Moving to Minnesota!

This beautiful photo was available through m01229's flicker

This week, Owen and I decided to move to Minneapolis. The University of Minnesota English department has offered me a PhD position, which essentially means I will be paid to study and teach Shakespeare. This is a great joy. This is what I want to spend my whole life doing. This is reason enough to move, but there are many other reasons I'm excited for this new place to call home.

For my European friends: That's Minnesota.

One reason is a strangely sentimental layover from an odd chance on a new year's eve. When I was in grad school and Owen and I were still just dating I was supposed to fly out and spend the week with him and his family in Seattle. There was a blizzard in NYC, and my flight scheduled to go through JFK was cancelled, so I had to find a different flight through Minneapolis. As we landed it was a perfectly clear night and I got to see the sudden skyscrapers of the twin cities all lit and beautiful, and heard a mother from a seat behind me asking her daughter, "does it look like home?", in a comforting, midwest accent. And I was just a little overwhelmed that I was getting a glimpse of the place my parents had spent eight years of their lives. It was a 20 minute layover, but I think of it six years later with a great deal of fondness.

I can imagine you thinking, "So your parents lived there for a bit, and you have a happy memory of a layover there. What else is nice about Minneapolis? Isn't it just supposed to be super-extra cold?" I mean, yes. Yes, it is. But I like winter. I've dressed as winter at a costume party, and I grew up in Rochester, NY which has fierce winters. Not as cold as the midwest, I grant you, but cold enough to know it and miss it in the years I've been away. Yesterday it got below freezing here and I was so happy to be out biking in the snow I found myself singing out loud.


(If you're not convinced but want to look at lots of beautiful wintery pictures click here:  http://www.captureminnesota.com/galleries/1915)

This happiness, (however naive) is a great thing, because Minneapolis is one of the best cities for biking in the US, even ranks internationally in top 20 lists for biking cities, even considering the fact that it has brutally cold winters! You can read about one author's incredulity on this matter here. Their extensive bike-only freeways, their financial investment in making biking safe in the city, a prospering bike-share program, and mentality that biking is normal and expected make it much safer than elsewhere in the US.

People in Minneapolis are not just bikers, they're also readers. They're regularly listed as some of the most literate of American cities, ranked number one this past year by USA Today. I don't know how much time I'll have for pleasure reading on top of my regular coursework, but it will be such a joy to be able to be inside libraries of books I can read, and be surrounded by people who care about reading. And check out the beautiful new Minneapolis Central Library!

This will be me. 

There's such a great cultural scene in the Twin Cities! So much great theater! With a fringe festival! And Music! And excellent public radio! Although I am a little crushed to be moving to Minneapolis just as Garrison Keillor may be retiring from hosting A Prairie Home Companion (a radio show I grew up with, thanks to my parents' years in MN). In case you do not yet know the sound of Keillor's voice, let me introduce you via the Writer's Almanac.

We won't leave until the summer, but wherever live takes us, be it Minnesota or beyond, I hope to (as they say on the show) be well, do good work, and keep in touch. 

The Seventy Books of 2015

This past year I read with eagerness and intensity, and read a lot of spectacular books. It's been a long time since I've read so much, or with so much joy, (even though many of these books are not uplifting), and I look forward to reading more broadly and more intentionally in the years to come. I'll write a bit about ten of my favorites but you can read my reviews on nearly all of these books on Goodreads. I also made a video about some of the books I've been reading as I've been thinking about the role of race in America, and if you'd like to watch that, it's right here. 

The vast majority of books I read this year were new books to me, but the ones I reread (mostly listening to them on audio book with Owen) are marked with an asterisk.

For a prettier version of this list click here. 

Fiction:

Middlemarch by George Eliot

This book is perfection. I love the narrator--just when you've formed your ill opinion of a certain character you get drifted some private thoughts or feelings of that character that make you want to like them better. The plot twists! The insecurities people feel about each other! I'm not sure I've ever loved a character as much as I love Dorothea. Reading a one hundred page book is nice sometimes, but reading the last hundred pages of a thousand page book? That is just joy. All the work you put in (sometimes literally making charts of the characters so you remember who's who) all the work the author put in of setting up expectations, drawing characters together to a climax, all of it comes together so beautifully.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Passion by Jeannette Winterson

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Remains of the Day by Kasuro Ishiguro

