Spotlight On... Author-Illustrator Allen Say

--by Hanje Richards

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Allen Say (born James Allen Koichi Moriwaki Seii in 1937) is an Asian-American author and illustrator best known for his book Grandfather's Journey, a picture book detailing his grandfather's voyage from Japan to the United States and back again, which won the 1994 Caldecott Medal. This story is autobiographical and relates to Say's constant moving during his childhood. His work mainly focuses on Japanese and Japanese-American characters and their stories, and several works have autobiographical elements.

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Say was born in Yokohama, Japan, to a Japanese family: a Japanese-American mother and a Korean father who was adopted by British parents. At age 12, four years after his parents' divorce, Say went to live with his grandmother but received her permission a short time later to live alone. The boy apprenticed himself for many years to his favorite cartoonist, Noro Shinpei, an experience detailed in his autobiographical novel The Ink-Keeper's Apprentice. In time, Say came to think of Shinpei as his "spiritual father," as well as a mentor.

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Boy of the Three Year Nap (by Dianne Snyder; illustrated by Allen Say) - Taro is a Japanese boy whose penchant for sleeping is the butt of village jokes, much to the chagrin of his poor widowed mother, who works hard to provide them with necessities. Taro cannot be coaxed into working, despite his mother's pleas, until he falls in love with a rich merchant's daughter and hatches a scheme to make himself wealthy. An engaging, almost universal trickster tale. (Caldecott Honor Book)

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Emma’s Rug - As a small child, Emma has two noteworthy practices: she stares for long periods at the fuzzy white rug she has had since birth, and she spends quite a bit of time drawing intently. When she enters school and garners many prizes for her artwork, it becomes clear that the seemingly blank rug is the source of her inspiration.

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Grandfather’s Journey - Home becomes elusive in this story about immigration and acculturation, pieced together through old pictures and salvaged family tales. Both the narrator and his grandfather long to return to Japan, but when they do, they feel anonymous and confused: "The funny thing is, the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other." (Caldecott Winner)

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Ink-Keeper’s Apprentice - Author/illustrator Allen Say draws on his boyhood in postwar Tokyo for this autobiographical novel about a talented boy's artistic education. A 14-year-old boy lives on his own in Tokyo and becomes apprenticed to a famous Japanese cartoonist.

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Lost Lake - Luke and his father, who is disgusted by the tourists surrounding the once secluded lake of his childhood, hike deeper into the wilderness to find a "lost lake" of their own. This is an absorbing story which takes readers on two journeys. The obvious trek is into the wilderness, but there is a parallel route which follows the boy and his father as they develop a deeper understanding of one another.

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Stranger in the Mirror - One morning Sam wakes up and looks at his reflection in the mirror. Overnight he has changed, and he sees a stranger's face staring back at him - an old face. Sam has suddenly aged. As a result, his classmates won't play with him, and at home his family treats him like a different person. On the inside, though, he is the same Sam - why can't anyone see that?.
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Tea With Milk - At home in San Francisco, May speaks Japanese and the family eats rice and miso soup and drinks green tea. When she visits her friends' homes, she eats fried chicken and spaghetti. May plans someday to go to college and live in an apartment of her own. But when her family moves back to Japan, she soon feels lost and homesick for America. In Japan, everyone calls her by her Japanese name, Masako. She has to wear kimonos and sit on the floor. Poor May is sure that she will never feel at home in this country. Eventually, May is expected to marry and a matchmaker is hired. Outraged at the thought, May sets out to find her own way in the big city of Osaka.

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Tree of Cranes - Heedless of Mama's warnings, a Japanese boy cannot resist playing at an ice-cold pond "filled with carp of bright colors." When he comes home, he is immediately treated for a cold, with a hot bath and rice gruel. His mother's attitude chills him more than the weather, though; he cannot understand why she seems to be ignoring him. As he recovers from a bad chill, his mother busily folds origami paper into delicate silver cranes in preparation for the boy's very first Christmas.

