The Last I Have to Say About Harry

For a while, anyway.

The June 4th edition of The Hartford Courant carried an article called School's Out for Harry in which the author, Kathleen Megan, says that the Potter books are used more often in college level classes than in grade school.

She quotes English teachers calling HP "middle- or lowbrow literature" and thus not appropriate for the classroom. The terms "middlebrow and lowbrow" are considered fighting words in many circles, no matter what piece of writing they're referring to. Another teacher had a really interesting thought. "We feel that if it's something children loved or found on their own, it doesn't make sense to turn it into an assignment."

Ah, what? Wouldn't assignments be a lot more interesting if they did involve books kids loved or found on their own? Well, I guess we can't have that.

No one mentioned the length of these books as a problem when considering adding them to a school curriculum. Even in paperback, it would have to be costly to purchase enough books for a class or two. And how long would it take a class of, say, twenty kids to read and "discuss" one of these things? A semester? I can remember one of my kids reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond when he was in grade school. His class read a few pages, filled out a deadly worksheet, read a few more pages, filled out another worksheet. It was mindnumbing. Imagine doing that with the last Potter book. They might still be working on it a couple of months after they got into seventh grade.

As I Was Saying

Okay, to continue with the interesting thing I mentioned in my last blog: Professor Jenkins mentions a website called The Daily Prophet in his article Why Heather Can Write (I figured out how to link us! Sort of.) He describes it as "a Web-based 'school newspaper' for the fictional Hogwarts," and says it is run by a teenager, who hires columnists and edits their work.

Which is all very cool and supports Professor Jenkins' thesis (Yikes! I said "thesis!")that writing fanfiction encourages writing and gives young people opportunities to have their work read and critiqued. And the site is very sophisticated looking, by the way.

But what I found really interesting was that when I did a search for The Daily Prophet I found masses of sites with that name. (No, I don't know exactly how many items make up a "mass.") You had your newspapers and your message boards and maybe a blog. I couldn't figure out what some of the sites were supposed to be. A number of them hadn't been updated in a year or two.

And then I found this one site that had a true piece of fanfiction in it. A manuscript-type story involving Sirius Black and another character, who I only vaguely remember from the books. And they like each other. They like each other a lot.

I wish I knew if the author was a teenager. And I wonder if Professor Jenkins has seen this site. Which I'm so tempted to link to.

A Harry Potter Tie-in

While cleaning something in the house I found a hardcopy for an article from MIT's Technology Review. (Yeah, I know. Me reading Technology Review.) Unfortunately, I can't find a way to link to the article from Feb. 6, 2004, which isn't all that old when you consider how much unread clutter I have hanging around here. So, since the new Harry Potter movie is probably opening as we speak and this article mentions HP, himself, several times, I'll have to tell you about it.

Why Heather Can Write by Henry Jenkins,is all about "how participating in popular culture may help kids to master traditional literacy skills." I will try to translate for Professor Jenkins. His article is all about how kids writing fanfiction about Harry Potter may actually be improving their writing skills even though there are no teachers involved. Hey, it could happen.

Jenkins says that kids write fanfiction it and post it at sites, some of which review and critique it before publishing. He says that "Through online discussions of fan writing, the teen writers develop a vocabulary for talking about writing and they learn strategies for rewriting and improving their own work."

Jenkins talks about Harry Potter fanfiction, but I assume the same could be said about any kind of fanfiction.

I'm just getting to the really interesting part, but this post is getting too long for my taste. So...

...to be continued!

Book Expo What?

BookExpo America starts today in, I believe, Chicago. I think this is a big industry event at which publishers present books they're hot for, though I'm not exactly sure whom they present them to.

I think I should be all bent out of shape because my publisher has never asked me to go. However, since I'd hardly even heard of BEA (That's what those of us in the know call Book Expo America. You can call it that now, too.)before I started going to Readerville, it's hard for me to get up a lot of agony over it. Flying half way across the country so I can sit at an autograph table where it's very possible no one will talk to me? I can do that at the local mall, thank you very much.

However, what I'd really like to do is go to BEA as a guest who just wanders around and looks at the booths. I'd like to do that because I've heard the publishers give away free stuff. You know how you go to a home show and come away with free notepads, yard sticks, little rubber things for opening jars? I've heard that at BEA you come away with free Advance Readers' Copies. (Which those of us in the know call ARCs. You can call them ARCs now, too.) ARCs are the bound galleys publishers send out to reviewers. So if you go to BEA, you can get books before they're available to the general public AND you don't have to pay for them.

At least, that's what I've heard. Because as I may have mentioned, I've never been to BEA.

Newsworthy

I've actually been doing a little reading of a journalistic nature lately. The May 27th edition of The New York Times (the Technology section, no less) carried an article entitled ForSome,The Blogging Never Stops. It's all about people who are obsessed with their blogs, update them several times a day, work on them while they're on vacation, etc. etc. Yeah, I know, that is totally not me. But since I have been writing about my blog lately, I saw a connection. Of sorts.

The April 19th issue of Newsweek ran a short article that caught my eye. Probably because it was in one of those little colored boxes. So I cut it out and left it on my desk where I found it last week. Okay, enough build up. It was called "Will Chopra, Like, Sell?" Deepak Chopra has written a book called Fire in the Heart: A Spiritual Guide for Teens. Now, of course, I have heard of Deepak Chopra, but even after going to his website I can't figure out what exactly he does. Other than spiritual stuff, I guess. And the only info I can find about Fire in the Heart is located at sites that are selling it. I can't find any independent reviews right now.

But none of that really matters, because what really interests me about Fire in the Heart is that it's part of what I'm thinking of as a mini-phenomena--successful writers of adult self-help books moving into a teen market. You have your Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul books (a whole series) and your Don't Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens books. I'm assuming there are more of these sorts of titles because I'm one of those people who always seems to know only about the tip of the iceberg, if you can follow that analogy.

