is this it?

OK, I've finished my 6th book in the challenge, and put in 2 more hours and 389 more pages. So here are the updated totals:

2454 pages

14.75 reading hours

2.5 blogging/networking hours

6 novels

And now I've caught up in The Alchemyst series and I'm seriously annoyed that The Warlock is not yet available for me to read. The little teaser at the end of The Necromancer is pretty tantalizing...

There are other books on my TBR stack so I may pick up another one, but I have to say, I'm pretty close to done. And I'm still kind of stuck in The Alchemyst's world--and liking it--so I'm not sure I'm ready to break that spell. On the other hand, there's still plenty of reading time left this evening. I don't expect to do much tomorrow morning--my time is up at 10:30 and I'm headed to church at about 8:45. So this may be it. But I'll check in again tomorrow morning to confirm the totals, one way or the other.

48 Hour Book Challenge Update

Whew! I'm surprising myself by how much I've read. The quick totals, 28 hours in:

12.75 hours of reading

let's call it 2 hours of social networking, blogging, reading updates, etc.

2065 pages

5 novels

The last three I've read are the first three books in Michael Scott's Alchemyst series; we have one more in the house and that's the next up. This is one appealing series: gods, demigods, and monsters from all kinds of mythology, a nice mix of the historical and the present-day, and all kinds of ambiguity about who's on whose side. I'm only sorry that the fifth novel isn't out yet--I'll finish the weekend without closure, but at least caught up on a series I'm enjoying.

But now I really need to get out of the house. I hit the farmer's market this morning and now it's time to get to Trader Joe's.

Top 100 Children's Novels ...

Can you believe Alice in Wonderland didn't even crack the top 10? Ah, well; at least one more of my choices made the list. But I'm thinking at least two of mine won't, now. Maybe more...

Top 100 Children's Novels (#45-41) - still going strong

I'm pretty sure this is the first time one of my top ten has made it onto Betsy's list, so I'm excited to share this chunk of the list here. Scroll to the bottom to find the other installments--this is seriously a labor of love here, one that goes way above and beyond mere list-making--it's well worth checking them all out.

Top 100 Children's Novels (#45-41) - A Fuse #8 Production - Blog on School Library Journal

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and ten more...

Top 100 Children's Novels (#85-81) - A Fuse #8 Production - Blog on School Library Journal

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The Next Ten..

Top 100 Children's Novels (#90- 86) - A Fuse #8 Production - Blog on School Library Journal

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100 Best

So that ten best list I gave you last time was just a teaser for Betsy Bird's list of the 100 best children's novels, voted on by her readers. Here are numbers 91-100, with all kinds of great commentary and links. None of mine are on this list...let's see if any of them break in a little higher.

Ten Best

Betsy at Fuse8 is at it again. Last year she did a poll on the Top 100 Picture Books of all time--and I didn't participate, because--well, I didn't have a good reason. (Other than the whole not blogging thing, about which perhaps more another day.) Tomorrow is the deadline for her new poll, the Top 100 Chapter Books of all time--and this time I'm in. I just sent her my list, and since I don't expect all these books to make her top ten (though I'd be surprised if most of them don't turn up somewhere in the top 100) I thought I'd share my list here as well. It's a little idiosyncratic, as such things should be, and I'm sure it would look different if I did it tomorrow. I didn't go back and look at other lists I've seen over the years; I just went with what came to mind first. So here's my list:

1. Charlotte's Web, E.B. White
This one changes the landscape for chapter books in mid-century. It's a perfect read-aloud, but also a great book for a relatively new reader to take on. It's got humor and pathos, and the best retelling of the Easter story I've ever read in secular form. I can't read the end without crying, even after all these years.

2. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
Another game-changer. Raises great questions about what it means to be a child and why we would want to think of children as different from adults, I think. Plus it's hilarious and deeply weird.

3. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
I know all the reasons not to like this--the shift in focus from Mary to Colin, the reassertion of the patriarchy at the end, the well-intentioned but nonetheless problematic depiction of India--but it's still one of those books I return to year after year. If, as Perry Nodelman says, children's books are all about teaching kids how to be kids, this one is the quintessential children's book. And yet its depiction of "appropriate childhood" is so appealing to me, even now, that I keep coming back to it.

4. The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963, Christopher Paul Curtis
One of the funniest books I've ever read, but also a great reworking of a historical shame. (And apparently a book I've never written about. Sigh.)