Friday Fiction: William Kennedy

--by Hanje Richards
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William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York. Many of his novels feature the interaction of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family and make use of incidents of Albany's history and the supernatural.

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Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game - Billy Phelan, small-time bookie, pool hustler, and poker player, becomes an unlikely go-between in the 1938 kidnapping of an Albany political boss' son.

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Flaming Corsage - The action moves back and forth in time as the drama of a stormy marriage unfolds and the truth of a murder is brought to light. Irish-American playwright Edward Daugherty woos and wins his beautiful, rich, upper-class love, Katrina Taylor, but the passion that brought them together cannot sustain them in the face of life's tragedies.

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The Ink Truck - Kennedy's first novel relates the story of a newspaper strike in a vividly evoked Albany, New York. Inspired by a real-life labor dispute at the Times-Union, the book follows the exploits of Bailey, a columnist embroiled in a newspaper strike. Working in a sardonic prose style, Kennedy was able to weave into the narrative many of his observations about Irish Catholic life in Albany.

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Ironweed - The story of Francis Phelan, once a talented major league baseball player, husband, and father of three, who has fallen so far from grace that his home for the past twenty-two years has been the street. Francis' denigration of himself and his common-law wife, Helen, makes for a disturbing read, and yet the novel is ultimately uplifting. It begins not with Francis' fall from grace, but rather with the day on which he begins his journey towards redemption.

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It is the night before Halloween in 1938, and Francis, who left his family for good back in 1916, is beginning to think about all that he's left...

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Legs - A fictionalized narrative of the erratic, stylish life and deadly career of notorious ‘twenties gangster Legs Diamond, told with equivocal disbelief by his attorney, Marcus Gorman.

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Masakado Lesson - Novel of secret computer skullduggery... Fueling the action is a race for computer supremacy, as American and Japanese groups each try to build the supercomputer that will signal domination. Led by an obsessed genius, the Japanese are on the verge of victory. Attempting to stymie their success is an appealing team: Toole, an ex-con who robs banks over computer lines, Karen Albert, a beautiful computer scientist, and mysterious Mr. Cobb, an apparent government agent with high connections. Their sabotage plan, involving poker, seduction, and sophisticated code-cracking, is turned upside down by deceit and double-dealing at every turn.
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Quinn’s Book - Daniel Quinn, America's foremost Civil War reporter, recalls his adolescent years in and around Albany, New York, and his 15-year pursuit of the mysterious Maud Fallon, a theater star world-renowned for her nude interpretations of Byron and Keats. Quinn has a newsman's eye for detail, and history buffs will enjoy his accounts of the anti-draft riots, the Underground Railroad, and Saratoga racing in its heyday..

Riding the Yellow Trolly Car: Selected Nonfiction - The 86 pieces collected here are broken into six sections that date from 1954 through 1992. They include early news columns, interviews, book reviews, book introductions, and life experiences. Much of the text concerns writing, and Kennedy examines his own masterful creations as well as the great works that touched him. He speaks admiringly of Doctorow, Mailer, Bellow, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and reverently of Joyce, Beckett, Hemingway, and Damon Runyon. Other pieces cover movies, sports, and, of course, Albany. Whether he's discussing his taste for oysters or the plight of the homeless, there's a touch of the poet about Kennedy, making his writing a great pleasure to read no matter what the subject.

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Roscoe - It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past – to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond.
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Very Old Bones - Another episode in the saga of the Phelan family in a mix of surreal flourishes and gritty naturalism. It's written as a mock-memoir by Orson Purcell, “a bit of a magician,” who is the bastard son of Peter Phelan, older brother of Francis. Orson is attempting to put the humpty-dumpty of familial life together again during a climactic family gathering, in 1958, by chronicling his own life, his father's, and three past generations. Peter, a painter, returns to Albany (from a long exile in Greenwich Village) in 1954, and stays to document the family's history in paint and to care for brother Tommy, a sort of “holy moron.”

National Novel Writing Month: Dispatches From My Living Room: #2

--by Hanje Richards

Since my first blog post about participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I have gotten a wide range of responses, from: “Why would you do that to yourself?” to complete excitement and support. I have also discovered three people that I personally know (in real life) who are also signed up for NaNoWriMo.

