Lazing by the water

it slips away
just when you catch the stream;
summer free time

-Andromeda Jazmon

Once we pass the 4th of July summer starts to really race by. I try to force myself to slow down, relax, enjoy the lazy moments, all the while thinking I don't have enough time to do all I planned. I need more time to sit by this stream and daydream...

summer reading update

I am taking a grad course in YA Lit for library school this month. We have to read 24 YA novels chosen from the ones referenced in the textbook: Nilsen, Alleen Pace and Kenneth L. Donelson. Literature for Today’s Young Adults. 8^th ed. New York: Longman, 2009. We also have to read another textbook, several articles, write a couple papers, compile a YA library with a $3000 budget, and do a "webliography" listing 5 websites of interest to teens.

We are expected to immerse ourselves in teen pop culture, including TV, movies, music, etc. I am afraid I don't watch much TV or listen to the latest popular music, so I need some help here. What's hot with teens these days?

I guess with all this reading, writing & surfing that I will be doing I won't have much time to blog. I am going to do short updates on the books I'm reading for the course. Here's what I have read in the past week:

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. My favorite parts are early in her solitary experience on the South Pacific island. First when she tries to leave the island, paddling out East into the ocean in an old canoe she found, in an attempt to join the rest of her people who have left her alone on the island. The canoe has a split and starts to leak so she turns around and goes back and just barely makes it home. I can see this happening to me, only I wouldn't have the sense to turn around and go back. After paddling for a day and a night I would be too stubborn to give up and I'd probably end up swimming with the fishes. My other favorite part is when she shoots the pack leader of the wild dogs with her self-made bow and arrow, then tracks him down and finds him almost dead. Instead of finishing off her enemy (who was responsible for the wild dog pack killing her little brother) she takes him home and nurses him back to life, making him her best friend. That is a miracle of grace, and one of the really beautiful turns in the book. What part do you remember moving you especially?

The Land by Mildred A. Taylor. I hadn't read this 2001 prequel to her Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry Logan family series before. I really liked it. It tells the story of Paul, a young man living on his white father's post-Civil War land in his Black mother's house. Paul is treated well and given many of the benefits his white brothers receive, up until he becomes a teenager and his father decides he needs to learn that being Black means he doesn't really live in the same world as the white family members. Angered and humiliated, Paul leaves his father's land with his best friend, a Black teenager. The two have many adventures before settling down on their own piece of land. Very interesting to see the Reconstruction period through the eyes of a mixed teen who identifies as Black although he looks white enough to pass. Taylor tells us in the Author's Note that this is the real story of her own family, heard from her father, uncles and grandfather. I'd love to go directly to reading Roll of Thunder and all the rest of her books, if only I didn't have so much assigned reading.

Day of Tears by Julius Lester. This is the story of families devastated and torn apart by one day's slave auction in Savannah, Georgia in 1859. Lester draws on historical documents to give us a picture of the largest slave auction in US history, This novel is told in first person accounts from different perspectives of both white and black family members. The characters are complex, revealing mixed motives, emotions, and coping strategies. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live through such horror, this book takes you there. It's disturbing, heartbreaking and riveting. Lester is a master storyteller and one of my all time favorite authors. I highly recommend this book.

I'm keeping a list of the 24 novels for this course on a Goodreads bookshelf here. Please feel free to comment if there are books you've read or wondered about...

Raspberry Season Haiku

picking raspberries,
trying to decide: sorbet
or raspberry jam?

- Andromeda Jazmon



I'm telling you there is nothing sweeter and more delicious than homemade raspberry jam on fresh baked bread. Unless it's ice cold homemade raspberry sorbet...



We like our raspberry sorbet with chocolate sauce and whipped cream.

It's something to contemplate while you are out in the hot sun, fighting prickers, avoiding bumblebees and listening to the birds scream at you for stealing their fruit.

The Friday Poetry roundup is at Tabatha A. Yeatts' blog. Happy 4th if you're American. Enjoy your weekend!!

Literature On the Web

A Resource list for English Literature students.