I haven't read these books, and I'm not knocking them. I read my share of the old self-help volumes, too. I'm particularly partial to books on creativity and how to blog more and faster. I mean write more and faster. I just find it interesting that this is happening. Everyone seems to want to write for young people these days...actors, singers, self-help authors.

What does it all mean?

What is This Thing, Anyway?

While cleaning my desk, I found a copy of The Horn Book, the January/February issue, I believe. While thumbing through it to make sure I'd read the thing, I found that not only had I read it, I had marked part of an article that referred to a new literary journal for young adults. Rush Hour is edited by Michael Cart, a name that often turns up when the subject of YA fiction is being discussed.

Rush Hour is supposed to come out twice a year with themed issues. The first one is Sin, the second Bad Boys. I have to say, I love those titles.

What is confusing me a little is that I usually think of literary journals as being, well, literary journals. I usually think of them as collections of writing that are published by a separate independent company that specializes in doing just that. These journals are published by Random House, a book publishing company. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I just think of a book publishing company as publishing individual books that take time to put together, not journals that come out twice a year.

Clearly, I need to free up my mind.

Actually, it makes a certain amount of sense for a publishing company to publish a journal. The things frequently cost as much as a high-quality paperback and usually look like one, too. And new publications of all kinds are very risky businesses because it costs so much to pay authors, editors, printing costs, etc., for a journal no one knows anything about and thus aren't likely to buy. A publishing company has a lot more money to play with and can take the risk.

Still, if I take my Barnes & Noble gift card to the store where will I find Rush Hour? Displayed with the journals and magazines or on the shelves with the books? Where will I find it in the library?

Oh, I'm just nitpicking. I'll let you know where I find Rush Hour.

By the way, this article says that Michael Cart has more than 10,000 books and papers. I am so lazy. My first thought when I read that was "How does he take care of all those things?"

What I Did This Morning

I am obsessed with the blog this week, as I sort of suggested in yesterday's post. This morning I did an Internet search of children's literature blogs. I didn't find a whole lot, which doesn't mean there aren't more out there, just that I didn't find them.

I found Kids Lit Books and More for Kids and Teens, Mrs. Rabbitt's Bookbag, and Books and Reading: Reading Motivation, Book Lists, Collection Development. All three sites appear to be maintained by librarians. I also found Children's Booklog. Sorry, I just can't make the link work. However, it's connected to a big site called About that I can connect to. I don't totally understand what it's about, but there it is. And Achockablog is a site from the United Kingdom, also connected to About.

Now, there may be blogs at individual children's authors sites that didn't show up on my search. My blog didn't show up, after all. But, otherwise, that's all I could find.

Blog Universe

I've been mentioned in someone else's blog! How cool is that? Karin (pronounced "car in") Gillespie also has a website and a book, Bet Your Bottom Dollar, coming out through Simon and Schuster this summer. She's not a kidlit person, but I'm mentioning her in Original Content, anyway, because Karin has a good book-and-author-type blog, and I'm in a blog mindset the last few days.

Totally Believable To Me

I finally finished reading M. T. Anderson's satire Feed, which I thought was fantastic. Anderson has created a well-defined world and populated it with some believable, complex characters. And there's lots of other clever stuff, too.

Can you believe that Gail, who hardly ever likes anything, is raving like this? Or, at least, raving in the good sense of the word?

Of course, I personally believe that the commercial world we live in now is already trying to control our minds so the basic premise of Anderson's story, to me, is just a logical extension of what is already going on. I thought that having the characters lose their flesh and hair was a little over the top, though. I agree that the environment is adversely affected by our mass consumerism and that will affect our health. But for the book's sake I think sticking to just the consumer stuff would have been plenty.

And, finally, I imagine some readers will be disappointed with how Titus, our narrator, treats Violet when she is sick. (Someone I know who has read the book referred to him as "a puke," though believably so.)His behavior isn't pretty. However, I think it is realistic about how hard it is for a young person to deal with this kind of situation. The things he says to her are all things that must go through the minds of many young people. Plus, he is part of a group of kids who aren't noteworthy for their depth and strength of character.

In spite of the sickness and skin disappearing from peoples' bodies, there is a lot of clever, sophisticated humor in this book. I liked it so much, I'm going to give one of Anderson's earlier books, Burger Wuss, a try.

I'm Cleaning My Desk Again!

On Feb. 14, 2003 I did a blog on Reading Rants, which is a site of book lists for teens on various subjects. I had stumbled upon the site, which is how I find most places on the Web, made a copy of one of the lists, and left it floating around my desk for who knows how long. Then, when I stumbled upon that, I wrote a blog about it.

Well, folks, I've done it again. I made a hard copy of a Reading Rants' list called Reality Bytes: Non-fiction about teens, for teens, which I thought looked interesting, and left it floating around my desk. Now, I'm only a week or two behind on life--well, probably a month to be honest--and can take a few minutes to clean my desk and I found the hard copy. So now you're hearing about. Really, I would read some of these books if I had the time. How's that for a recommendation!

Here is something interesting and timely I found at the Reading Rants site today: Joss Whedon of Buffy and Angel fame has written a graphic novel called Fray, which is about a futuristic slayer, of course.

I would have loved to have linked to something about Joss Whedon, but I couldn't find an official site for either him or his production company. I found masses of fan stuff for him, but what to choose? what to choose? I think it's great that a writer is getting so much attention and is so loved but in my experience this kind of stuff just doesn't happen to writers. Which leads me to wonder if Whedon doesn't have some connection to that circle of evil dudes Angel and his team took out on the series finale Wednesday night.