At the library, we’ve scheduled some events for other Bisbee-area NaNoWriMo participants, including the Tuesday NaNoCon Circle (with Con being short for Conversation), which will meet from 10 – 11:30am and offer an opportunity to share NaNo experiences – both good and bad – with other participants. The Circle will be facilitated by Yours Truly.

We’ve also designated the Library Meeting Room as a Quiet Write space for 16.5 hours per week during the month of November – except for holidays, including Veterans’ Day (November 11) and the long Thanksgiving weekend (November 25-28), when the library will be closed. Quiet Write space is offered to provide a place to bring your creativity – and your laptop, notebook, pen and paper, and other necessities. Wi-Fi is available, and reference materials are at your fingertips in the library. (Of course, you’re always welcome to use the library at other times as well, but the Meeting Room itself might not be available, due to other programming commitments.)

If you are in the Bisbee area and are thinking about participating in NaNoWriMo, be sure to pick up a flyer at the library!

If you are signed up for NaNoWriMo and are learning your way around their website, I would love it if you would “buddy” me. I am on there as author: Hanje. I will maintain your anonymity unless you give me permission to use your name, your initials, or whatever name you are using for NaNoWriMo.

We would love to see your NaNo comments on the library’s Facebook page, and I’d love comments on my personal blog (depending upon where you are reading this).

A little about how I am feeling about this experience, with one week of preparation time left:

I am alternately excited and nervous.

As of Saturday afternoon, I had NO CLUE what I was going to write about. By Sunday morning, with the encouragement of a two-word comment, I have started to mentally outline, and waves of inspiration have been hitting me at various points.

On a more practical note:

1) I have been working on November library blog posts, with the intention of having all of them completed by next Sunday night. (This excludes the posts I'll be writing throughout the month on NaNoWriMo);

2) I’ve returned all my “7 Day” library books and have refrained from checking any DVDs out of the library. (You must understand that I still have Netflix, TV, and any other books from the library – as well as all of my own books – so I am hardly depriving myself of distraction and enjoyment; I am just reducing the stress!);

3) According to the rules, I am allowed to outline and plot and create my characters before the contest officially starts. I have started doing that mentally but will probably start putting some of that down on paper in the next couple of days;

4) I've started creating my “survival kit” and my “commandments” – which I will share with you later in the week;

5) Oh, and most important of all – I am telling all of you. You are my safety net, my backup plan. When things get grim, I have a responsibility to you. I have the fear of ridicule and harassment from you if I fail to meet my goals – or at least fail to give it everything I have committed to give it.

Mystery Monday: James Ellroy

--by Hanje Richards

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Because I am a huge mystery fan, "Mystery Monday" was born. Because I like to read mysteries in order, I'm going to list and talk about them in chronological, rather than alphabetical, order.

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For those interested in reading some of the featured titles, I've noted at the end of each book's summary whether it's available at the Copper Queen Library (CQL) or at another library in Cochise County through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).

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James Ellroy (born March 4, 1948) is an American crime writer and essayist. He has become known for the so-called "telegraphic" prose style of his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences – best exemplified in The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover.

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After his parents' divorce, Ellroy and his mother relocated to El Monte, California. In 1958, Ellroy's mother was murdered. The police never arrested the perpetrator, and the case remains unsolved. The murder, along with The Badge by Jack Webb (a book composed of sensational cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, a birthday gift from his father), were important events of Ellroy's youth.
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Hallmarks of his work include dense plotting and a relentlessly pessimistic — albeit moral — worldview. His work has earned Ellroy the nickname the "Demon Dog of American crime fiction." Ellroy writes longhand on legal pads, rather than on a computer, and prepares elaborate outlines for his books, most of which are several hundred pages long. Dialog and narration in Ellroy novels often consists of a "heightened pastiche of jazz slang, cop patois, creative profanity and drug vernacular," with a particular use of period-appropriate, but now anachronistic, slang.