5. The Golden Compass/Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
Another game-changer, for me: this one is comfortable with ambiguity in a way that still feels radical to me in a children's book. By the end of the series good and evil get sorted out (a little too comfortably for my taste) but in this everything's still up in the air. Lyra is a work of genius--a worthy successor to Alice.

6. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle
Is it possible to be a bookish girl and not love this one?

7. Skellig, David Almond
My list skews towards "classics," I think, but this one is a modern classic. Just the right blend of fantasy/realism. A brilliant reworking of The Secret Garden, in some ways.

8. The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett
Because who doesn't love little blue men?

9. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stone, J. K. Rowling
OK, another game-changer in that it made fantasy cool again (and funny). I know Diana Wynne Jones was already writing funny fantasy, but I think the opening chapters of this novel really are brilliant. Roald Dahl meets Dickens meets Cinderella, or something.

10. The Painted Garden (also published as Movie Shoes), Noel Streatfeild
I loved this book when I was a kid because it was such a terrific reworking of The Secret Garden. I still think it's brilliantly intertextual and really smart about what it means to try to inhabit a book. I used to want to be "discovered" as the next, next Mary Lennox.

You've got about 25 hours left to play. Go ahead, you know you want to!

In defense of Holden Caulfield

John Green is annoyed by the recent NYTimes piece on how Holden Caulfield is irrelevant today, and he blogs about it.

(Has anyone else noticed that he's blogging more lately?)

(For the record, I mostly agree with Green, but I love the cover of Catcher that the Times used to illustrate their piece...)

you read it here first!

Nancy Pearl loves E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Of course she does! (I did, too. Last year.)

time change

in case you were wondering, here's why the time stamp on my blog is currently set to Tehran time. Seemed like a fairly easy way to try to help out folks who are trying to get information out to the rest of the world about their predicament--I can only hope it helps.

Neglecting the blog, again

I've been writing elsewhere, though.

Here's my last column for Literary Mama.

And here's today's installment at the Mama, PhD blog at Inside Higher Ed.

Nick's last day of school is today--and I thought I'd post this picture here, since the tattoos are, yes, Dreamdark tattoos. Very cool. The whole concept was his idea; I was just his stylist. (The hair is a spray-on color that washes right out, unlike Mariah's pink hair...)

Is the Kindle elitist?

From the first time I saw a Kindle, I wanted one. It was an irrational desire, a visceral one. I couldn't explain it, though I tried to talk about saving my back (from the weight of all those books), more access, etc. Really it just looks like a cool piece of technology and sometimes Iwant them. But here's an interesting counter-perspective on the technology, from an interview with Sherman Alexie about his hatred of the Kindle:

Books saved my life, Edward. I rose out of poverty and incredible social dysfunction because of books. And all of my senses-sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste-come into play when I think and read about books. Books are tactile and eccentric. An eBook will always be a gorgeous but anonymous box. It will also be just a tool–perhaps an amazing and useful tool-but I don’t want it to replace the book. And I’m worried that many people don’t care about the book itself, and see the eBook as a replacement. And I’m worried that Amazon and other eBook distributors will completely replace bookstores. The careers of nearly every successful writer are based on the amazing human interaction between bookstore employees and readers.

read it all here

Why I Do Research

In the middle of writing a conference paper, it's helpful to stop and think about why I'm doing it.

Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Why I Do Research - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Goal Setting, Research Productivity, and the Associate Professor Survey

A friend asked me yesterday if I had goals. Not just "things I'd like to do some day," but articulated, specified goals. With a timeline.

In short, no.

All the career advice I've ever read suggests that goal-setting is an essential part of an integrated, successful career. And I do have "things I'd like to do some day," don't get me wrong. But writing down goals...well, for whatever reason, I haven't done it. One reason, I suspect, is that I'm a little uncomfortable with taking myself quite that seriously, with putting myself forward, in the way that goal-setting suggests. When I write it down here it sounds ludicrous, but there it is.

But here's the thing. I spent some time yesterday with the MLA's Associate Professor Survey, and I wonder if I'm not alone. The key finding for me, that women in private independent institutions (like my own) spend on average 9.6 years at associate professor before advancing to full, was sobering. (Especially since I'm already right at that mark, if not a little beyond it.) But even more telling was the paired statistic that in the same institutions, men are advancing on average three years more rapidly. (That's the largest gap between men's and women's advancement that the survey found.)

