Say hello to the newest of my teen reviewers, Lillian Fisher-Yan! Lillian is a senior at the Dana Hall School and WOW. She’s a reader. To put it mildly.

I met Lillian last Friday, a few hours after I’d crossed paths with her and a couple hundred other girls at Dana Hall during a school visit with John Green. I knew I liked her when she approached me at the store to find out the exact cost (with tax) of a copy of Graceling. I raved about the book, she bought it, and we began to talk about other fantasy books. I quickly discovered that Lillian had good taste, good reader instincts AND a knowledge of existing books in the fantasy genre that truly put mine to shame. She had so greatly outread me in this one area that I found our conversation almost embarrassing. But where others see humiliation, I see opportunity! How would you like to read galleys and review them for me, I asked. Lillian’s response was something along the lines of, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? THIS IS LIKE MY DREAM COME TRUE!!!" (Throughout the exchange that followed I felt like the driver of the Prize Patrol Van. Making connections like this are what I love most about my job.)

Both of us all smiles, I sent Lillian off late Friday afternoon with about 10 ARCs of forthcoming novels, most of them fantasy. She said she’d probably have them all read by Halloween, certainly by Thanksgiving at the latest. Nevertheless it came as a surprise to receive my first review from her before noon the following day!!

I don’t know if Lillian actually sleeps, but I am certainly glad she reads, as I think you will be too as I introduce you to her reviews.

Heroes of the Valley
by Jonathan Stroud (Disney-Hyperion, January 2009)
Reviewed by Lillian Yan-Fisher

At first you want to bang your head against the wall, and then all of a sudden you want to cheer and run around the room! After closing the back cover of this fun, thought-provoking, and clever book, all I want to do is think about the society that we live in. Heroes of the Valley makes you stop and really digest the world.

Stroud creates a world of close-minded, bigoted people, one of whom is an irksome trickster named Halli Stevinsson, who is constantly getting into trouble and who sometimes made me want to throttle a kitten. Like others in his world, Halli is ignorant, annoying, and completely biased to his personal views. By following this want-to-beat-your-head-against-the-wall-as-you-read-about-him character we see a closed-minded society from one who lives within the ignorance. But when Halli’s actions set off a chain of events that will alter his life as he knows it, his journey teaches him about himself. We see him change from an ignorant nincompoop who is blindly intolerant of any change to a free-thinking, caring young man. 

I freely admit that, at the beginning of the book, I literally wanted to/maybe did a little, bang my head against a wall, or at least bury my head in the pillow I was laying on. I also admit that I wanted to put the book down in the middle several times to check my email. Yet at the end, I could not stop turning the pages. It took me about 200 pages to get to that point, but I think it was worth it.  

If you enjoy a good juvenile joke every now and again, today’s your lucky day! Back in January 2007 when John Green and his brother Hank had newly launched their "Brotherhood 2.0" video log project, John coined a new game of sorts, which involves adding the words "in my pants" to the end of book titles, just for a laugh. I recently discovered an online list of these "in your pants" jokes, which includes such gems as:

 A Series of Unfortunate Events In My Pants by Lemony Snicket
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets In My Pants by J.K. Rowling
The Very Hungry Caterpillar In My Pants by Eric Carl [sic]
Guess How Much I Love You In My Pants by Sam McBratney
Breakfast of Champions In My Pants by Kurt Vonnegut

The list is supposedly "All the in your pants jokes that John Green will ever need," but frankly I’m just not sure that list is half as long as it should be, nor is it half as exact in places. For example, the only book included by the lovely Kate Klise, who did an event with us at the start of this week, is Regarding the Bees in My Pants, which is rather funny, but not half so entertaining as Regarding the Fountain in My Pants. And the list doesn’t include the following titles which appear in my home library and which I think lend themselves well to this pointless but entertaining gag:

Peace Like a River in My Pants by Leif Enger
The Good, Good Pig in My Pants by Sy Montgomery
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing-in-My-Pants by M.T. Anderson (yes, I added hyphens, but I think that’s allowed)

What titles (for any age!) in your bookstore or library are improved or "enhanced" by this exercise? (Yes, this post is starting to sound like SPAM.) Please list your best "in your pants" jokes here, so that we can all appreciate them and add a wealth of new suggestions to John’s list, which can only benefit from um… growth.