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He often employs stripped-down staccato sentence structures, a style that reaches its apex in The Cold Six Thousand, and which Ellroy describes as a "direct, shorter-rather-than-longer sentence style that's declarative and ugly and right there, punching you in the nards."

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This signature style is not the result of a conscious decision, but chance. This came about when he was asked by his editor to shorten his novel White Jazz from 900 pages to 350. Rather than removing any sub-plots, Ellroy achieved this by eliminating verbs, creating a unique style of prose. While each sentence on its own is simple, the cumulative effect is a dense, baroque style.

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Black Dahlia (1987) - On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia – and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia – driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches – into a region of total madness. (available at CQL)

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Blood on the Moon (1984) - Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer. (available at CQL)

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Big Nowhere (1988) - An ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit, and past violence converge explosively. (available at CQL)
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L.A. Confidential (1990) - Film-noir crime fiction akin to Chinatown, Hollywood Babylon, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. It's about three tortured souls in the 1950s L.A.P.D.: Ed Exley, the clean-cut cop who lives shivering in the shadow of his dad, a legendary cop in the same department; Jack Vincennes, a cop who advises a Police Squad-like TV show and busts movie stars for payoffs from sleazy Hush-Hush magazine; and Bud White, a detective haunted by the sight of his dad murdering his mom.

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The cops chase stolen gangland heroin through a landscape littered with not-always-innocent corpses while succumbing to sexy sirens who have been surgically resculpted to resemble movie stars; a vile developer – a riff on Walt Disney – schemes to make big bucks off Moochie Mouse; and the cops compete with the crooks to see who can be more corrupt and violent. (available at CQL)

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White Jazz (1992) - Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns – it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer – a power in his own small corner of Hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.

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Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins – all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time.

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Klein tells his own story – his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing – taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. (available at CQL)

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Hollywood Nocturnes (1994) - Dig it: A famous musician-cum-draft dodger is plotting the perfect celebrity snatch – his own. An ex-con raging on revenge in High Darktown becomes a cop's worst nightmare. While chasing kidnappers, two cops stumble on an Okie town as bloody as the O.K. Corral. A strongarm for Howard Hughes and mobster Mickey Cohen finds himself playing both ends against the middle, all for a murderously magnificent moll. This is L.A., Ellroy style – corrupt cops, goons with guns, rattling roadsters – and all in the staccato rhythm of the streets. Hollywood Nocturnes shows us the seedy side of glamorous Hollywood, laid out like a corpse in the morgue. (available through ILL)

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Brown’s Requiem (1994) - Fritz Brown's L.A. – and his life – are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem, a private eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music, he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown's life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap. Reopening this case could be Fritz's redemption; his welcome back to a moral world and his path to a pure and perfect love. But to get there, he must make it through a grim, lightless place where evil has no national borders; where lies beget lies and death begets death; where there's little tolerance for Bach or Beethoven and deadly arson is a lesser mortal sin; and where a P.I.'s unhealthy interest in the past can turn beautiful music into funeral dirge. (available through ILL)

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American Tabloid (1995) - We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination – in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . . Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . . Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . . Where three renegade law-enforcement officers – a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents – are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . (available at CQL)
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My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir (1996) - In 1958, Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother – and himself. This is his story.
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In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten – and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is an epic tale of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence. (available at CQL)

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The Cold Six-Thousand (2001) - On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob’s emissary to the anti-Castro underground.

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It goes bad from there. For the next five years, these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and counter-plots: Howard Hughes’s takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover’s war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. (available at CQL)

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Blood’s A Rover (2009) - Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated. Robert Kennedy assassinated. Los Angeles, 1968. Conspiracy theories are taking hold. On the horizon looms the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and constant gun fire peppers south L.A. Violence, greed, and grime are replacing free-love, and everybody from Howard Hughes, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover to the right-wing assassins and left-wing revolutionaries are getting dirty. At the center of it all is a triumvirate: the president’s strong-arm goon, an ex-cop and heroin runner, and a private eye whose quarry is so dangerous she could set off the whole powder keg. (available at CQL)

Friday Fiction: Carol Shields

--by Hanje Richards

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Carol Ann Shields (June 2, 1935 – July 16, 2003) was an American-born Canadian author. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.

