What I’ve Been Reading
It’s just not fair for Angie Thomas to be this talented. That’s all I’m saying.
What I’ve Been Reading
Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed
Definitely as good as it is rumored to be! Quick-paced but still managing to pay loving attention to the details of everyday life in a Pakistani village–the sugarcane fields, the ironing of the salwar kameez, the hot homemade rotis, trips to the market, the close connections of the village families. There’s more than enough suspense to pull a reader through, and I particularly admired how the characters are multifaceted without being overly complicated–the thug of a landlord is human enough to mourn over a lost love, the mistress of the house is kind yet spoiled, helpful as long as her own convenience isn’t marred. Amal’s father, who lets her be taken as as servant to pay off his debts, isn’t a villain–he’s desperate, helpless, and trying to take care of a family of five daughters, sacrificing one to keep the others safe. Don’t miss this one!
Read MoreMore About Reading Logs
It occurs to me that I never did tell you why Natalie Babbit agrees with me about reading logs. (You do know who Natalie Babbit is, don’t you? She wrote Tuck Everlasting. Go read it. Now.)
She wrote, not specifically about reading logs, but about the panic all around her (in 1986) that literacy skills were devolving. This is from her speech “Easy Does It.”
We are blaming our children’s poor reading and writing skills on television, an easy and pleasant machine, and also on the seductive and mysterious computer, which, I understand, is easy and pleasant too….There can be no question about the fact that these two inventions are changing our world. They are only the latest things to change our world, which has been in a constant process of change since its creation…. Still, I think it’s highly debatable that they are single-handedly responsible for our difficulties….It seems to me that it’s not so much the difficulties that are new as it is our expectations.
When I was a child in the good old days, my friends weren’t all word lovers, not all book lovers, not all good readers and writers….And all were growing up without television and computers. It seems to me as if we simply can’t expect a universally high level of enthusiasm about reading. That expectation seems new to me. And, unfulfilled, it carries with it for our teachers [and, I’d add, our kids] a heavy and inevitable load of blame. But there always was and always will be a percentage of children that finds reading stale, flat, and unprofitable….
And if we–you and I–go on believing that we can, should, and must graduate all children from high school and college into a lifetime of appreciative reading of literature, and a capacity for clear and graceful writing, we will, quite simply, break our hearts….
The only thing we can do, I guess, is fight fire with fire….Somehow [teachers] are going to have to find a way to make reading as seductive as its rivals–to make it, in other words, easy and pleasant. Because that, it seems to me, is the only thing that was better about the good old days. Books–for me, anyway–were easy and pleasant.
One of the things that makes books easy and pleasant was the practice of reading aloud. Almost any writing is easy and pleasant when it’s read aloud. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Wilson, read aloud to us every day for the last half hour, and she read aloud for pleasure, hers as well as ours. We weren’t tested on the books she read to us. We didn’t do projects or write to authors. We just relaxed and enjoyed it….
Some of the things I hear about that are being done with books in classrooms now make my blood run cold….Books have collected countless barnacles of peripheral stuff these days, and how can that do anything but turn reading into hard work?…
Use a little low cunning. Ease up on the projects, schedule time for reading aloud. Read aloud things that you really like, yourself. Everyone responds to a good story, and that is what good literature really is: a good story, well told.
I think we can go a long way if we take that route. Honey, you know, is actually good for us nutritionally. So is peanut butter. But they taste so good that we forget about the nutrition. Reading is like that. Or at least it should be. And could be. Maybe. All we can do is try.
This marvelous essay and many more are found in Barking With the Big Dogs: On Writing and Reading Books for Children.
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New England Vampires
JB exhumed skeleton beings studied at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.
Forensic science and folklore can piece together some truths about life (and the afterlife) in New England in the 1700s and 1800s. Like Mercy Brown in Mercy: The Last New England Vampire, JB was a real person, a Connecticut farmer who died of tuberculosis….and whose community dug up his grave after his death, convinced he was a vampire. The Washington Post details new discoveries about him here…one of the few so-called vampire burials to be exhumed and studied.
You don’t have to travel to Transylvania to encounter homegrown vampire folklore. The same legends that led to JB’s exhumation were the basis for my YA novel Mercy. Family, loss, terror, and love–the elements of a good horror story or a supernatural legend.
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Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Thomson focuses on newfound connection, magic, and suspense to conjure a fast-paced, heartwarming mystery. Thomson’s world is populated by resourceful protagonists, fanciful creatures, and quirky supporting characters.”
—Publishers Weekly