This book is so incredibly beautiful. The story is simple: A butler looks back at his life in service while driving across England on his first vacation in decades. But the telling is complex and tender: so much of emotion, of Englishness, of nationalism, of blue blood and new money, and the sympathies and prejudices between the two world wars. Sad and tender.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

The Marriage Plot by Jeffery Eugenides

The Unexpected Mrs. Polifax by Dorothy Gillman

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

This is not the sort of book I usually love. It's super gritty, irreverent, violent, and it's fantastic. The writing is so good, and I learned a lot about the Dominican Republic while reading it. That seems to be one of Junot Diaz' main intentions, with his hilarious and informative footnotes, making fun of his white readers for not knowing anyone else's history, and telling the story with the zip of a comic, and the craft of a poet. Looking forward to reading more of his writing. 

(Not recommended if you don't like to read about: violence, characters who swear all the time, friendzones, or corrupt governments.)

Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee

A Room with a View by E. M. Forester

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

This book is not only beautiful sentence by sentence, even the structure is stunning. There's a central event (the bombing of St. Malo in WWII) and two central characters, and you live through that day of the bombing hour by hour. Between those hours you jump back in time for rich, colorful backstory, so that as you get each successive piece of that day in St. Malo the characters matter to you more and more as their situations become increasingly dire. This book also focuses a lens on the light of humanity. Not always shone, not always seen, but beautiful.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

Nonfiction/Memoir:

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

Bossypants by Tina Fey

I listened to Tina Fey read her own audiobook and just laughed so hard I cried a little. So much of her humor is in handing us the unexpected, but I was also charmed by her voicing her own fears and her own perspective on them.

Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks

Pilgrim at Tinker Creak by Annie Dillard

I want to own this book and pull it off the shelf and read it again and again. Biking over the fields near Leiden in January, I would try to frame what I could see in words, and then I'd hear Annie Dillard had the words already. “Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet.”

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr.

It is difficult to say how much this book moved me. The message, the fearless pursuit of justice through nonviolence and love, the exquisite writing, everything about this book left me hungry for more. Not only more of Martin Luther King Jr and his writing, but more of his vision enacted in our world today. Read it. Even if all you read is his letter from the Birmingham Jail, read this book.

Drama:

Our Town by Thornton Wilder*

Beginning Chapter Books:

The Great Cake Mystery by Alexander McCall Smith

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard Atwater

Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel by Nikki Grimes

Middle Grade Fiction:

A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park*

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo*

Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead

I love this book. When people talk about "contemporary realistic fiction" for young people the books sometimes the ground is shaky. Maybe they're already dated like the books I read growing up where none of the teenagers have cell phones. The books that really mattered then still matter today because they dealt with bigger issues than phone styles, but here is a book of today. A book I think will last a long time, and which represents a lot of current issues really beautifully. It deals with PTSD, with mysterious and the scary in social interaction, with mean kids, but also with really beautiful siblings and friendships. I was particularly touched by her sensitivity with issues of school dress codes, and "slut shaming" and exploring how these issues come out, and what they mean. It's also just great. You should read it. And also everything Stead has written because it's all fantastic.

Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner*

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner*

Frindle by Andrew Clements*

The House of the Scorpian by Nancy Farmer

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry by Mildred D. Taylor*

I remember this book being both sad and scary from when I was young. I remember asking, "but why?" a lot of times, but I wasn't expecting it to be so incredibly moving as I reread it now as an adult. The story is just beautifully laid out, plot and character, twists and history, and it makes me happy and pains me to read it. I know a lot of people are rereading To Kill a Mockingbird this year with Harper Lee's "new" book coming out. Let me suggest that this is also a book that could use a read or a re-read. There are many ways in which it twins To Kill a Mockingbird, but I love that it tells the story of a black child coming to terms with the implications of her skin and what it means. The questions this book raised about how much property matters startled me. Again and again people talk about--who owns what--be it land or a new car or people or coats or pearl handled pistols, ownership seems to central to this story.