One of the assignments I had this month for my collection development course in library science grad school was to compile a list of Internet resources for students. I chose to look for literature websites, databases, and sites, since that is one of my chief interests. I wanted to share what I found here on the blog, since I was really quite amazed at the wealth. Thinking back to when I was an English major in the early 80s, I just can not believe what a difference there is in what is easily available today. It's just phenomenal!

E-book collections: (Quoted text comes directly from the linked websites)

Alex Catalog of Electronic Texts: "This is a collection of public domain and open access documents with a focus on American and English literature as well as Western philosophy."

Digital Book Index: "This index is intended as a "Meta-index" for most major eBook sites, along with thousands of smaller specialized sites."

Electronic Texts on the Internet: This is an extensive list from RefDesk.com of many full text literature sites on the Internet. It includes links to many of the other sites I have referenced here. From Beowulf to Kafka, the Constitution to Project Muse, Elements of Style, Library of Congress and World Lecture Hall.

International Children's Digital Library: Wide variety of full text & illustrated children's books to be read/listened to online. New supporters & contributors are welcome.

Internet Public Library: "A wide variety of free, full-text sources for literature on the web."

Million Books Project: Collection of scanned texts, Not extensive. Browse by subject.

The Online Books Page: "Listing over 35,000 free books on the Web - Updated Friday, June 19, 2009 "

Project Gutenberg: "There are nearly 30,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. A grand total of over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources."

Internet sites & search engines:

Bartleby.com: Great books, authors, literary encyclopedias online.

Columbia University Press: Database of full text poetry, e-books, gazetteer of the world, and other electronically published resources.

Gale's Literary Index " a master index to the major literature products published by Gale. It combines and cross-references over 165,000 author names, including pseudonyms and variant names, and listings for over 215,000 titles into one source."

Google Books: Search engine for full text and citations of thousands of books and magazines, in co-operation with authors, publishers & libraries.

Google Scholar: "provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations."

Kidlitosphere Central: "strives to provide a passage to the wonderful variety of resources available from the society of bloggers in children's and young adult literature."

LibraryThing: catalog your books, read reviews of books, find author profiles, & make literary connections. "World's largest book club."

New York Times book reviews online.

Poets.org: website of the American Academy of Poets. Poem, biographies, literary essays.

Poetry Foundation: "The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture."

Scholar's Guide to the WWW: extensive list of helpful links on every scholarly subject.

WWW Virtual Library: Index to Open Access (free) sites for encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, biographies and other reference works.

Yahoo Directory for Literature: Links to all things literature, bookish, author-related, social networking and publishing on the web.

Abecedarian Poem

Blessed are the Broken-Hearted

Another
beatitude
called out;
discovered
even, through
faith.
Give
heed.
I
just
know it is
love that
moves us.
Not
only
puzzles us,
quite
radically
saves us.
Truly
unruly,
verily, reliably,
while
x-ing the street -
you are
zapped!

- Andromeda Jazmon

The Monday Poetry Stretch this week at Miss Rumphius Effect was to write an abecedarian poem. I've enjjoyed this form ever since I read Robert Pinksy's Every Body Can Die (click & scroll down to read it). One of my ambitions is to write a really killer ABC poem. Pinsky's poem is a little different than this form, as every word in the poem follows the alphabet sequence, and we are just doing the first word in the line alphabetically, but it is a similar form.

Check out the other Poetry Stretch Results here, and visit the Friday Poetry Round up being hosted by Kelly Herold at Crossover. Enjoy your summer weekend!

Sold

by Patricia McCormick. Hyperion, 2006. Library copy. Lakshmi, a 13 year old girl living with her family in a mountain village in Nepal, is spunky and full of hopeful expectation. Her step-father is a gambler who spends what little money she and her mother can scrap together sewing and growing cucumbers, but still Lakshmi thinks she can turn things around and get the family hut a new tin roof if only the drought didn't end in a flood. The family is desperately poor but Lakshmi loves her life in the mountains. She has no concept of what life might be like down in the valley. Everything changes when her father looses bad at cards and sells her in order to pay his debts. At first Lakshmi thinks she is just going away to work in the city as a maid for a rich woman. That may be what her father really believes; we are not sure. But the woman who pays him and leads Lakshmi down the mountain is actually a broker for a man who sells her to a brothel across the border in India.

