CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Neil Gaiman was the guest on the Radio National’s Book Show yesterday. In conversation with Michael Sherrifs, he talks about graphic novels, his two-decade-long collaboration with Dave McKean and classic YA literature.

It is for online listening only, but the transcript is also available.

Speaking of books of a bygone era, the Fine Lines blog revisits some loved titles of the ’70s and ’80s with a more critical eye. The latest post is about Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, now an astonishing 39 years old! This weekly blog is worth a nostalgic visit.

After taking the Bronze Medal at the (now defunct) Nestle Awards and being shortlisted for the Booktrust Teenage Prize for Here Lies Arthur, Philip Reeve has at last won a big award -  the 2008 Carnegie Medal, announced in London last night.

Emily Gravett won the Kate Greenaway medal for Little Mouse’s Big Book of Fears. Emily’s technique in the making of this book was rather unorthodox.

Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant recently won the Red House Children’s Book Award - the longest running children’s choice award in the world. The popularity of this charming, although skeletal, detective and his adventures with Stephanie Edgley is as great in Australia and the United States as it is in Landy’s native Ireland.

Now, the second book, Playing with Fire, is out, and to celebrate , the dedicated website has the audio of Book 1 available online for free listening (but not downloading) for a limited time. The narration by Rupert Degas retains the Irishness of the tale and he is able to inject just the right amount of dark humour.

Skulduggery’s many fans should take advantage of the offer while it lasts.

The oft-maligned Wikipedia has addressed many of its early problematic issues. Tighter controls mean that authorship and editing of entries are subject to scrutiny and sources are required to verify statements. Having students contribute to this collaborative tool is adding to the pool of knowledge, teaching them research and Web 2.0 skills and creating an authentic audience.

Why not get them to create / augment / correct entries about some of our Australian authors or illustrators? Patricia Wrightson, for example, may no longer be fashionable, but she will always be important. There are many gaps in her entry and at least one glaring error concerning The Nargun and the Stars, recently reissued by UQP Press. (We are tempted to correct it, but will leave it for a little longer so that someone can take up the challenge!)

Students will learn the importance of fact checking from print and online sources and citing them correctly in a real-world situation.

And if you are short of inspiration, check the YA Author and Illustrators pages on this blog. In the meantime, how nice if somebody could give Patricia Wrightson the entry she deserves.

There is more on using wikis in the classroom on our CMIS website.

Have you caught up with Inanimate Alice yet? It is digital storytelling at its most delicious. The fourth of ten episodes has recently come online.

Beginning with Alice as an eight year old living in remote regions of China with her parents, the story will develop in interactive complexity as Alice matures into her twenties. She has so far also been to Russia and Italy and in the fourth episode she is fourteen and living in an ordinary town in England. Why?

The related pedagogy project is attracting educators from around the world.

Each episode takes about half an hour to view. Treat yourself and your students soon.

Inanimate Alice has been created by Chris Joseph, digital writer in residence at The Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montford University, Leicester in the UK.

It’s an interesting award, the Phoenix. Its aim is to celebrate a title that missed out on a major prize when it was first published, but with the hindsight of twenty years is reconsidered.

The award is given by the US Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) and named after ‘the fabled bird that rose from its ashes with renewed life and beauty. Phoenix books also rise from the ashes of neglect and obscurity and once again touch the imaginations and enrich the lives of those who read them.’

In 1989, Francesca Lia Block published WeetzieBat. She has just been announced as the winner of the 2009 Phoenix Award for this overlooked title. In 2007, Margaret Mahy received the award for Memory (published 1987) and in 2008, Peter Dickinson for Eva (1988).

A list of some past winners and their acceptance speeches can be found on the Children’s Literature Association wiki. Others can be found on the Phoenix Papers section of the ChLA website, although this is a work in progress and not all links are working.

• Melina Marchetta is guest author on the OzProjects Beware of Books site next week. Students are invited to submit questions to Melina on the forum.
• House of Many Ways, Diana Wynne Jones’s newest title set not long after the events in Howl’s Moving Castle, is due here in August. This interview with the author sets the scene.
• A discussion guide has been released for Life as We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer’s grim and scary tale of the consequences of a meteor hitting the moon. The sequel, the dead and the gone (the author’s preferred punctuation) has just arrived on our desk and will be reviewed shortly. It has been published here in paperback as The Dead and the Gone and the cover is not nearly as attractive as the American hardback. Pity.
• Literature teachers might like to follow this link from the Teaching Literature to Adolescents blog. Peter Smagorinsky, from the University of Georgia, is creating a growing list of titles to support conceptual themes such as Utopias and Dystopias, Conflict and  Justice. It’s a long list, and yes, the bias is American, but Smagorinsky is accepting suggestions for additions to the links, novels, poetry, drama, short stories, non-fiction titles, songs and films he is compiling for each theme.

There’s been a bit of talk about Wordle on the lists lately, and we have also talked about using it in the classroom on our Technology Focus blog.

It’s an application that can be overdone, but used judiciously as an intriguing book promotion, it can be pretty effective. Here’s an example of the popular Stephenie Meyer title Twilight (not that it needs much promoting!) It was created very quickly just by copying the text of the review into the Wordle creator and tweaking the colours, layout and font.

This is best viewed by clicking on the image. Have fun.

Shaun Tan has been honoured again for The Arrival, with a special citation in the Boston Globe Horn Book Awards announced yesterday. Special citations are rare in these awards, which are among the most prestigious in the US for children’s and young adult literature.

The awards have been presented since 1967. Winners are selected in three categories: Picture Book, Fiction and Poetry, and Nonfiction and two Honor Books may be named in each category.

2008 Winners are:

Fiction and Poetry: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (this title, available in Australia in September, has won several other awards in the US including a National Book Award.)

Non Fiction: The Wall : Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sís (to be reviewed in Fiction Focus, Issue 2, 2008)

Picture Book: At Night by Jonathon Bean (a book for young children, not yet available in Australia)

Neither of the two fiction Honor Books is available here yet: Savvy by Ingrid Law will be here in September and Shooting the Moon by Frances O’Roark Dowell has no indicated publishing date for Australia. Both are targeted at an upper primary / lower secondary readership.

There’s a great post today on Guys Lit Wire, a blog about books for boys. Do teenage boys need books with weak female characters? links to a YouTube discussion where two older males bemoan that boys can’t be heroes any more. In praising a new title, Nick of Time by Ted Bell, the speakers make a point of saying how great it is that the female characters are passive so that the boys can rescue them.

This discussion is rebutted confidently by ‘Colleen’:

‘There are a couple of things that bother me about this discussion (between two adult men without a teenager in sight by the way). First it is that for a boy to feel heroic he must rescue a girl - and the girl also needs to be rescued. I’m sure the sociologists would have a field day over all this but I can’t believe that anyone in the 21st century would believe that such antiquated notions of what it means to be a hero have any place in a worthwhile discussion. Save the world - yes! Save the animals, save the environment, save whatever needs saving in your books. But the girl MUST be saved by the boy for the boy to feel powerful? How do these gentlemen think it makes the girl feel to have to wait to be saved? Have they ever thought about that at all?’

Colleen also provides a ‘top of the head’ list of titles where boys are both strong and heroic.

It’s a terrific discussion for a boys’ lit blog, with plenty of comments coming in.