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books

Guy reading

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This is just to whet your appetite for a longer, fuller discussion of male reading habits. This past week, I had the chance to listen to Michael Sullivan give a talk about getting boys reading. If you get the chance, please see him, listen to him, and most importantly, TALK ABOUT HIM with the boys in your life.

One of his key points that I want to quickly mention is that all males who become readers can name that book that turned them into readers. It’s one book that made reading something to them in ways no education or program had. This weekend, while among a number of my close male friends, I asked them to name that book. And they all could and they all did.

Sullivan has a belief for many boys, it’s a fantasy book. More on why in a future post. But for now, tell me one of two things:

1. What was the book that turned a male in your life on to reading (or if you’re one of the rare males reading this blog — statistically speaking — what was it for you)?

2. If you are a female, can you name the book that turned you on to reading? One title that made you a reader? Or have you always been a reader?

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk a bit about guy reading habits and books they dig. It’s an important and underdiscussed topic. Feel free — i.e., PLEASE — chime in. I am eager to hear your thoughts.

Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook by Martha Hall Foose

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I love food. It’s a borderline obsessive thing. I like to eat, I like to go out to new restaurants, I love to cook. At the reference desk, I always have various food blogs open in the background. I’m always making something new and bringing it in… and of course, I’m always on the hunt for good cookbooks. Faithful readers have seen evidence of this obsession in earlier cookbook reviews.

Martha Hall Foose won a James Beard award in the American Cookery category for her book Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook. And I completely understand why, and I’ve only just made one recipe!

Cornbread Crusted White Chili – and yes, it’s as good as it sounds.
Here is the outer cheesy cornbread crust – inside, there was an amazing white chili with tomatillos, chicken, and hominy, but my friend and I devoured it before I remembered to take a picture. Whoops.

I read this cookbook like a novel. Foose throws us into the slow Mississippi Delta world that she loves so much. Every recipe has a history; we meet characters like Aunt Mary Stigler Thompson – a woman who declares none of the entrants in the mayonnaise making competition are “as good as my own”; Mrs. Ethel Wright Mohamed, a woman who stitched hundreds of tea towels to remember her beloved late husband; and M. Taylor Bowen Ricketts who cooked black-eyed peas just as well as she painted. Foose’s notes section with cooking instructions are just as charming as the histories that grace every recipe.

Oh, and the food. Huge color photographs adorn nearly every page of complex, beautiful, mouth-watering Southern food. From curried sweet potato soup with pork rind croutons to banana puddings served in a mason jar to field peas with snaps… I was hungry every time I picked up this book. I took my time with Screen Doors and Sweet Tea – in fact, I took so long that it’s now over-due. I had to quickly photocopy all of the recipes I want to try and return it to the library. I know I’m not the only one who’s actually cooked from this book – at the front, I found a post-it note from another patron who had meticulously written out each recipe that she tried.

Southern cooking is not fast, nor is it easy. Many recipes require hours of prep work, and I know that I don’t have a lot of time for this kind of cooking during my hectic work week. But for special occasions, I will definitely make a caramel cake. Or the greens with cornbread croutons. Or overnight dinner rolls.

Oh, it’s time to start planning the next dinner with Foose. And I’m adding this book to my Christmas wish list. I foresee running out of shelf space at this rate.

And the Results Are In…

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… and it was tasty!

Don’t worry, we’re not announcing the winner of the latest giveaway early. You still have until October 19th to enter.

Instead, I wanted to share the end result of a recipe from a cookbook I reviewed earlier in the summer, The Best Casserole Cookbook Ever by Beatrice Ojakangas. I didn’t have my camera handy for many of my previous cooking ventures, but I grabbed a few snaps of the finished Burgundy Beef last night. It was too beautiful not to record for posterity. If you haven’t picked up a copy of Ojakangas’ book, maybe these pictures will change your mind.

 
Here’s the finished product, just after taking it out of the oven.
Extreme beef close-up. You can see the pearl onions and mushrooms in this shot.
My plate for dinner; I served the beef with the classic combination of garlic mashed potatoes.
Let me tell you, it tasted just as good as it looks. And I have the world’s best lunch for the next couple of days!  I wish I grabbed shots of the Spicy Cheese and Green Chile Dip and the Vegetable Moussaka… both of those recipes came out just as nicely as this one. But they were quickly devoured at a work potluck. Library workers know how to eat.

More Cover Talk

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I received an ARC of Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials a few days ago in the mail. I’m excited to read it, partly because I need a break from my recent diet of rather depressing dytopias, and partly because it’s written by Rosalind Wiseman, who also wrote Queen Bees and Wannabes, a nonfiction volume for parents of teenage girls that was evidently the inspiration for the movie Mean Girls (a movie enjoyed by both males and females in my high school – some males saw it about a dozen times in the movie theater, I kid you not).

Here is the cover design of the book I received:That design will never see the light of day in a published format, though, because Penguin Group has changed the cover to this:


When publishers choose a cover, they’re making a strong argument about who they believe will be – and should be – interested in the book. The first cover appears to be more gender-neutral, while it seems to me that the second appeals to a more female audience. I don’t know much about the book aside from the title, which I think could appeal to both genders pretty easily, but it looks like the publishers have opted for a girl-centric readership. (The protagonist of the book is also a girl, but the subject of “Do boys read books narrated by girls and vice-versa” is the subject for a whole other, much longer, post.)

