A Whale of a Picture Book
I don’t get a lot of pictures books sent my way here at Beatrice, but I heard that Mac Barnett, one of the directors of 826LA, the Los Angeles outpost of Dave Eggers’s creative writing centers for children and young adults, had collaborated with Adam Rex on something called Billy Twitters and His Blue Whale Problem, and I was intrigued enough to check it out. I’m so glad I did: Imagine a particularly excellent McSweeney’s item, geared towards a precocious eight-year-old. With illustrations that are just as smart and sly.
The deadpan humor is fantastic; frankly, I think grown-ups may well wind up loving this book more than kids—but I’m not suggesting that kids won’t get a kick out of it. They’ll love the silly pictures, and if they don’t laugh at all the jokes when you read it to them, well, give ’em time.
15 July 2009 | read this |
Hey America: It’s Christmas Time!
I pretty much have next week off from my other blogging gig, so I thought I would take advantage of my free time to hunker down with the 5-disc deluxe edition DVD of The Bronx Is Burning, ESPN’s adaptation of the Jonathan Mahler book about the 1977 New York Yankees. You couldn’t pay me to wear the Yankees “World Series Championship” hat that comes with it, but the extended interviews with Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner should be worth a look, along with all the ESPN promo clips. And, heck, put Oliver Platt and John Turturro in a miniseries and I’m pretty much sold.
Then, when my eyes get tired, I’ve still got most of the 8-CD unabridged audiobook of Christopher Lee reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin, imported from England to listen to. Which is funny, because—well, I loved the films and all, but I wouldn’t say I’m the biggest Tolkien fan in the world; read the books when I was in junior high, thought they were fine, never really looked back. But, come on—Christopher Lee. So that’s fun. And between that and the DVD, I ought to be suitably distracted until 2008.
21 December 2007 | gift ideas, read this |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