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The youngest of three children, Carol Shields was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1935. She studied at Hanover College, the University of Exeter in England, and the University of Ottawa, where she received an M.A. In 1957, she married Donald Hugh Shields, a professor of Civil Engineering, and moved to Canada. In addition to raising five children, all of whom are now grown, Shields worked as an editorial assistant for the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers and as a professor at the University of Ottawa, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Manitoba.

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Shields passed away on July 16, 2003, at the age of 68, due to complications from breast cancer. She was in the process of writing a new book at the time of her death.

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Box Garden - Charleen, a divorced woman attending her widowed mother's second wedding, makes startling discoveries about other family members attending the reunion and achieves a new understanding of herself and her own life.

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Collected Stories - Appearing first is her last unpublished tale, "Segue," about an aging couple in failing health - he a famous novelist, she a writer of sonnets - who grow apart as they take "responsibility for [their] own dying bodies." The story serves as a poignant tribute. Overall, Shields' touch is gorgeously light, her tales capturing brief, evanescent moments in the busy lives of couples, mothers and lonely wives. Playing with language, exploring intimate relationships, and examining small town life through Shields’ eyes are all contained in this volume.

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Jane Austen - In this biography, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award-winning novelist, Shields’ magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

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Larry’s Party - Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony, and tenderness. Larry's Party gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life in episodes between 1977-1997 that seamlessly flash backward and forward. We follow this young floral designer through two marriages and divorces, and his interactions with his parents, friends, and a son. Throughout, we witness his deepening passion for garden mazes – so like life, with their teasing treachery and promise of reward. Among all the paradoxes and accidents of his existence, Larry moves through the spontaneity of the ‘70s, the blind enchantment of the ‘80s, and the lean, mean ‘90s, completing at last his quiet, stubborn search for self. Larry's odyssey mirrors the male condition at the end of our century with targeted wit, unerring poignancy, and faultless wisdom.

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Republic of Love - Fay McLeod and Tom Avery are likable souls: kind to their parents, close to friends and co-workers, dedicated to their professions (she's a folklorist, he's a radio talk show host). But thus far, both have been unlucky in love. Fay has never married; Tom has married and divorced rather too often. Participating on the periphery of lives of married friends has begun to pall. They finally meet, and it is a coup de foudre for both, but Fay is leaving that night for a month of mermaid research in Europe. Even when she returns, their affair is jeopardized by upheavals in others' lives. Can a woman of letters find happiness with a spokesman for the commonplace?

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Small Ceremonies - Wife, mother, and biographer, Judith Gill finds her own life overshadowed by her need to observe and understand, becoming a woman whose world is shaped by the actions of others, until she discovers her own role as a translator and celebrant of life's small ceremonies.

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The Stone Diaries - One of the most successful and acclaimed novels of our time, this 1993 fictionalized autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett is a subtle but affecting portrait of an Everywoman reflecting on an unconventional life. What transforms this seemingly-ordinary tale is the richness of Daisy’s vividly described inner life — from her earliest memories of her adoptive mother to her awareness of impending death.

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The Stone Diaries won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1993 Governor General's Award, the only book to have ever received both awards. It was nominated for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1993 Booker Prize, and was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. It was also chosen as a "Notable Book" by The New York Times Book Review, which wrote "The Stone Diaries reminds us again why literature matters."

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Unless - For all of her life, 44 year old Reta Winters has enjoyed the useful monotony of happiness: a loving family, good friends, growing success as a writer of light "summertime" fiction. But this placid existence is cracked wide open when her beloved eldest daughter, Norah, drops out to sit on a gritty street corner, silent but for the sign around her neck that reads "GOODNESS." Reta's search for what drove her daughter to such a desperate statement turns into an unflinching and surprisingly funny meditation on where we find meaning and hope.

