Remember how John Green was starting his tour at my school? They changed the venue to the public middle school nearby, which was a good call, because it was way bigger than our auditorium. But I still got to volunteer, and my students and colleagues still got to attend, with fancy reserved seats in the second row. We are so special.

So here’s the thing about this “book tour”: whatever you’re picturing — signing, reading, Q&A — was only maybe 50% of the event. John’s brother Hank was also there, playing his nerd rock songs about Harry Potter and deep-sea anglerfish. Together they lead a huge online community of people who call themselves Nerdfighters; hence the 750-person immediate-sell-out packed auditorium for a “book signing.”

An example of what this looked like might be in order. At one point, John announced that his wife was about to come on stage (a big deal for fans, since she avoids John’s videos and all the internet hoopla — wise woman), but we got Rickrolled by Hank in a dress:

Almost five years ago, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out. My friends and I attended a massive concert in Harvard Yard featuring Harry and the Potters and Draco and the Malfoys. The line we still quote is, “Are you ready to save the world from Voldemort… BY READING?!?” Followed, of course, by an entire university green’s worth of geeky kids and adults screaming and waving books in the air.

The Wizard Rock and Nerdfighting communities, as you might expect, have a lot of overlap. (We met the founder of the Harry Potter Alliance, who was sitting in the row in front of us.) At one point John explained, completely without irony, “My brother and I are part of an internet community that fights to make the world a better place.” And an auditorium full of smart, funny, thoughtful, self-possessed, caring, amazing high school and college students cheered their heads off… and then stood up to shake their booties to a song about quarks. My friends, I cannot tell you how beautiful that was. People my age (which is also the Greens’ age) like to talk about how we wish the internet had been around when we were in school, and for me, this is why. A whole community of kids who celebrate their nerdiness and want to save the world by reading? Who might I be if I’d had that then?

After the show, I said to Arianna, “I feel like I just got hit by a truck of awesome.” The whole experience gave me warm, fuzzy hope — something I (and all of us) really need these days. Cheesy to say, but I walked in as just a fan of John’s books; I walked out a Nerdfighter.

John Green (author of An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska, and Paper Towns) has a new book coming out: The Fault in Our Stars.

Such a big, anticipated release needs a tour, of course.
Tours, as we all know, need venues.
(You see where I’m going with this.)

That’s right, folks: John and his brother/co-Nerdfighter Hank will be starting their Tour de Nerdfighting with a second visit to my school on Jan. 10!

Unfortunately, it’s sold out. It did so in a matter of days. So, um, I guess this is just to rub it in? I’m not a very nice person.

Twenty-five (or so) years later, the top authors in the business tell those stories in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick. A week ago I attended a Harvard Bookstore event at the Brattle Theater: Chris Van Allsburg himself, Lois Lowry (one of the contributors, and a local gal), the book’s editor, and moderator/Horn Book editor/professional curmudgeon Roger Sutton.

It was delightful. Some tidbits:

They stuck to the mythology admirably the whole night. “When Harris Burdick dropped off the pictures” this and “Lemony Snicket claims that Burdick sent these stories to the authors in secret” that. Never a snicker or wink from Van Allsburg.

Hollywood’s original Jumanji sequel idea? Jumanji in the White House. “The President discovers the Jumanji game while visiting in France.” Van Allsburg had to come up with a better idea fast to prevent this travesty from seeing the light of film. Hence, Zathura — a game comes to life in space. (Which, while undoubtedly a better idea, may or may not have been a better film. I didn’t see it.)

To avoid fights, the editor called each author in order to pick a picture. She “got very few nos” from the authors she called. (Which is pretty impressive, since we’re talking about a list that includes Stephen King, Sherman Alexie, Jules Feiffer, Lois Lowry, and on and on.) But some folks were stuck with only a couple of pictures to choose from. When asked who had no choice at the end, the editor said, “That would be you, Chris.” (The least-loved picture? “Oscar and Alphonse,” the caterpillars who spell goodbye in the girl’s hand. It was never my favorite, either. I would have picked “The Third Floor Bedroom.” “It all began when someone left the window open…”)

The most interesting question was the one no one in my world can shut up about these days: what will become of us (writers, publishers, librarians, readers) in this digital age?

Roger: “This seems a very print-dependent book.” (Not sure I agree with that, actually, though in its print form it is quite beautiful — the formatting is pretty straightforward, and I think the images would look fine on an iPad.)