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau*

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud

The Crossover by Alexander Kwame

Ghost Knight by Cornelia Funke

The Dreamer by Pam Muñoz Ryan

Young Adult Fiction:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

East by Edith Pattou

A nostalgic, emotional five stars for this book. I really, really, liked it. The fable of east of the sun and west of the moon told in a novel form, it reminds me of fairytale retellings I read as a young teen, (Robin McKinley and such), and it was very easy to submerge myself in the story. I found it... cozy. Reading it at a bus stop in the freezing rain was comforting, and reading it cozied up with blankets and tea was exactly what I wanted. If you had mixed feelings about His Dark Materials, but still really like polar bears and legends from the far north? This is the book is for you.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Part 1: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing Part 2: Kingdom on the Waves by M. T. Anderson

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman*

Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Flight by Sherman Alexie

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Insurgent by Veronica Roth

Allegiant by Veronica Roth

Going to another Baby Shower? 12 more suggestions!

So many of my friends are having babies, I want to buy them all stacks of books! Since that is not financially feasible, I’m making a new list of suggestions. If you'd like to see the other lists I've made of children's books, scroll down to the bottom. I'll put the links there! These are all picture books: six are wordless, or nearly so, and six are books that have a special focus on language.

In The Town All Year Round by Rotraut Susanne Berner

This book is dozens of stories in one. Each spread in this oversized book is full of characters and activity, and you can follow the same characters from page to page as their story unfolds. The older man dropped his keys while he was on his run? On the next page the little girl is catching up to return them! It reminds me a little bit of Richard Scarry (without the text) or Where's Waldo (with stories!). It's a real treasure.

Actual Size by Steve Jenkins

This big book is full of pictures of animals shown at actual size. From giant butterflies to tiny fish, the hands of gorillas or the foot of an elephant this is a science book without feeling like a science book. The illustrations are beautiful painted paper cuttings, and they look almost three dimensional. Steve Jenkins's books about animals are always great, but this is my favorite for its simplicity.

Tuesday by David Wiesner

This book made me want to be a children's book illustrator when I was younger. I've loved nearly all of David Wiesner's books, but Tuesday's story of the frogs and their flying lily pads is charming, hilarious, and incredibly beautiful.

Wave by Suzy Lee

My mother-in-law bought me this book one year as a birthday present. It is painted in black and white and blue, and tells the story of a girl and the water one summer's day. The gestures and emotions are so clear and bright. It's a smaller book, not very tall but quite long, so that the spreads of the sea are open and wide, and feel just right.

The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

A retelling of the old fable of the lion and the mouse, and how the two are able to help each other. The vast glowing watercolors won Pinkney the Caldecott award, and no wonder. It's the sort of book where you can imagine getting an extra copy to cut up and frame, each spread is so beautiful.

Noah’s Ark by Peter Spier

I grew up with Peter Spier's books and love them for their honesty. You don't usually see Noah's Ark books that include Noah shoveling elephant dung, or the animals looking cooped up and irritable. Some pages have many illustrations per page; some have just one big image over the whole spread. He manages to convey both the enormous scale of the water, the giant ark made tiny in comparison, but also the minute details which make life interesting.

So those are some great books which focus on the pictures, and here are some books I love that give special attention to language.

Max’s Words by Kate Banks

I came across this book in college in my children's lit class and I absolutely love it. Max's two older brothers collect things, one coins, the other stamps, but Max doesn't know what to collect. He decides to collect words, and discovered that they are much, much more interesting than coins or stamps. Through the book he and his brothers become better friends, and the illustrations are just right—full of potential's blank spaces.

Ounce Dice Trice by Alastair Reid

I have never read anything quite like Ounce Dice Trice, and that is a shame, because it is incredible. Creative nonsense in the style of Ogden Nash. I've included the page suggesting names for elephants; he also offers alternative titles for each finger, new ways of counting (ounce, dice, trice is the start of one such example), and there are also lists of squishy words and of group noun words. Gundulum of garbage cans, anyone? It's a fantastic read aloud and while kids will love it, it's the grown ups who will really be in for a treat.

Poems for the Very Young selected by Michael Rosen

Disclaimer: I have not actually read this book. I was going to recommend a different book by Michael Rosen, another collection of poetry, when I saw that he did an anthology for very young children—it seemed more in fitting with the rest of this list of suggestions. Every book I have ever read from this man is excellent, and his care and precision with language is wonderful, so even though I have not opened it myself, it seems like the best book I can suggest full of poetry for little ones. If you've read it, I would love to hear what you think!

The Composer is Dead by Lemony Snicket

Lemony Snicket regularly and explicitly works to broaden the vocabulary of his readers. This book opens with one of his signature phrases. It begins, "'Composer' is a word which here means 'a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.' This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing." My favorite of his books, The Composer is Dead is part mystery, part introduction to the orchestra, and entirely excellent. It comes with a cd so you can listen to the music written for the story, and hear the story read out loud.