Spotlight On... National Novel Writing Month

--by Hanje Richards

Many of you think of Thanksgiving when you think of November. You may think of the start of holiday shopping, the changing of seasons, some days off of work and/or school. This November, I am thinking about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The motto for NaNoWriMo is: "November 1st – 30th: Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon."

Have you ever thought about writing a novel? I have. When I was eight or nine, I even interviewed babysitters to illlustrate the juvenile novels that I was plotting in my head. I thought about it in Junior High, I thought about it in my twenties. I thought about it when Helen Hooven Santmyer’s most famous book (And Ladies of the Club) was published when she was 88 years old... and made the bestseller list.

I have not given up yet. I am still thinking about novel writing, but I guess you could say I have been one of those people that the NaNoWriMo people call a “one day novelist,” meaning that I always thought that ONE DAY, I would write a novel. All that is about to change. I am going to sign up for and commit myself to the NaNoWriMo.

If you are interested in the project, which over 165,000 people participated in last year, I highly recommend that you visit the website: www.nanowrimo.org . This well-organized website has everything about the project, about how to participate in it and what the whole thing is about... and it tells you way more than I could in this space.

Here is the short version:

What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month’s time.

Who: You! We can’t do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together.

Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of our era’s most enchanting art forms! To write without having to obsess over quality. To be able to make obscure references to passages from our novels at parties. To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work.

When: You can sign up anytime to add your name to the roster and browse the forums. Writing begins November 1. To be added to the official list of winners, you must reach the 50,000-word mark by November 30 at midnight. Once your novel has been verified by our web-based team of robotic word counters, the partying begins.

If you have ever wanted to write a novel, or to challenge yourself in a way you may not have challenged yourself before, check out the website for NaNoWriMo. If you are interested in watching someone else do it, you can follow my posts here at the Copper Queen Library blog. I promise to be brutally honest about the process, and hope to have a little fun sharing this experience with others.

If you are considering participating in NaNoWriMo, we would love to hear your comments, your experiences and anything you would like to share with others. If there are people who are interested in forming a virtual or real-life support group during the process, that is absolutely a possibility; just let us know!

(A word to the wise: 50,000 words in 30 days is 1,667 words a day!)

Spotlight On... Eric Carle

--by Hanje Richards

Eric Carle (born June 25, 1929) is a children's book author and illustrator. He has illustrated more than 70 books, including many best sellers (most of which he also wrote). More than 88 million copies of his books have sold worldwide.

Eric Carle’ s art is distinctive and instantly recognizable. His art work is created in collage technique, using hand-painted papers which he cuts and layers to form bright and colorful images. Many of his books have an added dimension — die-cut pages, twinkling lights, even the lifelike sounds. Carle's readers often use his work as an example and create collages themselves that they often send to Carle; he receives hundreds of letters each week from his young admirers.

The themes of his stories are usually drawn from his extensive knowledge and love of nature — an interest shared by most small children. Carle attempts to make his books not only entertaining, but also educational, offering his readers the opportunity to learn something about the world around them. When writing, Carle attempts to recognize children's feelings, inquisitiveness and creativity, as well as to stimulate their intellectual growth; it is for these reasons (in addition to his unique artwork) that many feel his books have been such a success.



Do You Want To Be My Friend? - From horse to crocodile to giraffe, no one wants to be the little mouse's friend, until he meets up with a friendly, familiar face — and not a moment too soon!

Dream Snow - A farmer lives alone on a small farm with so few animals that he calls them One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. Oh, he also has a tree named Tree. One night near Christmas, he falls asleep in his favorite chair after his peppermint tea and dreams that he is covered in a white blanket. On successive pages, One the horse, Two the cow, Three the sheep, and so on are each covered in a snowflake blanket, accomplished by an acetate page of flakes and an amorphous shape that, when turned, reveals the animal. When the farmer awakes and finds it has snowed for real, he dresses himself warmly, decorates Tree, and strews gifts for all five animals under it.