CVA: For text, he said he’s fine with digital, especially for large, heavy books. “But the book as an artistic object can’t exist” digitally, because the publisher’s choices about size, paper, and font are all made by the device manufacturer. As an illustrator, for instance, he can’t think about large double-page spreads for a book that will be published digitally. LL agreed.

Roger: “The activity is reading the iPad, not reading the book.” (I think that’s a good way of putting it. The iPad does so many other things that it’s tempting to take a break between chapters… or paragraphs… to check email or whatever.) He and LL both said they don’t go back to books that don’t grab them right away, because there are so many other things sitting on their Kindles to be read. It, like so much digital information consumption, promotes flitting about rather than focus.

CVA: Reading on glowing screens is not relaxing, biologically; it doesn’t work for bedtime reading, especially with children. (And this is one of the reasons I got a Kindle rather than a color device. Though I still read on paper, mostly.)

I’ve only read the first story so far (Tabitha King’s, which was fine, if not stunning). I’ll post a full review when I’ve finished it. So much of the magic lay in imagining the story lurking behind the image and words that I wonder whether reading these stories will ruin it a bit. Sure, they’re just one author’s imagination (unless you believe Lemony Snicket, of course), and mine is just as valid… but it’s hard not to see these as the “official” versions. (Besides, it’s not like I ever had a firm vision of what happened in any story; each one felt more like a dream I couldn’t quite hold on to.) Anyway, I look forward to diving in!

(If you have no idea what my title is referencing, it’s this. You’re welcome.)

Most of all, this conference was about putting faces to names. Charlotte’s Library, MotherReader, Book Smugglers, Betsy of Fuse #8, Barry Lyga, Linda Sue Park, Lenore, I know who you are now, even if we didn’t get to talk for long (or at all). (…That sounded creepy, and I didn’t at all mean it to. Not a stalker, promise!) The bloggy world got a little smaller, and as I told Ana of Book Smugglers, now my Reader feed list will feel like friends’ blogs, which is a thing I am much more likely to make time for.

Especially Paula, Phoebe, and Noa — it was fantastic to meet you, and I hope we’ll be able to book-geek again sometime.

The conference was also about making new friends, with people who love stories as much as I do. Thumbs way up to Smart Pop‘s editor-in-chief Leah Wilson and Daniel Nayeri for getting into it with me about father figures in Friday Night Lights and why we’ll never see Tim Riggins in prison. And thank you for taking me to the Kidlit Drink Night, Alison, and introducing me to everyone. We really need to get one of those started up in Boston.

(Sorry for all the name-dropping, people who weren’t there. If nothing else, it’s helpful to remind me who I met when.)

And it was about an outstanding stack of ARCs and promotions for books I can’t wait to read:

• All These Things I’ve Done by Gabrielle Zevin
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
• The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
• Shut Out (signed!) by Kody Keplinger
• The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin
• Unison Spark by Andy Marino
• Boy21 by Matthew Quick
• Reunited by Hilary Weisman Graham
• The Only Ones by Aaron Starmer
• Straw House, Wood House, Brick House, Blow by Daniel Nayeri

(Plus one I’ve already finished, The Shattering by Karen Healey, which I loved but will wait to post my review of until it comes out in September. There are spoilery things I want to talk about.)

All told, it reminded me of nothing so much as attending Web ’98 in Boston. I wore my Fray t-shirt and hung out with all the cool kids: Peter and Adam and Molly and Derek. I was 19 and kind of star-struck; I learned to drink wine that weekend so they wouldn’t think of me as a kid. (Ha, I’m sure that totally worked.) Now they’ve all got “since 1996″ on their blogs and I have “since 1999″ on mine, and we’re all still fumbling around with the possibilities for connection and expression in this medium that’s not so new anymore. (And I’m still trying to hang with the cool kids, although I hope I’m a little smoother about it than I was then.)

I think one of the most valuable things I got from this trip was the assurance that I enjoy what I do here, I’m proud of what it adds to the conversation, and that’s enough. I’ve yearned for some sort of blog fame for twelve years, but I’m ready to set that down. I love puzzling out my thoughts, and I do that best in writing, and in a conversation. So I’ll just keep doing that over here in one way or another until they turn out the lights.

(Infinite thanks to Lexi for the best guest room in New York City, and to my colleagues and students for covering things while I was gone. You get to share the ARCs, don’t worry.)

Ooooh…

BEA/Book Blogger Con, here I come!

Christy Lusiak, counselor and Lecturer in English and Women & Gender Studies, spoke about “triggering,” which might be of interest to those of you who had such a good discussion about it back on my original post. She defined a trigger as something that “retraumatizes a victim of abuse, or any traumatic event.” I like her use of the word “retraumatize” — as distinct from ordinary kinds of being upset.