The journey, first by foot down the mountain and through many villages, and then by train across the border and into Calcutta, is both shocking and overwhelming for Lakshmi. There is no comparison to the horror and desperation she finds when at last she reaches her new life in the "Happiness House". She is beaten, starved, drugged, terrorized, imprisoned and tortured into accepting her lot. Somehow she manages to hang onto the simple truth her mother taught her: "To endure is to triumph". She finds ways to make friendships with the other girls and women caught up in the nightmare. She sees beauty and tenderness and does not give up hope. She schemes to find ways to save up the money they tell her she owes, even though the record book never shows any credit for her work. After over a year, when she begins to realize the death trap she is in, she looks outside for another way of escape.

After the gruesome horror of the main part of this book it is a relief to get to the ending, which is hopeful. The book itself is based on real events that are happening at this moment. The author's note at the end of the book tells us that each year nearly 12,000 Nepali girls are sold by their families. She tells us that the U.S. State department estimates that "nearly half a million children are trafficked ... annually." She traveled to India and Nepal in researching the book, tracing the steps of the young girls brought from remote villages to Calcutta, and interviewed aid workers who get them out of the net. She also met and talked with survivors like Lakshmi. She tells us that there are women who have survived this brutality that now travel the villages and patrol the border seeking to share their stories and prevent more girls from being taken. She writes in their honor.

Sold is not an easy book to read, although I finished it in one sitting. It is written in free verse with strong imagery that is both nuanced and sharp. It's one of those books you never forget, and that you wish were just fiction. Highly recommended for adults and teens, and a good book club pick.

Other reviews:

Readergirlz feature on the book & author chat: ideas for book discussions, music playlist & how to support anti-slavery action (scroll down the page for more).
Teenreads.com
BookBrowse (with published reviews)
Maw Books blog
PaperTigers

Chains

by Laurie Halse Anderson. Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 2008. Isabel is a twelve year old African American girl in slavery in Rhode Island in 1776. When her mistress dies she expects to be freed, since it is in her mistress's will. Unfortunately the heir is a man who wants to sell her and her little sister, 5 year old Ruth, in auction. He has no patience for her claims and the lawyer with the papers has left the state. The doctor who knows Isabel and her mistress does nothing to help her. They are sold in a tavern and end up with a cruel woman and her business-minded husband in New York City. In the summer and fall of 1776 NYC is in the middle of British occupation in the Revolutionary war. Isabel is smart and kind-hearted, and continues to hold on to hope even in the face of unbelievable cruelty and injustice. As she listens and watches the Rebels and the Loyalists she befriends a young man, freed from slavery by joining the Rebel army, who is then captured and imprisoned. She moves from naive innocence to revolutionary thoughts of her own. The ending is a cliff-hanger making me want to call Laurie up and ask how her novel writing is going. Can't wait for the sequel!

Chains is beautifully and expertly written, as all of Laurie Halse Anderson's books are. I hung on every word of this book but forced myself to spread it out over several nights instead of tearing through it in one sitting. I kept thinking back to reading Octavian Nothing and comparing the two. I almost expected Isabel to run into Octavian. I'm sure they would have a lot to talk about and could help each other out.

I was also thinking back to the books I read in middle school and high school about the Revolution. We had nothing from an African American perspective, as far as I can remember. I think I read Johnny Tremain. Don't think there were any African Americans in that book, although Anderson tell us that probably 20% of the population of the colonies was Black. Can you think of anything else written for Young Adults about the Revolution, pre-1980s? How differently I understand the issues and complexity now that I have seen it through the eyes of African American young people caught up in the struggle. Which side would offer more freedom, more dignity, more humanity? The British or the Rebels? Neither side seemed to care much about anything but their own economic profits, actually. I don't think they told it to us that way in history class. What do you think?

Check out Anderson's website here, where you can read her blog more about her books, see reviews, a teacher's guide, and hear a music playlist.