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December 31, 2008

Reading Rabbit Holes

With the holiday break winding down (we have to report back to school on Friday for staff development), I am in work-avoidance mode. Instead of taking down my Christmas decorations, lesson planning or writing, I decided to clean out the bookmarks in my computer under the guise of doing something productive. After two hours, I realized that I had fallen into the rabbit hole, the colorful, magical, random world that so often sucks me into the Internet. I have some gems in the rabbit hole—Websites that make my eyes glaze over with reading bliss, and surprisingly, enhance my classroom instruction and my conversations with students about books.

Here are my top five reading rabbit holes (ranked in order of the number of hours I spend on them). Be careful, you might fall in!

Take some time off from updating your Facebook page and wander over to goodreads, a social networking site for readers. Create virtual bookshelves of the books you have read, want to read, and are currently reading. My shelves hold a staggering 1,110 books now with my goal to list every book I have read over my lifetime. Spend hours writing reviews, taking the never-ending book quiz, or surfing the lists and reviews of other readers. You can set your bookshelves to private and use this site with students as a forum for book discussions or simply celebrate the books you read.

Spend one year reading the postings at Jen Robinson’s Book Page and take a university course in the latest children’s literature. Jen regularly links to the hottest news and best sites in the kid lit blogosphere and I skim her book reviews often for fresh reading fodder. Jen sits on the review board for the Cybils Awards, the children's and young adult bloggers' literary awards, a list of sure-fire hits for the past few years. I could have built this post by pirating all of Jen’s links, but shouldn’t you go to the source?

Don’t despair that teenagers don’t read much, check out Teenreads, the Holy Grail of book review sites for teens, and have your faith restored. Designed with teenagers in mind, this busy site has podcasts, polls, contests, monthly reviews, authors’ interviews and tons of other features. Don’t miss the Ultimate Teen Reading List with over 300 book recommendations for teens by teens. The Children’s Book Council picked Teenreads as the nomination site for this year’s Children’s Choice Book Awards—a nod to the influence of this site and its readers.

I discovered Wordle last spring, while avoiding revising my book (apologies to my editor), and have seen it since in education publications. Users create word “clouds” by typing in text to generate a picture. Words that appear frequently in the text appear larger than others—a cool way to summarize key points or illustrate repetition. Tweak the fonts, colors and backgrounds using the site’s editing tools and design killer-word collages of your favorite quotes or book passages. My students wrote poems and made Wordle collages from them. I created this word cloud about my teaching life.

John Green, author of the brilliant, hilarious, and irreverent books Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns, is one of my favorite YA authors to read (his books are a bit mature for my sixth graders). John’s homepage, Sparksflyup, is the best author rabbit hole on the Web with regular vodcasts, blog postings, and John’s commentary on all things reading and writing. Read the transcript of his recent ALAN Conference Speech and discover the awesomeness of John.

Now that I have exposed my secret browsing life—it’s your turn. Share your reading rabbit holes with the rest of us. Are there sites you use for book reviews? Do you read any authors' blogs? I have a few open spots for new bookmarks waiting… And yes, I am reading during my vacation with my annual book-a-day challenge. More about that in a future post, I still have a few days left!

Happy New Year! Think about all of those unread books stretching across the year before us...

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 11:41 AM | | 5 Comments | Recommend

December 17, 2008

New Take on the Newbery

Each winter, the children’s literature world debates the upcoming Newbery Awards, the annual honor given each January by the American Library Association for the best children’s books of the previous year. Scores of book bloggers create Newbery shortlists predicting the winners, while libraries across the country host mock Newbery committees. Discussing the timeless appeal and literary merit of the books we read is an authentic pastime for readers, but this year the importance of the Newbery Award itself is the center of a media storm.

In the October edition of the revered book review publication School Library Journal, Anita Silvey, notable children’s book expert, questions whether the Newbery Award winners resonate with today’s young readers. Pointing to the unpopularity of recent winners with librarians, teachers, and students, Silvey denounces the Newbery committee for selecting books that are unusual or unique rather than popular.

I am a Newbery nerd from way back—reading every gold and silver medal winner since I was in fourth grade—but this achievement becomes harder for me to accomplish each year. I still have not read last year’s winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, a book of monologues and dialogues set in an English village in 1255. Although written for classroom use, my sixth grade students aren't interested in reading it. The current Newbery trend toward honoring books acclaimed by educators and book reviewers, but ignored by children, makes me question whether the Newbery Award is the literary jewel it once was. I still mine the Newbery lists for gems, but I wish that the list was not such a hit or miss offering these days.