I am almost universally opposed to having real photographs (or depictions that look as if they could be real photographs) of actual people on the covers of books. It prevents me from forming my own mental image of the person, which is a large part of my reading enjoyment. (This one isn’t that bad because their faces aren’t showing.) Also, as the cover controversy for Justine Larbalestier’s Liar has shown, the models for so many of these covers all look alike. I understand that publishers want to sell books above all, so if they find something that works, it makes financial sense for them to stick with it. I still lament the fact that truly creative and attention-grabbing covers on YA novels aren’t as ubiquitous as they should be.

What do you think about these covers? Do you have a preference? After I read the book, I’ll have a better idea, but teens grabbing a book from the library shelf aren’t going to have that knowledge going into it either. Honestly, I’m not crazy about either cover – the first isn’t as interesting as it tries to be, and the second is just too much like so many other YA covers.

Listen up!

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Do you listen to audio books?

I admit to being new to listening to them, afraid my attention span and ability to listen for comprehension of lengthy books would not allow me to get anything out of them. When I moved, though, and my commute went from no time to close to an hour, I gave them a try and am glad I did. Now I’m able to get more reading into each and every day. Moreover, I’m able to dig into books I may otherwise not pick up to read, simply because I’m a captive audience in the car and am willing to give anything a try.

This weekend, I traveled up to Wisconsin to attend a conference on listening for literacy which focused on audio books. As a newbie to audio books, I learned about how naive I’d been and how little I really knew about audio books and what makes them good and bad (though admittedly, I knew there WAS a reason I loved the audios of Al Capone Does My Shirts, Dairy Queen, and Wednesday Wars and was just not crazy about books like The Dead and the Gone and Nineteen Minutes).

Rather than give a blow-by-blow of the entire day, I thought I’d share some of the cool things I learned that might make you a better listener, as well.

First and foremost, I learned there are three types of audio books:

  • Fully voiced — this is when there is a separate voice for each character, and the Harry Potter series would be a good example. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a different person doing each voice, but rather, it could be one person who has developed enough voices for each character. I’ll talk more on this in a bit.
  • Partially or semi-voiced — this is when the main character and perhaps 1-2 of the other major characters have separate voices. The rest of the characters are in the general narrator’s voice.
  • Unvoiced — this is when the narrator just reads the story and (hopefully) reads it well.

Although listeners can have a preference for one of these, they can all be done well or all be done poorly. But what makes a good audio book and what makes a bad one? If you’re listening to one and aren’t sure, consider these:

  • Are the words pronounced correctly? Is the narrator using an authentic accent? One of the presenters mentioned a book set in Wisconsin where the narrator had a mid-Atlantic accent and it really killed the book for her as a Wisconsinite. The Dairy Queen, on the other hand, has an authentic Wisconsin accent.
  • Is the book complete with a clear, crisp sound? Is the volume consistent?
  • Do you hear juicy mouth sounds? Is the narrator’s voice hoarse?
  • Has the producer done a good job if material was dubbed not making it obvious? Is the text being repeated or omitted or cut too short? Are chapter breaks awkward or poorly timed?
  • Are names of the title, author, and narrator correct? One of the presenters said that there was one book where the reader mispronounced the name Nguyen and a student with that name was turned off entirely (for those of you unsure, that’s “win,” and the reader said “nah-guy-en”)
  • Does the reader mostly match the age and experience — at least in sound — to the main characters?
  • The readers connect to the text and are generally excited by the reading and discovery in the beauty of the story and the language.
  • Is music used effectively? Walden — the one by Thoreau — apparently has fantastic music interludes and was lauded for that reason.

All of these aspects are what people who listen to audio books begin to understand. They develop a “listening literacy” in a way that readers who read a lot develop about books — pacing, voice, and so forth. Moreover, listeners also gain stronger understanding of cause and effect, predictability, and how language works. During a panel that brought in local teens to talk with us about their listening habits, it was very cool hearing how much they love learning new vocabulary through listening.

Reflecting on my own audio book experiences and thinking about these things, I know exactly what it was about each of my listens that made it enjoyable or less enjoyable.

Back to my earlier comment about fully voiced audio books — have any of you listened to a production by Fullcast Audio? The director and two voice actors (David Kelly who did Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn and Chelsea Mixon of Shannon Hale’s Book of a Thousand Days) came to talk about their company. Rather than depend on one or two narrators, Fullcast hires, well, a voice for each character. Think reader’s theatre on audio. I’ve yet to listen to one, but after seeing a piece about their forthcoming production of Eyes Like Stars and listening to David and Chelsea do a scene from Hale’s book, I can say I plan on hunting out a few of their titles at the library now!

Finally, I wanted to say that listening to teens talk about their favorite audio books was so insightful. I think there were probably 15 or so students there, and the most surprising and exciting thing they said was that audio books are the reason they’re willing to try books they otherwise would never pick up from the shelf. Need I mention the boys ALL said that the Twilight series was one of their favorites to listen to?

So, do you do audio books? What are some of your favorites? What do you listen for? If you haven’t, perhaps you’d love to try your hand at winning a copy of The Dairy Queen from us.

As for me, I’m listening to M. T. Anderson’s Feed, even though it’s a book I’d never pick up. What a fantastically done audio book that has really drawn me in.