I wonder if women are less willing to label themselves career-focused than men are. I wonder if those women aren't articulating their goals, aren't naming them, and are therefore falling behind on them. I think in institutions like mine this could be a particularly insidious trap, as we are sought after and rewarded (up to a point) for our service and our teaching, and can make a pretty good career on them alone. So I wonder if when women like me say, "I'm too busy for my research," they really mean, "I haven't made it a priority." I wonder if they haven't made it a priority because they see that it's not really that highly valued, or because they truly prefer their teaching or service work, or because they have trouble carving out time for it at home. I am not at all ready to discount institutional and/or systemic discrimination against women, either--I know that the research work I do is, on occasion, measured and found wanting, at least in part because my field (children's literature--a female-dominated field) is not taken as seriously as, say, Renaissance literature. But such discrimination may fall into a larger pattern of discounting women's work that women themselves participate in. What would it take for us to claim our own work, our own value?

Or, on the other hand, are we choosing the saner course by pursuing more integrated lives? Sometimes that's what I think, and it does make sense. I have great autonomy in the classroom already; I do the research that interests me in the time frame that I can make work for my family, and that means an emphasis on conference papers and articles rather than on a monograph. (Psst--I prefer to read articles anyway, and suspect that they're more influential in most cases. But that's another story...maybe.) In my essay for Mama, PhD I call for us all to insist on the value of our work, to hold our senior colleagues and administrators to account when they pay lip service to teaching and service and then reward only original scholarship. I do think the work I do is valuable, but a small voice inside me also says, "you're not doing enough research." Maybe if I put some goals in writing I could measure my work against them and silence that voice. Maybe.

We think of these things when the semester ends and the research program hasn't quite ramped up again--or I do. Here's what I wrote yesterday about that survey, taking things in a slightly different direction:

Mothering at Mid-Career: The Associate Professor Survey - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Note: when I went to post this, I wanted to tag it for future reference and discovered that I have never used a tag for either "research" or "scholarship" before. Hmm.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview.

All semester I've been chairing a committee to review and revise our first-year curriculum. One big part of most universities' first-year curricula is, of course, some kind of expository writing course. Maybe this one?

ENG 371WR:
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era
M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Robert Lanham

Course Description

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

truly, read the rest. I find myself guilty of several days on the syllabus...

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview.

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(I'm sending you to her main page rather than to this specific link because I want you to see all the fabulous poetry-makers she's featuring this month. It's a treasure trove over there, really!)

Secret Keeper

I so wanted to review Mitali Perkins' Secret Keeper, a copy of which I received thanks to the author herself (I believe) some time ago. I read it over the weekend, when I was sick, and it kept me engaged and occupied (actually, it had me riveted!) as well as keeping my mind off of my increasingly nasty cold. So all is good.

But (you knew there would be a but) I should have reviewed it Monday. The week has intervened, a week full of committee meetings and class meetings and financial aid forms (not to mention tax forms) and recovery, and I just completely lost momentum.

So I'll leave you not with a review but with a question: is it a happy ending if the main character gets one thing she wants by giving up another? I am still struggling with the ending of this novel, which strikes me as more realistic than the endings of many children's and YA novels (but especially children's). There's just not a smidge of wish-fulfillment in it that I can see--tough choices and some significant pain, rather. But, still, (or, maybe, therefore?) it troubled me.

Do read it. I'd love to talk about it further, and maybe then I can write a real review.

Yum!

Seen on Fuse8, the most amazing bento box ever.

drive-by

Maira Kalman goes to the inauguration and likes it.

Revolutionary Moments

I'm teaching a new course this semester, and I blogged about it for IHE today. I felt a little badly that I didn't have an inauguration post for IHE, but it just didn't happen. I'm not there, I'm here--and in fact I'm teaching from 11:15 to 12:30, right when the action will be happening. But then it occurred to me--my course is about revolutionary moments, moments when things changed in some significant way. And so I've decided that we'll take a little break in my class to watch it live, just so we can say we, too, saw the moment. Maybe we'll even think about analyzing the rhetoric of the speech, if we have time.

Check out this gorgeous photo essay here, too.

And there's lots of great children's lit/inauguration blogging going on, too. I probably won't find it all, but don't miss Monica Edinger's link to her earlier "Letters to Obama" post. And Betsy Bird has some great stuff up at Fuse#8. The incomparable Julius Lester has an inspiring post (ok, it was from yesterday). There's more, but that will get you started.