Amos and Boris by William Steig

Like Lemony Snicket, William Steig makes sure to introduce children to excellent vocabulary, but just works them into his text. When I was reading it for the first time as an adult, I needed to find out what a "phosphorescent sea" was, because phosphorescent wasn't a word I had known. The sentences are just easy to savor. It's the story of a mouse and a whale who become friends and each save the other's life—when the whale is beached, little Amos "races back with two of the biggest elephants he could find." It's that sort of beautiful understatement that I love in this book. Can't get enough of it.

Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss

Last but not least is the wild tongue twister Fox in Socks. Dr. Seuss's books freaked me out a little as a kid. I remember being so affected by a low-tech film version of The Lorax that I was afraid to go in the library it came from—but this one is all about trying to say tricky things. It's great fun to read aloud and faster every time!

Did I miss your favorite wordless book or book cherishing words? What are some other books you like? Let me know in the comments!

If you are interested in more lists of kids books:

12 book suggestions for Babies
More books from authors you already know
Books to make kids laugh
Books dealing with race (feel free to skip my uncomfortable thoughts and go right to the list at the end)
10 best books about Shakespeare

And here's the list of books all together:

In The Town All Year Round by Rotraut Susanne Berner
Actual Size by Steve Jenkins
Tuesday by David Wiesner
Wave by Suzy Lee
The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney
Noah’s Ark by Peter Spier
Max’s Words by Kate Banks
Ounce Dice Trice by Alastair Reid
Poems for the Very Young selected by Michael Rosen
The Composer is Dead by Lemony Snicket
Amos and Boris by William Steig
Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss

Some thoughts about Race and a list of picture books

Over the last few months I have been in near constant distress about the racial issues in this world. I was, I suppose, naively shocked by items in the US news with a police officer shooting the unarmed Michael Brown, and read story after story about protests and heavily armed police and struggled to look for hope as ugly events kept flowing in. Living in The Netherlands in November and December doesn't help much because of the "Zwarte Pieten" or "black Peters" the little helpers to the Dutch version of Santa Claus. I know this is a complex issue, with a lot of history and the tradition has changed a great deal for the better. But living in a progressive, tolerant, and beautiful country where it's normal to see children wearing blackface or hear them singing songs with the chorus, "dumme, dumme, dumme Zwarte Pieten!" (that's "stupid, stupid, stupid black Peter!") scares me for the future of this world. I had just convinced myself that the Dutch were more racist than the Americans when I heard more news that the grand jury had ruled that Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown would not even face trial. And somehow these things kept surprising me. Surprising me the way my classmates in Virginia grad school surprised me when I said, "but interracial marriage isn't a big deal anymore" and everyone in my class looked at me like I had lived in some kind of ignorant bubble. And perhaps, mercifully, I had? I had a fair number of friends from mixed families in my homeschool groups, and in music lessons. My white uncle married a black woman and if it was a big deal in my family, I had, in fact missed it. I felt like the kids reacting to this Cherrios commercial: 

I love that it surprises these kids, but I don't love that it surprises me. I don't want be ignorant about these issues of prejudice, because they are clearly still issues. I also want to be honest about my own unconscious prejudices, including my reluctance to seek out books/movies/media focused on or written by people who don't have the same color skin that I do. This has never been something I've consciously thought. I have never walked around thinking, "I don't want to read any books by Toni Morrison, she's black!" but at the same time, I haven't read any books by Toni Morrison, and I read a lot. So what you could call my new year's resolution is reading a whole lot. I want to read many works of classic literature that I've missed so far, especially books by authors of color or dealing with race. I also want to read some non-fiction, such as "The New Jim Crow," which has been on my reading list for a while. So far I've read MLK's Why We Can't Wait, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I started Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon this morning. 

But I also wanted to make a list of books for children, because I am passionate about the impact of stories and pictures on children. Children's books have become less and less diverse in the last few decades as budget cuts to schools and libraries put buying power into the hands of the largely white middle class consumer. The people determining what goes on a best seller list are therefore not librarians and teachers looking for diversity, but parents and grandparents who (totally understandably) don't automatically think about race when choosing books. So here are some picture books and some names you might consider adding to your list when you go to the library, or even when you buy books for kids you know and love. 

