Read This: Kid*Lit(erary)

My friend Laurel Snyder has started up a new blog called Kid*Lit(erary), which features “micro-reviews of the very very very very very best children’s books in the world.”

“You might ask why a 32 year old (young) woman is reading children’s books,” Snyder writes in an early post. “And I could tell you that it’s because I’m a children’s author (which I am) but that would only be a partial truth. Because I’ve been reading (and re-reading) the same books for 25 years, and I’ve only been a children’s author for two of those years… But now I want NEW books, books that will live up to the standards of the books I love.” So far, she seems to be putting together an interesting mix, juxtaposing classics like The 13 Clocks with newer stories like Olivia Kidney. If you’re frequently shopping for reading material for kids—or, like Laurel, for yourself on the sly—this seems like a pretty good place to get some inspiration.

28 May 2007 | read this |

Read This: Under My Roof

My favorite paragraphs from all the reading I’ve done this week:

“What are we waiting for? Did you buy a bunch of smoke detectors?” I asked him so he wouldn’t know I knew that he bought commercial grade uranium online.

“No, I bought commercial grade uranium online. Perfectly legal.” About ten miutes later, he signed for the uranium and put the box in the trunk of his car. Then we drove to the FedEx shipping center a few blocks away. There he answered to “Jerry Wallace,” Mom’s maiden name, and quickly flashed her old passport that he had put his picture on and then re-laminated to claim another box. That one went on my lap for the drive home. I wasn’t too happy about that because it was heavy and radioactive. Since the sample was only twenty percent Uranium-235 I didn’t have to be that worried, but, you know, testicles.

Even though I’ve been a Nick Mamatas fan for a while, it took me a while to get around to reading Under My Roof. Luckily, it’s a novella, so it goes by pretty quickly. Basically, all you need to know is that the narrator’s dad has decided to secede from the United States, like Peter Griffin did in that one episode of Family Guy, except that Peter didn’t have a homemade nuclear device, but other than that it’s a more realistic version of the scenario. Slightly. For one thing, the narrator’s a psychic pre-teen. Anyway, it all escalates pretty quickly, but in ways that remain true to the story’s fundamental conventions, and I just think that if you share my sense of humor, you’ll dig it. So there.

7 April 2007 | read this |