CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

Two related items have come through on the overnight feeds.

First, legislation in the UK to ‘vet’ authors before they can visit schools. Along with all others working with children, authors must register on a national database for a fee of ₤64.

Philip Pullman’s objections are loud:

Both Pullman and former children’s laureate Anne Fine said the legislation would mean that they would not speak in a school again. “I refuse – having spoken in schools without incident for 32 years, I refuse to undergo such a demeaning process,” said Fine. “It’s all part of a very unhealthy situation that we’ve got ourselves into where all people who are close to children are almost seen as potential paedophiles.”

Coincidentally, in an essay entitled Manhood for Amateurs : The Wilderness of Childhood in the New York Review of Books, US writer Michael Chabon reflects on how (over) protecting our children may lead to the death of the adventure story. Because there are no more adventures.

There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her [Chabon's daughter] ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn’t encounter a single other child.

Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Image used under Creative Commons licence

Now where have we heard all this before? From the Wall Street Journal. This conversation is at least 20 years old.

Mostly girls, of course. There’s not much around about boys with eating disorders, although the condition exists for them too.

With the recent release of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls, the New York Times’s Health pages has asked the question about ‘thinspiration’.

There’s a discussion going on at Jezebel, if you’d like to join in.

Richard Dawkins on children’s Literature:

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales.

The Guardian books blog responds.

Current Children’s Laureate in the UK, Michael Rosen, has spoken out about standardised testing and the dangers of teaching to the test -  what is called SATS in Britain, NAPLAN here and something else in the USA and Canada and New Zealand.

This was very much a focus at the May CBCA Conference in Melbourne: literacy versus literature and politicians who don’t seem to understand the difference.

Rosen says:

Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often. At the moment, the government is barking up the wrong tree.

Change the acronyms and what Rosen has to say is relevant to every country that is going down the standardised testing path at the same time that school libraries are fighting for survival.

Britain’s Laureate and the USA’s Ambassador both have the gravitas to speak out for the importance of books and libraries. Don’t Aussie kids deserve a high-profile spokesperson too?

The controversy about language in CBCA’s Picture Book of the Year continues, with today’s Courier Mail just catching up and showing Requiem for a Beast being read to a nine year old for dramatic effect.

The whole problem seems to hinge around the ‘Children’ part of CBCA and the expectations that this word evokes, but for a newspaper to use a nine year old to demonstrate its out-of-context point, seems, well, just a tad irresponsible.

And just to prove how powerful books are, in Britain, former Children’s Laureate Jacqueline Wilson has had a word in her latest title, My Sister Jodie, removed after complaints from – wait for it – three parents.

This in a world where children and young adults are exposed to violence and foul language in the visual media seemingly without the blink of an eye.

The pen must be mightier than the YouTube.

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.