Kadir Nelson, author and illustrator
Nelson's clear writing and majestic paintings have won a pile of awards, and his work respected well outside the field of children's literature. He has written a staggeringly excellent book on the history of African Americans for ages 9 or so and up, a biography of Nelson Mandela and one of Harriet Tubman, and has illustrated the words to several Spirituals. Sometimes a bit difficult to search for (as books are listed under author, not illustrator) so here are a few of his works that you might miss just by searching.  

Please, Puppy, Please by Spike Lee
Abe's Honest Words: The Life of Abraham Lincoln by Doreen Rappaport
Ellington Was Not A Street by Ntozake Shange
Henry's Freedom Box: A Story from the Underground Railroad by Ellen Levine
I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr. 

Jacqueline Woodson, author
Woodson writes for many different age groups, but the link above is for her picture books. It's a really nicely set up website where you can get a good idea about the books by just scrolling through. One of her most widely acclaimed books, The Other Side, is about a black girl and a white girl who become friends in an intensely segregated town. She says she wrote it because, "I wanted to write about how powerful kids can be. [...] They don’t believe in the ideas adults have about things so they do what they can to change the world. We all have this power."

Nikki Grimes, author
I'm not as familiar with her work as with some of these authors but I just read her early reader Make Way for Dyamonde Daniel and it was great. She's known for her biography of Malcolm X, and A Pocketful of Poems, and When Gorilla Goes Walking.

Walter Dean Myers and his son, Christopher Myers are also good to know. WD Myers mostly wrote for older children (his YA book, Fallen Angels shaped my understanding of Vietnam), but he teamed up with his son for the wonderful poem of a book, Looking Like Me. Christopher Myer's Jabberwocky is also fantastic. 

Langston Hughes, My People photography by Charles R. Smith Jr.
This sparse, glowing poem is set to stunning sepia photographs: 

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.
The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.
Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people. 

Books by Ezra Jack Keats
Keats was not black himself, but he often populated his books with black children as they were the children who lived near him in NYC. The Snowy Day was the first book with a child of color to win the prestigious Caldecott Award.

Books by Patricia Pollaco
Pollaco is from Eastern Europe (Ukraine, I believe) but she, like Ezra Jack Keats, writes and illustrates books with black and white children. My favorite is Chicken Sunday which is a great story for Easter or any time of year. It includes Pusanky eggs, a beautiful hat in the window, and a gospel choir who sing like low thunder and sweet rain. 







These are just a tiny few! February is Black History Month, so there will be more displays and such in libraries and hopefully bookstores. I've just been focusing on books with black characters and/or authors and illustrators because it seemed appropriate to the prejudice I'm seeing in the news and MLK day on Monday. But here are a couple more lists which include more races than just the black and the white.

Cooperative Children's Book Center's list 
The Gaurdian's list
Cynthia Leitich Smith's list
The Coretta Scott King Awards These are two awards given out by the American Library association to black Authors and Illustrators of books for children and young adults.

Do you have favorite books by black authors or illustrators? Books with black protagonists? I'd love to hear about them. And thanks for reading. 

Plantin-Moretus: a Printing Museum in Antwerp

Last month Owen and I went to Antwerp. A friend of ours was presenting at a conference and had sent us a strange little "I'm going to be really close to you but there's no way for me to actually come visit you, bummer" message on Facebook, and that seemed like the perfect excuse to take a weekend trip to Belgium, and so for an extremely reasonable train fare, and a happy couple of nights in a AirBnB apartment, we had an exciting adventure and a delightful time visiting a friend from home. There are a lot of things I could tell about Antwerp: it's beautiful central markets, its enormous and exquisite cathedral, its incredible train station, the excellent bike rental system, but the thing I most want to talk about is the printing museum.

the two presses in the back are the oldest in the world

Growing up I knew more about historical printing than most children. My father is an art professor and although it is not his specialty, he has taught both typography and printmaking from time to time. More than once I helped him print etchings, an impressive process involving soaked paper, an inked metal plate and an actual old-school press which rolls the sandwich of paper and metal through sufficient pressure to press the paper into all the inky scratches on the metal plate. It's a finicky job, and requires two people, one with clean hands to deal with the paper, and one with dirty hands to deal with the ink, and I loved it.