While you’re thinking about which titles to post in the comments field, you can watch John’s original video post on the "in your pants" subject here:

Are you hosting a baby shower for an English teacher? Is your child’s SAT tutor gravid? If so, I recommend shopping the selections from SATees at Café Press. Pasted below are just a handful of the offerings that will have other playground mothers scratching their heads. (Click on each image to be taken to its product information.)

Review-filled periodicals piling up around your desk? Stacks of Publishers Weeklys making their way into your recycle bin? Booksellers (and maybe librarians too), why not put those reviews in front of your customers/patrons? No, I’m not suggesting you should pile up those outdated issues on a display table. I’m saying you should take scissors to them. Now. Cut out those book reviews (and maybe some interesting articles too) and then post them!

I started doing this in our children’s section a couple years ago with our issues of PW. After I’ve had a chance to thumb through the latest one(s) I tear out the pages of children’s reviews and clip the (favorable) ones focused on books we’ve currently got in stock or will have in the near future. We then laminate those reviews using our little office-sized laminator and stick them up on the shelves where they might serve as useful information for our customers. It’s nice that they come packaged in skinny-enough columns to fit along the joints where our bookcases meet.

I do have a few helpful little tips for those of you who’d like to try doing this in your library or bookstore: BEFORE you start cutting out any one review, flip that page over to see what’s on the back and make sure you aren’t cutting right through a review that you’d prefer to feature over the one you were originally aiming for. You’ll obviously have to pick and choose between favorites on occasion, as reviews of them will sometimes wind up printed back-to-back in the same column on the same page. Of course, if you’ve got a photocopier or there are multiple subscribers to the same periodical at your store, this problem can easily be remedied. If not, consider writing up your own shelf talker for one of the titles, and clip the printed review for the other.

In the photo below, you can see both PW reviews and hand-written shelf talkers in use in our picture book section. (The horizontal slips are our shelf talkers and the vertical ones are the reviews.)

Another tip: Often reviews wind up starting in one column and ending in another. Cut out the blocks of text for each and paste them together using a gluestick, then trim the edges so they line up — now the whole thing looks like it was one column in the first place! Ta-da!

And my final suggestion: Though it’s sometimes difficult to find space, on each review be sure to write the name of the periodical + date of the issue you clipped it from. This tells your customers the source of the information they’re reading, and it tells YOU approximately how long that same review has been stuck to your store’s shelves, growing old to your regular customers.

There’s no excuse for OLD reviews when you’ve got a new periodical arriving weekly. Except maybe for the excuse of "I got busy and forgot and those magazines piled up for five months before I remembered, let alone found the time, to clip reviews from them, replace the old ones hanging from the shelves, and write a blog post about this very useful practice that I ought to remember to do more often." But of course I wouldn’t know anything about that. ; )

Booksellers, note that PW offers free subscriptions to booksellers in the U.S., so this review-posting trick is one way you can offer value to your customers at no expense to you. (Wouldn’t it be nice if everything we do for our customers was that affordable??)

Today’s fun is an 80’s flashback with a twist: Literal reinterpretations of classic music videos. With the help of a couple friends on back-up vocals, animator/singer Dustin McLean has taken two music videos that are well-known to members of my generation and rewritten the songs’ original lyrics to be literal, play-by-play accounts of what’s happening on screen. The bonus for those of us book-obsessed folks? Both of the Literal Videos McLean has so far produced have a library/books/comics theme. Totally radical!

Thanks to Lady Faces for calling these to my attention!

First, the Literal Video version of the Tears for Fears tune "Head Over Heels." (You can compare it with the original on YouTube.)

Next, the Literal Video version of A-Ha’s "Take on Me." (Again, you can also compare with the original on YouTube.)

Rock on, readers!

Oh, no! Your house is suddenly going up in flames! You have time to save all your animate loved ones (children, pets, housemates, etc.) a handful of vital possessions, and ONE BOOK from your beloved collection. (Just one!) Which book will you choose? (Decide quickly!)