Eric Carle’s Dragons: Dragons and Other Creatures That Never Were - From dragons and griffins to mermaids and bunyips, mythological creatures abound in this joyous treasury of poetry celebrating mythology and legends from around the world. Eric Carle's playful and vibrantly-colored collages illustrate the fantastic beasts in more than 30 poems from renowned writers.

Grouchy Ladybug - Progressing through a series of brilliantly colored die-cut pages, a bad-tempered braggart becomes a nicer, happier, better-behaved bug.

Have You Seen My Cat? - A little boy's cat is missing; he embarks on a fantastic round-the-world quest to find his lost pet. Along the way, he meets lots of interesting people and sees many beautiful members of the cat family, including lions and tigers and panthers. But over and over again, he has to say, "This is not my cat!" until at last he finds the cat he's looking for — who has a delightful surprise for him.

Hello, Red Fox - It's Little Frog's birthday, and Mama Frog gets a big surprise when the guests show up for his party — all the animals are the wrong color! Little Frog tells her she's not looking long enough, and he's right.

Hole in the Dike - This abridged adaptation of Mary Mapes Dodge's classic tale about a boy who saves Holland from a disastrous flood is enlivened by Carle's bright and authentic collage illustrations.

House for Hermit Crab - Hermit Crab's problem is that he keeps outgrowing things. When he outgrows his first shell-house, he's a bit scared. The next one he finds is big enough — but depressingly bare. To his happy surprise, all sorts of beautiful and useful undersea neighbors come to his aid and decorate and protect his home. Finally, the new house is perfect but now it, too, has become too small! Once again, Hermit Crab must move on. But this time, he is not only bigger — he is more self confident. While he is sorry to leave his friends and his familiar shell behind, he now sees the future as full ofexciting possibilities.

Lamb and the Butterfly - A lamb and a butterfly have a conversation during which the habits and behavioral traits of each creature are revealed. The lamb is bound to the earth and closely tied to its mother's side; the butterfly, on the other hand, is free of the pull of the earth and of maternal bonds.

Little Cloud - The clouds drift across the bright blue sky — all except one. Little Cloud trails behind. He is busy changing shapes to become a fluffy sheep, a zooming airplane, and even a clown with a funny hat. Eric Carle's trademark collages will make every reader want to run outside and discover their very own little cloud.

Mixed-Up Chameleon - Except for catching flies and changing colors occasionally, this chameleon doesn't find life very exciting. When a surprise visit to the zoo makes this wistful lizard realize it can change its shape and size as easily as its color, it ends up wanting to be like all the animals in the zoo at once — with hilarious results.
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Mountain That Loved a Bird - A beautiful bird named Joy stops one day to visit a mountain. Every spring, she flies high in the air, looking for the best place to build her nest and raise her children. As much as Joy would like to stay with the mountain, she must leave to continue her search. After hearing the mountain's pleas for her to stay, Joy is so touched she makes a very special promise that each spring the mountain will be visited by one of her kin. Over time, the birds bring about a wonderful change in the mountain — a change that will transform the mountain forever.

Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? - The polar bear hears a lion roaring, who hears a hippopotamus snorting, who hears a flamingo fluting, who hears a zebra braying, and so on through a varied list of animals. At last, the zookeeper announces that he hears children roaring, snorting, fluting, etc.

Rooster’s Off to See the World - One fine morning, a rooster sets off to see the world. Soon, he's joined by two cats, then three frogs, then four turtles, then five fish. But one group by one, his new friends decide to head home, leaving the rooster alone again — and ready to return to his own comfortable home as well. Bold, colorful collage illustrations, a beguiling story, and a simple introduction to number sets, addition, and subtraction distinguish this book.

Tiny Seed - This picture book conveys the miracle of a seed. Flower pods burst and dispatch their seeds on the wind; the airborne seeds are subject to myriad disasters; and the ones that make it through the perils of the seasons to become mature flowering plants are still susceptible to being picked, trod upon, and otherwise damaged. But nature allows for survivors, and so the tiny seed grows into a giant flower, releasing its seeds and continuing the cycle.