a bilingual printed text

In graduate school I learned a lot of things about the printing process, and the sale and importance of books in the time of Shakespeare. We folded up paper into quartos and sixteenmos, listened to Tiffany Stern talk about how the paper props were likely given separately from the rest of the script to the printers. We became familiar with secretary hand, got to know different printers and their particular stamps on their pages, we even had a project where we had to write a paper making sense out of all the books sold alongside a Shakespeare play at a bookstand in London in a given year, all things we can do with even a small library, thanks to the powers of the internet, and a few good resources. I wrote my MFA thesis about the power of books, paper and stories in their world and in ours.

geeking out

With all this love of books and their printing, I was excited to visit the Plantin-Moretus Museum, but not nearly as excited as I should have been. I do not know if I have ever enjoyed a museum so much, and if you've read this blog at all you may know I take inordinate joy in museums. The Plantin-Moretus told the story of a printing family business, a friendship with Rubens, enough wealth and hubris to make anyone laugh, (for instance, gilded Italian leather wall coverings) but also careful and meticulous insight into every step of the printing process.

uncut pages with editing marks in the margins

As you walk from room to room, you enter various places of work. There's the type room (where the type is, to this day stored in careful boxes) and the room for the setting of the type, and a full of presses. The room for the editing (big boothed table by large windows for the light), the shop where the books were sold, the foundry where the type was made, and no end of beautiful libraries. You can pour over books in Dutch, books in English, books in Latin or Greek, or printed Arabic scripts. Beautiful manuscript volumes, tall, narrow account books, a five language bible in many volumes, and giant atlases. This printing house put out some of the earliest of illustrated scientific works covering anatomy, botany, astronomy all studied like never before. It wasn't just the printing presses they own, including the two oldest presses in the world, it seeing all those tools for every piece of every task, which was just astonishing. The process seems so careful, so meticulous, with so many pairs of hands involved from start to finish.

Today's tools are so much more complex, and yet also so user friendly that even though I haven't any clear idea about the workings of my computer or even of this website, things are set up so that I can click the "publish" button whenever I choose. It makes me wonder, where is craftsmanship in online writing? Does it lie wholly in the writing style? And how to the material objects used to read text today (my computer screen, or a smart phone or whatever) affect the material read? What about laying text in a blogpost? Do people have more or less control over their words now? How does range of readership affect these questions? In the last week I've had more pageviews on my blog from the Ukraine than from the US, and I am very curious: who are you readers in the Ukraine? What do you find interesting in my writing? And to anyone reading, what do you find compelling about books? About the act of reading? It's been nearly a month and I am still wondering.

More Books from Five Illustrators you Already Love

Lots of my friends are having babies right now, and I get a lot of questions about good children's books, so here's some more suggestions. Previous posts I've written on kids books are one for this blog about going to a baby shower, and another for The Shakespeare Standard on the best books about Shakespeare for kids, so feel free to check those out as well. In this post I'm going to list a bunch of really famous children's books, and then suggest other great (but less famous) books by the same author or illustrator.

Ezra Jack Keats

The Snowy Day won the Caldecott Award in 1962, and has mesmerized children since that day. A Jewish artist born in 1916, his books quietly promote healthy interactions between generations, races, boys and girls, and even people with disabilities. I love The Snowy Day, but I also love many of his other books. 

Peter's Chair is one of my favorite books for children who are going to have a new sibling. Peter finds his dad painting his find his crib and his highchair pink! Distraught, he takes his (still blue!) chair and run away, only to find he is too big to sit in it. Coming home, he suggests perhaps they should re-paint the chair together. Apartment 3 tells the story of two boys poking around their run-down apartment building as they look for the sound of the harmonica. Some picture books shy away from gritty realities of life, but this one doesn't, cigarette smoke, shouting voices, a scary superintendent even a man who's blind show that beauty can come from unexpected places. A Letter to Amy, tells of Peter's wanting his friend Amy to come to his birthday, but his own shyness about asking her. There's a thunderstorm and some misunderstanding but it ends with happiness.