(Thanks to all of you who gave such great responses to my last graffiti stall post, in which I asked what fictional family you’d like to have adopt you. Keep those suggestions coming!)

This morning a customer came in with a request we had a hard time filling, so I’m putting it out here for you all to ponder AND for you publishers and writers to put in your bag of tricks. The customer in question is the mother of a fifth grade boy, and the two of them are about to start participating in a community service group, doing volunteer work in shelters, etc. She wanted a book they could read together in which a character (or characters) did such work.

Color us stumped. We could think of lots of books in which kids did good deeds or fell into the position of offering their time to help someone, but few books that were about kids engaged in organized community service projects, in spite of the fact that this is a pretty common activity.

In the end we wound up selling her a copy of The Hero’s Trail by T.A. Barron, which talks about the different ways we define heroes and heroic deeds and includes examples of kids who volunteer service work has made a difference in the world. I think it was a good choice, in part too because there’s so much other material available to support the book, including an actual prize awarded by Tom Barron every year, plus the documentary Dream Big: The Inspiring Young Heroes of the Barron Prize. This customer left feeling like we’d more than fulfilled her wish, but I can’t help feeling we must have missed out on a few additional recommendations — either because we didn’t know about existing books or because these books should exist but don’t!

Anyone have any thoughts as to what else we could have tossed her way? If not, it’s clearly time for you writers out there to take up this cause, and at least MENTION such work as a part of a character’s life. (Much as I encouraged you to mention the existence of a wider range of sports a couple months ago, too.) 

In recent months I’ve been noticing a marked increase in the number of publishers who claim to be "going green" in one way or another. For many of them "going green" has meant creating a new imprint that uses eco-safe materials and/or donates money to environmental causes. DK, for example, has a new line called "Made with Care." They claim that these books are their "greenest books ever, made with the most ethical and environmental processes [they] could source." Meanwhile Simon and Schuster’s Little Green Books "will be made from recycled materials, and the storylines will cover subjects such as improving the environment, learning about endangered animals, recycling, and much more."

I have mixed feelings about initiatives like these that ultimately just create more "stuff" even if that "stuff" is being created out of recycled materials. Rather than create a new line of books that are specifically more eco-friendly, why not just make ALL of your existing, or at least forthcoming books more eco-friendly? This is a poor metaphor, I know, but the "create a new line of books model" is kind of like saying "Over-population is a problem so we’re going to breed a special group of children who know that overpopulation is a problem, rather than just having fewer children in the first place."

Does anyone else see a problem with this?

I was thinking about these things as I read through the picture books on Penguin’s spring list, which (like those of the aforementioned publishers and others) included some efforts at eco-innovation. One is a book to which I’m giving an award for  BEST COLOPHON I’VE SEEN ALL YEAR. It’s The Great Paper Caper by the brilliant Oliver Jeffers, whose picture books are among my favorites, and whose website is among the coolest I’ve seen. I haven’t seen the colophon of Penguin’s edition so I don’t know if they’ll adopt the same format, but the British edition of the book (published by HarperCollins) features this colophon (click on the photo to view it larger):

Awesome, no? The image of a tree is fitting for several reasons: the theme of paper recycling appears both in the plotline of The Great Paper Caper and in the finished book’s production. On his website Oliver explains that the book "is inspired by and printed on FSC paper [paper that comes from replenished forests], a noble cause, and frankly, common sense. The first edition hard back comes in four different colour covers, with a bonus disposable jacket that turns into a plane. No joke."

I applaud the cleverness of these eco-friendly touches, and (for the umpteenth time) I applaud the cleverness of Oliver Jeffers’s writing and illustrations too. My question, though, is this: If Oliver Jeffers’ new book didn’t have recycling as its inspiration and/or theme, would it have been printed on FSC paper? And if the answer is no, then WHY NOT? I’m guessing the answer is that it’s more expensive to print books on FSC paper. And that the marketing hook is missing if the book is printed on FSC paper but the book isn’t ABOUT recycling.

That just bugs me.