A recent Washington Post article, "Plot Twist: The Newbery May Dampen Kids' Reading," implies that the failure of Newbery Award winners to connect with readers contributes to the decline in overall reading among children. I think this assertion is a stretch. The limited allure of recent winners doesn’t marginalize reading, it marginalizes the award and reveals a missed opportunity by the Newbery committee to celebrate books that are not only well-written, but also attractive to readers. My students don’t read less because of the Newbery list’s lack of popular appeal; they simply read fewer books from the list. Gone are the days when I could convince a student to try a book simply because it won the Newbery. No matter the prestige surrounding the award, my students trust me to suggest books that are enjoyable. How can I in good conscience suggest the difficult, preachy, boring books that have won the Newbery award in recent years? Pressing such books on my students would definitely turn them off and reduce my credibility.

Pat Scales, the president of the Association for Library Services to Children (the division of the ALA that bestows the Newbery Award), compares the Newbery to the Pulitzer claiming that popularity is not the goal—literary quality is. But I don’t think that these two aims—literary value and wide appeal—are mutually exclusive. My students love past winners like The Giver, Maniac Magee, Holes, and The Tales of Despereaux, but none chose these books for the gold medal seal on the cover. My students devour books like these because they are good stories with memorable characters— qualities that make books worth sharing with future generations of readers. I thought this was the intent of the Newbery Award. It shocks me that the American Library Association offers no assurances that their yearly selections for the best children’s literature appeal to the books’ perceived target audience.

The Newbery Award is in danger of becoming a museum piece, a stuffy canon that is good for you, but not necessarily good reading. I yearn for the days when it was a source of books children could love, too.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 11:43 PM | | 4 Comments | Recommend

December 03, 2008

No Twilight for Reading

Eight English teachers, surrounded by hundreds of teenagers, stand in line behind velvet ropes. Everyone wears black, sporting t-shirts bearing slogans like, “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb,” and “Edward prefers brunettes.” Two girls, in matching Cullen Crest jackets, snap pictures of the crowd with their cell phones.

When the theater doors finally open, my friend Jennifer, the head of her high school English department, zigzags forcefully through the crowd and secures us a row of seats. More than one group of girls eyes us with bemused expressions, but for tonight, we are united in a common purpose—to see the movie adaptation of Twilight, Stephenie Meyer’s hit book about a small town girl and the vampire boy she loves.

The movie begins and the crowd silences. Except for the predictable squeals when Robert Pattison, the teen-heartthrob who plays vampire Edward Cullen, first appears on screen, the theater full of teenage girls remains remarkably quiet and attentive. They are engrossed with the movie, and I become increasingly interested in watching them—a packed theater of adolescents who are not just obsessed movie fans—they are obsessed readers. Most have read the entire Twilight series, almost 2,000 pages of text.

Risking instant scorn, I must admit that I do not think the Twilight books are that well-written. The books are too long, too indulgent, and I find the protagonist, Bella Swan, a bit of a whiner. In spite of endless comparisons in the books, Bella is no Cathy and Edward is no Heathcliff. I wonder, though, how many girls picked up a copy of Wuthering Heights this year and read it because Bella did.

There has been a lot of flack about Twilight in schools and homes. The books’ content—full of vampires and werewolves—is considered inappropriate reading material by some. The latent sexuality in the books causes parental concern, too, although I could point out that Edward is a boy who actually values his girlfriend’s virtue—the couple waits until marriage to consummate their relationship.

Say what you will about Twilight, I have not seen so many kids cart around 500 page tomes since Harry Potter. If we want to encourage students to read, we must validate some of their less-than highbrow reading choices when they do. Hopefully, due to the popularity of event-books like Harry Potter and Twilight, this generation sees reading as part of their culture—right alongside Guitar Hero and Facebook.

Interesting isn’t it, that we decry the pitiful amount of books most teenagers read and then question their choices when they do read? Looking at the New York Times bestseller list, adult readers choose authors like James Patterson and Janet Evanovich, not the Brontes. It seems we denounce the pop-culture books our teens read by day, and go home to read the same type of books ourselves.

Back in the darkened theater, the movie ends and the surging crowd carries us outside. My new Twilight comrades, the throngs of teens who surround me, chatter away—discussing the movie and their impressions of it. I found the movie more campy than scary—and what's up with Jasper’s catatonic stare? I can’t help but smile to myself, though, when I pass a group of girls debating their favorite book and how the filmmakers, “Just didn’t get it.” Teenagers arguing the merits of a book on a Friday night—how can we not celebrate that?

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 6:39 AM | | 14 Comments | Recommend

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