The Cats Are Coming!
Saber-Toothed Cat by Sarah L. Thomson–the latest in the early reader series Ancient Animals.
The latest title in the Ancient Animals series has been published! Check out Saber-Toothed Cat. If you know a newly independent reader (think first or second grade) who loves dinosaurs, this would be a perfect introduction to a wider and wonderful world of prehistoric creatures.
Read MoreDo We Still Need Libraries?
I used to do library research here, at the New York Public Library. Loved it. There’s something about great architecture combined with books–transformative.
Rural Maine libraries on borrowed time. Libraries that survive on fundraisers, donations, and grants–or that are closing.
Stories like this make me weep. But then I think–I admit it. I don’t spend as much time in libraries as I used to.
Well, I just don’t. A lot of the research material I need is available online. A few keystrokes and I can get it, without leaving my desk. And like a lot of people in the publishing business, I am buried under books. I rarely need to go and pick up a paperback to while away the time. I’m too busy cowering guiltily away from the tomes piled up under my coffee table and on my nightstand.
So do we need libraries anymore? Let me think. What do libraries provide that I can’t get at home?
Access. Not every person, especially not every child, has a computer with high-speed internet. Libraries used to the the only place it was easy to find reference books, encyclopedias, dictionaries–the kind of book you didn’t need every day, but when you needed them, you needed them. Now a lot of that stuff is available electronically, and libraries are there to make sure we are all able to get it–not just those of us who can afford expensive gadgets. Libraries are still about the democratization of information, without which a democracy is doomed.
Community. I see them. Sitting there. Staring at a screen, flipping through a magazine, curled up on a beanbag chair with a book. READERS. Reading is a solitary pursuit, but when I go into a library, I’m surrounded by evidence that I am not the only person who does it. Granted, some of these readers look a little odd, and some of them seem to be carrying on conversations with invisible table mates, and they aren’t all the kind of people I want to invite home for a cup of tea. I don’t like all of them. I don’t like all of their books. It doesn’t matter. They are fellow members of my tribe, people immersed in words and ideas. Libraries build that community–and we readers can’t do without it.
Expertise. It’s too easy to discount this today. We can shop for any book we want online; we can browse through a million websites; we have a world of literature at our digital fingertips. But librarians still know things the rest of us don’t. The wider and wilder the world of information and literature grows, the more we need guides who have read the maps and can point out the signposts.
Choice. Shelves and shelves of books spread out all around us. We don’t have to read the latest bestseller or the book that just got the hot review or the one our mother-in-law gave us for Christmas. We can look at all the possibilities on the shelves, and we can choose. How especially wonderful this is for children, who can break out from the books their parents have picked for them (“Mom. Nothing about India or adoption,” my six-year-old said sternly to me the other day. Rats. She’s on to me.) and read what catches their eyes and calls to their hearts.
And those things are worth $22.24 per taxpayer per year, or about 6 cents a day–which is what it costs per resident to keep the library in Mexico, Maine, open. A bargain.
Read MoreTug of War
Detail from Hokusai Manga
Historical fiction is a balancing act–better metaphor, a tug of war, accuracy pulling hard on one side and accessibility on the other. If you make your characters talk like they actually did four or five centuries ago, you will quickly lose readers who don’t have the patience to mentally translate. For example, here’s a snippet of Meriwether Lewis’s diary from his expedition to find the Northwest Passage. He’s presumably writing and spelling more or less as he spoke:
…this may in some measure assist us to account for the heavy dues which are mor remarkable for their freequency and quantity than in any country I was ever in— they are so heavy the drops falling from the trees from about midknight untill sunrise gives you the eydea of a constant gentle rain.
And that’s just from 1803, and the man is speaking/writing English. If you’re trying to go farther back historically and farther afield geographically, it gets harder and harder to make your characters sound comprehensible.
On the other hand, if you make your characters talk like today’s teenagers, they just sound ludicrous. I knew I had gone too far in that direction when one of my writing group participants told me that my ninjas sounded a bit like her Yiddish-speaking relatives.
And the thing is, you don’t actually know if you’ve kept your balance until the thing is published and you get reactions from readers. That’s when you discover if accuracy had yanked you so far off into Meriwether-Lewis-land that nobody can understand you, or if accessibility has pulled you flat on your face.
Read MoreBack To Regular Life
Next sabbatical reading?
Not that a life spent researching Japanese demons and plesiosaurs is all that regular, but anyway, the sabbatical is over.
Too bad. It was an intoxicating experience to be able to read for hours at a stretch, the way I used to be able to read (now that I think about it) in childhood. It’s surprising that, as a writer, I could forget how mind-blowing it is to bury yourself in a fictional world, not to be dragged out for anything less urgent than lunch (hey, I like lunch). Thank goodness for this reminder. I may have to schedule mini reading-sabbaticals more often.
I realized something, though. I read realistic fiction, fantasy, humor, autobiography, award winners, and regular everyday books…but what I did not read was anything where the main character is not white. This is disheartening. I’m a fan of children’s literature, reasonably well-read in the field, alert to new trends…and to find books with a character of color, I must go deliberately searching for them. Most readers don’t do that. And then the fictional world reflects and reinforces the world inside our heads, where minorities are not just minorities–they are nonexistent.
So I’ve got Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk To Water on the list. Anything else I should add?
Read MoreSarah 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