Moving on, I’d actually like to give out a second "award" here, though I realize this one isn’t going to be taken as kindly. With apologies, my award for the WORST TRADEMARK I’VE SEEN ALL YEAR goes to Frederick Warne, publisher and licensor for The World of Beatrix Potter (distributed in the U.S. by Penguin), for its new publishing program called "Peter Rabbit ^TM Naturally Better" OR (here in the U.S.) "Peter Rabbit… Naturally Better ^TM". Note the interesting change in punctuation as the name crosses the Atlantic.

As it’s explained on the Penguin website, Peter Rabbit… Naturally Better is "a new initiative which promotes products that are made from safe and ethically responsible sources." I have NO problem with the idea of such products (in fact I applaud them!), AND I actually think the books in this line are very nicely produced — the illustrations in the Peter Rabbit… Naturally Better board books and cloth books are very tasteful simplifications of Beatrix Potter’s original designs, and the muted color palette employed on their pages is truly lovely. But the NAME??

First of all, I don’t like the implication that Peter Rabbit needs to be "improved" somehow. I realize that the "better" in the trademark refers to the fact that these books are "better" for the planet than their predecessors, but it’s impossible not to read those words as meaning that the books themselves are somehow "better" content-wise than the originals and that, "NATURALLY," that’s the case. It’s as if we’re being told "the content and art are bad in their original state but, NATURALLY, they’re better once they’ve been redesigned or rewritten or re-imagined and re-branded (again and again and again)." On a pettier note, I also just think the name sounds cheesy. And I think that ellipsis just make things worse. It’s like there’s a pause after the product’s name in which we wait for the advertising punch line to be delivered.

I can’t begin to imagine the number of meetings that were held and names that were tossed out before Warne settled on this one, and (again) I applaud their motivation for creating this line and the finished results. But that doesn’t change the fact that I think someone could have coined a better name for this line (perhaps one of YOU can come up with an improvement?) AND that the line just adds more books to a brand that’s already chock full of them.

I think what’s really bugging me again here, though, is this attempt on the part of publishers to look virtuous and nature-loving by adding new lines of supposedly eco-friendly books. You can use all the eco-friendly materials you want in their creation, but the fact is the production of more titles requires the use of more energy. So, sorry folks, your eco-footprint does not get ANY smaller with the creation of these babies. Naturally.

It’s been a busy week of event preparations and crazy run-around at the store, both during the day and "after hours," which means I’m slow to report on timely matters this week. Alas!

Last Friday I attended the annual Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards ceremony, always one of my favorite book events of the year. Held in the lovely Boston Athenaeum, it has an air of orderly prestige about it, but zero stuffiness. The speeches are always blissfully short and even more blissfully sweet. The chatter afterward among those in attendance is light-hearted and lively, and the evening does not stretch out to great lengths, which is very much appreciated by those of us for whom this time of year feels like a lengthy marathon of nothing but books, books, books.

This year my Boston Globe-Horn Book "day" began earlier than usual, as I had the pleasure of being wined and dined by Little, Brown over a delightful lunch at Boston’s famed Top of the Hub restaurant. The gathering was in honor of Tricia Tusa and Nancy Coffelt, the talented duo behind Fred Stays with Me, one of two picture books selected for an Honor by the 2008 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards committee. It was a treat to talk with both of these women, whose personalities are as warm and welcoming as the picture book that brought them together. Over lunch our topics of conversation ranged from picture books to politics (who can escape the latter nowadays?) while everyone present admired the fantastic views from the Fenway Room on the Prudential Building’s 52nd floor.

I stupidly waited until after we’d all finished eating to snap any photos for your enjoyment. I say "stupidly" because our lunch began with beautiful sunny weather and ended with heavy cloud cover, stealing a bit of the "punch" from my pictures. I think you’ll agree, though, that the view suffered little from the change.

First, a photo of the lovely Tricia Tusa…

and a photo of the lovely Nancy Coffelt.

Next, a shot of the room, so you can admire the height of its windows:

Here’s the always charming Andrew Smith of Little, Brown facing west…

No doubt taking a photo that looks very much like this one:

Note that they don’t call this the Fenway Room for nothing. (I zoomed in for the shot below, though if you look carefully you can see Fenway Park in the photo above too.)