Barbara Cooney

Less well known than many of the books here, Barbara Cooney's most popular book is Miss Rumphius. If you have missed this one (as I did somehow until grad school), it is the story of a little girl and her life guided by her grandfather's three principles. Travel to far away places, live by the sea, and do something to make the world more beautiful. Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran is a story about kids with fabulous imaginations making a world out of a hillside of mud, rocks and boxes. Eleanor tells the story of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt as an awkward, shy, and unpopular young girl. Perhaps my favorite of Cooney's illustrated books is a one a dear, dear friend gave me for my birthday, called When The Sky is Like Lace by Elinor Lander Horwitz. It's the story of what happens on bimulous nights, full of silliness and wonder, just pure magic to read aloud, with lots of details for little kids to find in the pages. And if you want a Christmas story to read on a long chilly evening, Holly and Ivy tells the story of a little orphaned girl, and a little unloved doll, and a couple without any children who all find each other and are happy when Christmas comes. It's a longer book, with full pages of Rummer Godden's beautiful text, and takes about an hour to read out loud from cover to cover.

Maurice Sendak

Where the Wild Things Are is perhaps one of the most loved children's books. It's a little weird, and a little scary, but it is written and designed with incredible skill. I like his writing too, but most of these books I'm suggesting are ones he illustrated for other authors. A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss is a book of imaginative, playful definitions of everyday things such as mashed potatoes are "to give everybody enough" and the ground is "to make a garden." It's wonderful, and Sendak's pen and ink illustrations are hilarious. Nutshell Library is a set of four tiny books. I know the books are also nice (Chicken Soup with Rice, One was Johnny, etc.) but I remember especially loving how perfectly little the books were. The Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik are less picture books and more "I can read" style, but they are utterly charming. Sendak's animals are more life-like and less surreal than in some of his other books, but with no less personality. If you prefer the weird side of Sendak's illustrations, let me recommend the Christmas classic, The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman. The pictures are strange, even grotesque, but profoundly fitting for the strange little fairytale.

 

Chris Van Allsburg

Chris Van Allsburg's favorite letter from a child is this, "Dear Mr. Van Allsburg, I love the books you write. I am so glad your books are so weird because I am very weird. I think you are weird but great. I wish a volcano and a flood could be in my room when I am bored." 

Best known for The Polar Express, Chris Van Allsburg's drawings and paintings are intricately detailed, but always just a little off. Perhaps a cathedral with every arch and shadow perfect and precise, but the nun and her chair float 100 feet above the floor. My favorite are The Wreck of the Zephyr two stories in one, and a ship that might fly? The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a set of enigmatic pictures and glimpses into stories we can only guess at, and which has been the seed of many, many writing projects, I'm sure. The Stranger combines an odd visitor with the changes of the seasons, and leaves questions tantalizingly open at the end.

 

Tomie dePaola

Tomie is known to many for Strega Nona, the tale of the old lady with the magic pot of pasta, but he has illustrated over 200 books in his career, many of them about Italy, folktales, stories of Saints and Bible stories, but also books for holidays and nursery rhymes. I'll share four of my favorites. The Art Lesson is a story from Tomie's early days in school, and the woes of only being allowed to draw with school crayons. It is funny, sweet, and an excellent read-aloud even for quite young children. The Clown of God is the only picture book I brought with me to The Netherlands, a book which tells a great deal about the connection between faith and work. It's a good enough story that small children (maybe 5 and up?) will get caught up in it, but deep enough that adults will keep coming back to it. Bill and Pete go down the Nile is one of my favorites from growing up, and to this day I can still remember Andrew and I chiming in with my mom as she read, "'ooooooo' said all the little crocodiles." Bill is a crocodile, and Pete is his "toothbrush" and together they save a giant diamond from the bad guy trying to steal it from the museum. The Days of the Blackbird is a Northern Italian folktale about a little girl, her sick father, and how a dove became a blackbird through kindness.

 

And again in a concise form without all the pictures and descriptions for easy use:

Ezra Jack Keats 

Known for: The Snowy Day

Other excellent books: Apt. 3, Peter's Chair, A Letter to Amy

Barbara Cooney

Known for: Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney

Other excellent books: Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran, Eleanor by Barbara Cooney, When the Sky is Like Lace by Elinor Lander Horwitz, and Holly and Ivy by Rummer Godden. 

Maurice Sendak

Known for: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Other excellent books: A Hole is to Dig by Ruth Krauss, Nutshell Library by Maurice Sendak, Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik, and The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman

Chris Van Allsburg

Known for: The Polar Express

Other excellent books: The Wreck of the Zephyr, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, The Stranger

Tomie DePaola

Known for: Strega Nona

Other excellent books: Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile, The Art Lesson, The Clown of God, and The Days of the Blackbird

Hope you enjoy!