Christy also noted that the flip side of triggers is that a different victim of the same sort of trauma might read the same book and find comfort in it. One of the many reasons why content warnings would have been a better idea than removing the books entirely.

Panelist Amy Pattee, my Children’s Lit prof from library school, and moderator Kelly Hager, interim Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies (both super-smart women for whom I have endless respect) discussed the more theoretical aspects of creating a list of books “for the feminist reader.” What does that mean anyway? Are readers feminist just because they’re female, or because they’re actively working for women’s equality, or because they’re girls who the writers of the Bitch list hope will do so eventually, or what?

And what is a book meant to do for such a reader? The word “empower” shows up predictably on this list and others like it, but empower whom to do what? As Amy asked, is it only feminist to read books with “kick-ass teens,” or can you still be a feminist reader reading Sweet Valley High? Does being a “feminist reader” mean something about how you critically interact with texts, all texts? (In other words, are you a feminist who is reading, or are you reading in a feminist manner?)

And who cares anyway? What’s the point of lists? It’s easy to sniff at the authoritarianism of list-making in this era of crowd-sourcing, but a list from people or an organization with authority in the field has value, I think. There are simply too many books in the world (movies, albums, restaurants…); sometimes we want to enjoy serendipity, but sometimes we rely on those with experience to narrow our choices down. One problem — the biggest one, I’d say — with the Bitch list is that it wasn’t clear who wrote it or what their criteria were. But with those specified (“we are the editors of a feminist magazine, compiling a list of stories that we hope will inspire teenage girls to be thoughtful about their role in the world as women,” to toss out my hasty, poorly-written attempt), and with some annotations on the books themselves, Bitch could have created something really valuable.

As usual, I parked my obnoxious little self in the front row and talked too much. Sorry, Kelly (and everyone else). I made too much of a concern that many of the books aren’t “YA.” To be clearer about my issue with this: yes, there isn’t a clear definition for what YA means, but it seems to me that a list that includes both Harriet the Spy and Hunger Games without being clear why, and puts both under the banner “YA,” hasn’t thought things through. There’s overlap, yes, but these are not books for the same readers at the same point in their lives.

Simmons took a survey and ended up with its own list, which has exactly the same problems as the Bitch list: it isn’t clear who wrote it and the criteria and goals aren’t clear. A crowd-sourced list from the general Simmons community asked to choose their “favorite” feminist YA books from the Bitch list garnered a fairly predictable top 10 of mostly classics we adults would have loved as kids (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, A Wrinkle in Time, Island of the Blue Dolphins) and a few modern classics widely read by adults (Hunger Games, Speak, Golden Compass). Books like The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Climbing the Stairs, which might have something even more compelling to say to the modern feminist girl, were overlooked, probably because they were unfamiliar to most of the voters from outside the YA lit field. There’s an interesting list of write-in votes (from Little Women to the Abhorsen trilogy), but it’s just as unmediated as the rest.

Simmons College, a reputable women’s college with an outstanding library school and Children’s Literature department, is in a position at least as good as Bitch Magazine’s to create a meaningful list of “books for the feminist reader.” I would really, really love for that to happen. And in the meantime, the discussion was utterly fascinating and an hour wasn’t nearly enough. Thanks, Kelly, Amy, and Christy, for making it happen!

If you’ll also be there, please say hi! I can’t wait to meet everyone and geek out for a couple of days in person.

I realized that I’m unfamiliar with the work of a number of people speaking at the conference — mostly because they write for younger kids or children’s poetry or something else outside of my wheelhouse — so I’m going to try to rectify that.

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key is the first in a series about Joey, a fourth grader trying to get his ADHD* under control. I’ll be the first to admit that out of the world of problems that my students have, ADHD is not one I get. At a fundamental level, my reaction tends to be, “Oh, just chill out already!” In the same way, some of my colleagues don’t get why my favorite nerdy quiet kids can’t have a non-awkward conversation with their classmates. Teachers are people too, and we gravitate towards different types of kids.

But we still have to teach all of them fairly. And like the best fiction, Joey Pigza put me in Joey’s (tied-together, tossed down the hall, spinning in circles) shoes and helped me get for the first time what it’s like to be the kind of kid who can’t sit still. It was written to be entertaining and maybe comforting for kids, but it ended up being bibliotherapy for this teacher, too.

* Presumably, though the diagnosis is never named.

Also reviewed at: MentalHelp.net, Blogcritics, and HomeschoolBuzz.com