Here’s the view looking northeast, toward Boston Harbor:

After lunch I wandered around downtown some, then made my way over to the Public Gardens, home to another famous Boston sight: the ducklings. (If you just asked yourself "What ducklings?" then you are probably in the WRONG business!) I ran into fellow children’s literature aficionados Susannah Richards and Rusty Browder snapping photos of the same local landmark—proof that even those of us who see these feathered friends on a regular basis never tire of seeing them again.

It’s unusual to get shots like these of the ducklings, because usually they are crowded with kids, patting them each on the head and taking turns sitting on Mrs. Mallard, whose head shines from the number of hands that have rubbed it over the years.

After my visit to the Public Gardens I strolled around Beacon Hill for a bit and then made my way up Beacon Street to the Athenaeum, whose entrance is marked by a studded red leather door, JUST LIKE the one at MY house!!

(That was a complete lie of course. Our studded leather door is purple. Yours too?)

From here I’m afraid there’s a break in the photo tour, as the Athenaeum does not allow your average Joe (or Alison) to take photographs inside. They DID, however, allow an "official" event photographer to capture the finer moments of the evening’s affair, and you can view the fruits of his/her labor on the photos page of the Horn Book web site. Better still, you can LISTEN to all of the speeches delivered that evening on the Horn Book web site’s audio page. (Oh the wonders of technology!) Soon you will also be able to view video footage and therefore be treated to a combination of the aforementioned two.

Highlights of the evening for me? Hmmm. I’ll choose just FIVE and list them here, seeing as how you can always just listen to the speeches themselves, and therefore don’t need me to recap ALL the highlights for you.

1. Listening to Jonathan Bean, author/illustrator of At Night, talk about his family’s bedtime rituals, and swooning over his metaphor relating ideas to birds and the writing process (or rather the idea-generating process) to bird-watching. The gis
t:
both patience and quiet are required, and there’s no guarantee of ever seeing exactly the bird/idea you were waiting for. (He expresses it much more eloquently in his speech, of course, than I have summarized it here.)

2.  Hearing Arthur Levine deliver Shaun Tan’s speech for The Arrival, and it was every bit as inspired as his books, I think. He said that books remind us of what we already know but are in danger of taking for granted. That "as readers we are always emigrating, stepping into the shoes of others." As adults we often think the world is ordinary—children know better and books show us otherwise.

3.  Musing over Frances O’Roark Dowell (Shooting the Moon) remark that this is the first book she has written from her own experience. She has an MFA in writing poetry and, as she explained, "No one tells a poet to write what they know. They say, ‘Make it up! Make it weird!’ "

4.  Watching Sherman Alexie’s video acceptance speech for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which was extremely clever and (of course) very funny too.

5.  Learning that Nic Bishop kept aquariums of frogs in his house when he was researching Nic Bishop Frogs. He wrote that "working on this book was something like a second childhood."

I snapped one last photo for you about half a block from the Athenaeum, as I headed back to my car following the awards ceremony.  Here’s the distinctive gold dome of the Massachusetts State House, as it appears at night. If you inverted the dome and turned it to silver, it would resemble the very elegant engraved bowls that Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners take home with them to display in their trophy cases. (You do all have trophy cases, don’t you? I mean, who doesn’t nowadays.)

And… there you have it. A few quick peeks at a wonderful ceremony, and (all told) a truly wonderful day.

I’d like to give one quick nod to the three judges who I think made outstanding choices for this year’s slate of Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards: Terri Schmitz, Lolly Robinson, and John Peters. Imagine reading all the books submitted in all of those different categories and managing not to lose your minds, your judging ability, or your good taste in the process…. I think that accomplishment in itself is award-worthy.

My friend and colleague Janet Potter is easily one of the most talented and entertaining booksellers I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years. She’s sharp as a tack, exceedingly well-read, highly observant, and wonderfully witty. She’s also sorely missed!

