Snippets of bookishness

Dear Annie,

As a third child, I'm always happy to hear about the new books your third is discovering.  Somehow, I never doubted that he'd get quality reading time.  Although semiotics could be pushing it...

A few snippets of bookishness today:

It's Book Fair time here: I spent the morning working on set-up with the volunteers who make the book fair happen every year at Lizzie's and Mona's old school.  More than 800 titles (2000+ books) are laid out on long tables with colorful signs in the school's black box theater.  For the next two days, kids will come classroom by classroom to browse and write wish lists to take home to their parents.  Then they'll return with checks and gather armloads of new books.  The lovely woman who's been running it says the moment the kids are set loose to look is her reward for all the hard work.

And one more mention of our delightful visit from Jon Muth,  Zen storyteller and panda artist.  The Washington Post did a piece on him for its kids' news page.  I used this space two years ago to attack a very unfortunately written book review on that page.  So here's another side of KidsPost.  Muth's new book, Hi, Koo! is a collection of 26 haikus about the seasons.  Reporter Christina Barron chose to focus on his unorthodox (to English-speakers) definition of haiku, which doesn't follow the 5-7-5 structure.  Better than your average story.

Speaking of the Washington Post, I highly recommend  this beautiful short blog entry by Ron Charles, deputy book editor, "Why World Read Aloud Day is my favorite holiday." It has thoughts to make us all appreciate both the power of the written word, and how amazing some parents can be.  Make sure you get to the fourth paragraph which starts, "When my wife and I had our first daughter, we weren’t sure we’d ever be allowed to share that joy [reading aloud] with her...."

Love,

Deborah