the first chapter and say, "Um, Jacqui? That would never happen." You are right. Keep reading anyway, okay?

2. Knucklehead, by Jon Scieszka

I know; everyone's already recommended this sort of autobiography. But I hadn't read it. If you haven't either, you should. And you should give it to your sons, especially if there are a lot of them.

Why you must love it: It is hilarious, and it's the best kind of hilarious, which is to say that it is full of "Omigod, we totally did that" moments.

Caveat: It may teach your kids new ideas...

3. You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!
by Jonah Winter, André Carrilho

Why you must love it: Because you must love Sandy Koufax, who struggled and overcame and stood up for his beliefs and retired on top. And was a good guy, it seems. The voice is perfect and the story has what I consider the perfect level of information for a picture book biography.*

Caveat: The illustrations. I like them and they're very cool, but the faces are warped and it freaked Destructo out quite a bit: "Why he YOOK yike dat? He really yook yike dat?"

* By the way, Boni has more picture book biography recs over at her blog this week, if you're interested.

PS It's Maurice Sendak's birthday, speaking of books you must love. Rumpus rumpus rumpus, as we say around here.

(sighs in contentment)

I am a very fast reader. I have been known to skip the boring parts or to rush to the end to see what happens.

Sometimes, though, I pick up a book like this:

And nothing, no nothing, could make me speed through it because it's just. that. good.

Here is how you know Angle of Repose is brilliant. Not because it won Wallace Stegner the Pulitzer Prize. Not because Stegner's descriptions are so beautiful they make you think it would be cool to move to the middle of nowhere on the back of a mule and build your own house out of rocks. Not because Susan grapples 130 years ago with the balance between her family and her art, or because the narrator's efforts to imagine his story ring familiar to any writer, or because the tale is simultaneously so sweepingly universal and heart-wrenchingly specific. Not even because I dare secretly compare it to East of Eden, which you know rocked my world.

No. The way you can tell how much I am loving this book is that I have, on my bedside table, these:

Yet even the call of Percy Jackson and The Hunger Games is not enough to make me rush a single of Stegner's words.

Yum. What are you reading?

The first of May

Holy cow, there is way too much to celebrate today! Let's get to it.

1. It's May! This weekend we shall hide the winter coats and corduroy and pull out the open toe shoes.

2. It's Buy Indie Day! Go buy a book from your local indie. Even if you don't go buy, consider linking to the IndieBound site instead of or addition to Amazon at your blog or website. I am going over to Nicola's later to get a few things. Hmm. What shall I buy? Maybe...


3. ... Moon Zoo, by England's first female poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. After passing over Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, it's nice to see they now have their heads screwed on straight. Has anybody read Moon Zoo? It looks gorgeous.

4. Or maybe I will buy Catch-22, which I have never read. It's Joseph Heller's birthday. Imagine if you wrote a book that was so good that the title became a widely-used idiom. Crazy. Also, he was a pretty good writer, I hear (begins list for next project involving books she should have read a long time ago).

5. But the biggest thing to celebrate today involves a writer far more brilliant and dedicated than Heller or Duffy. Yes, it's me. Today marks the one year birthday of this blog. Read here to see how it all started, and for directions on starting your own blog. I considered doing BIG BIG BIG things here in Jacqui's Room to celebrate, but...

6. ... I have only three more chapters to write and Ant's first draft will be done, so I am writing madly. Of course, some of it is, um, all "This is where they find the thing and then something happens." But still!

Have a happy first of May.

How I Spent 2008

I love book lists. Mostly, I love to read them and see which ones I've read and say, "Yes! That was good!" Your last gift, which I had planned to give you last week before the whole "spend the day on the beach with the kids instead of blogging" decision, is a book list. All the books I read in 2008, in backwards order with Lizzie Bright sneaking in at the last minute on the 3oth.

Interestingly (embarrassingly?), I read two books by many authors, but the only authors from whom I read three books are Carolyn Keene and Stephenie Meyer. I wish I could say, "Oh, and I read six books by (insert name of impressive sounding serious author)," but after the 15 Classics in 15 Weeks marathon, you can see I sort of tapered off into delicious middle grade grade adventures for a while. I did read half of Foucault's Pendulum in there, but I didn't finish it.

Also, I didn't count any books I only read out loud to the kids, even though some of them took us weeks (like Little House in the Very Boring Oh My God Is He Cleaning the Gun Again? Woods). I was tempted to because it would have put me over 100, but...

In any case, enjoy. Comments welcome.

1. Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (Gary D. Schmidt)
2. P. S. I Love You (Barbara Conklin)
3. Shakespeare Wrote for Money (Nick Hornby)
4. Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer)
5. The Bungalow Mystery (Nancy Drew #3, Carolyn Keene)
6. The Popularity Plan (Sweet Dreams Series #2)
7. The Luckiest Girl (Beverly Cleary)
8. The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport (Laura Lee Hope)
9. The Hidden Staircase (Nancy Drew #2, Carolyn Keene)
10. The Secret of the Old Clock (Nancy Drew #1, Carolyn Keene)
11. The Book of Lost Things (John Connolly)
12. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
13. Chains (Laurie Halse Anderson)
14. Identical (Ellen Hopkins)
15. Cordelia's Honor (Lois McMaster Bujold)
16. On Writing (Stephen King)
17. Size 12 Is Not Fat (Meg Cabot)
18. How I Live Now (Meg Rosoff)
19. Standard Hero Behavior (John David Anderson)
20. The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Mary E. Pearson)
21. Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains (Laurel Snyder)
22. Dune (Frank Herbert)
23. Peak (Roland Smith)
24. Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature (Robin Brande)
25. Faust (Johann Wolfgand von Goethe)
26. Breaking Dawn (Stephenie Meyer)
27. Eclipse (Stephenie Meyer)
28. Light in August (William Faulkner)
29. Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
30. Once Upon a Time in the North (Philip Pullman)
31. Freak Show (James St. James)
32. The Underneath (Kathi Appelt)
33. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (Rachel Cohn & David Levithan)
34. Clay (David Almond)
35. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
36. Savvy (Ingrid Law)
37. I Am the Messenger (Markus Zusak)
38. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (Ford Madox Ford)
39. The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno (Dante Alighieri)
40. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Cormac McCarthy)
41. The Hundred Dresses (Eleanor Estes)
42. Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1 (Marcel Proust)
43. Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)
44. Book of a Thousand Days (Shannon Hale)
45. New Moon (Stephenie Meyer)
46. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
47. Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (Herman Melville)
48. My Mother the Cheerleader (Robert Sharenow)
49. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
50. Silas Marner (George Eliot)
51. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)
52. The Canning Season (Polly Horvath)
53. Lock and Key (Sarah Dessen)
54. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
55. Then We Came to the End (Joshua Ferris)
56. Love In The Corner Pocket (Marlene Perez)
57. Rats Saw God (Rob Thomas)
58. If You Come Softly (Jacqueline Woodson)
59. The Wednesday Wars (Gary D. Schmidt)
60. After Tupac and D Foster (Jacqueline Woodson)
61. Reincarnation (Suzanne Weyn)
62. Deadline (Chris Crutcher)
63. Looks (Madeleine George)
64. The Squad: Perfect Cover (Jennifer Lynn Barnes)
65. Arkansas (John Brandon)
66. Our Man in Havana (Graham Greene)
67. 13 Little Blue Envelopes (Maureen Johnson)
68. Things Hoped For (Andrew Clements)
69. Waiting for Normal (Leslie Connor)
70. Little Friendly Advice (Siobhan Vivian)
71. Making Waves (Randi Reisfeld)
72. The Tale of Despereaux (Kate DiCamillo)
73. Prom (Laurie Halse Anderson)
74. Runemarks (Joanne Harris)
75. Divisadero (Michael Ondaatje)
76. The Golem's Eye (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 2, Jonathan Stroud)
77. Confessions of a Triple Shot Betty (Jody Gehrman)
78. Little Secrets #1: Playing With Fire (Emily Blake)
79. The Opposite of Invisible (Liz Gallagher)
80. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (Kate DiCamillo)
81. The Amulet of Samarkand (The Bartimaeus Trilogy, Book 1, Jonathan Stroud)
82. Dairy Queen (Catherine Gilbert Murdock)
83. Letters from the Corrugated Castle: A Novel of Gold Rush California, 1850-1852 (Joan Blos)
84. Secrets of My Suburban Life (Lauren Baratz-Logsted)
85. How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) (Ann Hood)
86. A Great and Terrible Beauty (Libba Bray)
87. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)
88. Shooting the Moon (Frances O'Roark Dowell)
89. A Crooked Kind of Perfect (Linda Urban)
90. The White Darkness (Geraldine McCaughrean)
91. A Curse Dark as Gold (Elizabeth C. Bunce)
92. Thirteen Reasons Why (Jay Asher)
93. The Land of the Silver Apples (Nancy Farmer)
94. The Bermudez Triangle (Maureen Johnson)
95. Letters from Rapunzel (Sara Lewis Holmes)
96. Elijah Of Buxton (Christopher Paul Curtis)
97. The Name of this Book is Secret (Pseudonymous Bosch)

Edited to add: Thor reminds me that I read Lizzie Bright earlier; it was John Green's Paper Towns that I read all night on the 30th. A worthy #98.

ReadKiddoRead

In which I give you an idea of where to spend your next several hours.

James Patterson (yes, that James Patterson) set up ReadKiddoRead, a site all about great books that will make kids want to read.

I wanted to hate it. I wanted to be snotty and say, "What does James Patterson know about kids' books?!" But I can't. I love how it's set up. I love that the books they've chosen include some well known and some lesser known suggestions. I love that they have "if you loved X, try Y" ideas. I love that real book folks are on the board.

I do not love that the recommendations page for picture books does not read something like, "But if you really want a treat, read The New Girl...And Me. We think it's the BEST BOOK EVER." But you can't win them all. I am sure it's an oversight.

Thanks to Lisa Yee for the link.

Favorite Beginning of a Book

My favorite start to a book ever has to be the Prologue to The Canning Season, by Polly Horvath, which I just started today. Not because the main character's name is Ratchet Ratchet Clark. Not because it includes skull-boring insects, hurling placenta, Salisbury Steak, and the Pensacola Hunt Club. Not even because of the image of Ratchet's mother sliding down her hospital sheets and almost out the window. No, the reason is because after all of this fun, the beginning of the book is thrown upon us the same way it's thrown upon Ratchet. Her mother has this wonderful monologue describing how Ratchet got her name. Then the monologue ends:

"... and that's how you became Ratchet Ratchet Clark. Oh, and by the way, you're going to Maine tonight."

Genius. I can't wait to read the rest.

What book has your favorite first chapter?