After several years of devoted service to both Wellesley Booksmith and Brookline Booksmith, Janet headed off to Dublin, Ireland where she recently completed a master’s degree in journalism AND a lengthy stint as an Irish bookseller. (She’s also been doing lots of traveling, as evidenced by the photo above, taken in front of Rome’s Colosseum.)

What’s next on Janet’s list of adventures? A bookselling gig in GREECE! (Be still my bookseller heart!) Before Janet left Dublin for sunnier shores I asked her to write about her experiences as an Irish bookseller, and here, my friends, is her typically "Janet" (read: witty and wonderful) response.

Have Experience, Will Travel
The Adventures of an International Bookseller 

by Janet Potter

The fall of my freshman year of college I got a part-time job at Wellesley Booksmith, and I have almost consistently been working in bookstores for the 7 years since. To date, I’ve worked in 5 bookstores, for 10 managers and 14 assistant managers. No doubt like many of you – reading, shelving, restocking, recommending, and writing about books has become second nature to me. I sometimes answer my phone by saying, “Would you like a bag?”, and I can finally summarize the plot of The History of Love faster than Michael Phelps swims 100m.

After 6 years of bookselling in Boston, I moved to Dublin last August, where I’ve worked at two different bookstores while I finished a master’s degree. Bookselling in a different country, I’ve simultaneously experienced a world-is-flat sensation and culture shock. In some respects, all bookstores are the same, which in a way reassures me that if I ever hike to the remotest jungles of the world, I will find the local bookseller there and we will complain about customers who take too long counting change and can’t remember the titles of Mark Haddon’s books.

In other ways, working at bookstores in Dublin was like starting all over again. During my first week of work I spent about 10 minutes with a very patient customer who was looking for a book by Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. Still getting used to a new inventory system and unfamiliar with the author, I tried looking under O, under C, under K. Was it a novel? Was it a memoir? When I eventually gave up and asked a co-worker, they very smugly directed me to the bestseller shelf, where 50 copies of the book in question sat at the #1 spot. Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is maybe the most popular author in Ireland, and owns a timeshare on the bestseller list. I was mystified. It had been years since I’d had to look up a frontlist title, let alone not find it. You know that new part-timer who just started at your bookstore? The one who doesn’t know who wrote The Kite Runner? I was THAT girl.

I learned quickly that one country’s frontlist is another country’s remainder table. Luckily, I used this to my advantage, and I hope to the advantage of the Irish reading public. These people have never read Sarah Vowell! George Saunders! Richard Yates! They’re published here, but they languish on the shelf much like anything by Colm Toibin that isn’t The Master does in the U.S. The store I work in now has Gilead on clearance for 1.99, and we can’t give it away. If I ever see anybody browsing anywhere near it, I always say, “If you’re looking for a good read, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. If you can’t take my word for it, ask the Pulitzer Prize committee.” And yet it never moves. I think the word “Iowa” on the back cover conjures up some BBC World News interview they once saw with a farmer who said he’d elect George Bush for 8 more terms, and they put it down. These poor people don’t know what they’re missing.

But with other books I’m more successful. I once encountered a very anxious woman whose teenage daughter needed some vacation books, and was tired of being given Marian Keyes every time she walked into a bookstore (Marian Keyes is like a religion here). I set her up with a combination of some of my favorite spunky female authors – one part Marisha Pessl, one part Melissa Bank, and two parts Curtis Sittenfeld – and three weeks later she was back asking me where I got my magic powers. As I politely refused her gifts and adulation, I insisted that these were merely the go-to books any American bookseller would know.

Obviously I enjoy my niche as the keeper of America’s publishing treasures – I feel a little like a benevolent deity when I stand beside a parent who’s flipping through Knuffle Bunny for the first time and saying, “ I can’t believe I’ve never heard of Mo Willems before, why isn’t he popular here?” And I can only say, “I don’t know, but we can change that, you and I.”

And I’m getting better at the Irish side of the things. The other day a guy came up to me and said, “What’s like deportees, chicken?” A few months ago I would have thought this was the setup to some awful play on words, but I now know that it’s Irish for: “I recently read The Deportees by Roddy Doyle (Roddy Doyle – also a religion) and would like something similar.” I recommended Ross O’Carroll Kelly.