CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Some weeks ago in his blog, academic James Herring took issue with the comments of Rob Moore, President of ASLA  (Australian School Library Association).

In his Leading Edge column in the latest edition of Access, ASLA’s professional journal, Rob Moore says:

Why did you become a teacher librarian? Was it the money? The power? Is this job just a key part of your overall strategy en route to world domination?

Could it be that a love of books played some part in your motivation to take the significant career move from classroom teacher to teacher librarian? I’m not suggesting for one second that you took this job on so that you could find a cosy corner for a good read, but a teacher librarian without a love of literature and reading is like choc-chip ice-cream without the choc-chips … it’s still ice-cream but the nuances of flavour and texture are reduced to a bland vanilla.

And so Rob goes on, in this literature-themed issue,  to talk about the role of the teacher librarian as enabler - the one who brings books and readers together in a unique role within the school.

James Herring’s blog response was immediate, provocative and brief, but he has since expanded his views at the recent IASL conference in California. Listen to James as he proposes (in a summary of his IASL keynote speech) that TLs should spend more time focusing on the curriculum and less time promoting literature - an activity he feels leads to the marginalisation of teacher librarians. He acknowledges that his views are controversial, but that he has his supporters. What do readers of the Fiction Focus blog - after all, a space devoted to promoting literature - think? We’d love some discussion.

Margo Rabb, whose novel Cures for Heartbreak is another one on our radar but not yet available* in Australia, has an essay in the New York Times about crossover titles and the stigma against YA literature in the US. Titles published as YA just don’t sell as well, which means that publishers are often tapping into older markets with different covers and marketing. But not always.

Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) nicely nabs the snobbery in an email comment to Margo Rabb:

... he recalled “a number of people looking down their noses at me when I explained what I did for a living, as if I painted watercolors of cats or performed as a clown at parties.”

The CMIS Resource Bank is developing a growing list of titles that will appeal to adults and teens alike, and the ALA’s Alex Awards are all about adult books that appeal to teens.

* We know we can easily import international titles that take our eye, but as a rule we wait until there is an Australian publication date before reviewing in Fiction Focus. Titles we review need to be readily available for purchase by schools through their usual suppliers.

The Books section of the Guardian newspaper’s website is full of delightful nooks and crannies. Looking for something else altogether, we have stumbled across Writers’ Rooms, where writers describe the spaces in which they work, accompanied by a rather stunning photograph.

There are enough YA authors here to make this a not-totally indulgent post, but there are also voices from the past such as Lord Byron and George Bernard Shaw. Which makes this site slightly less spooky than I See Dead People’s Books, Library Thing’s latest project, which you can also read about in the Guardian.

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.

If you have read Janet Tashjian’s 2004 title The Gospel According to Larry, you’d be aware of Larry’s zeal to reduce the clutter in our lives by owning just 75 items at any one time. His blog develops a cult following.

So it is with considerable interest that we note this recent article in Time.