Category Archives: books

Some of you may remember how much I loved the book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick. In particular, I thought its use of mixed media made it an unusual book that told a very powerful and intriguing story. The audio book is also pretty amazing and it comes with a DVD interview in which Selznick talks about writing the book, which I show to my sixth graders.

Well, Hugo netted the esteemed Caldecott Medal for 2008.

What? Never heard of Hugo? Maybe this award will serve notice on this great book. (See the Hugo Cabret website too.)

Peace (in picture books that are not quite picture books),

Kevin

Charles Hodgson, over the Podictionary, has uncovered and made visible the origins of the word “book” in a recent podcast and it is fascinating (as his information almost always is).

For example:

“When the word book first appears in the written record the dates are pretty early in Old English. This means that book itself was a book. What I mean by that is that although you think of a book as something with pages bound between covers, the earliest Old English meaning of book was anything at all written down, so the act of writing down the word book itself created a book.“

Go to Podictionary and listen for yourself. Or listen here.

Peace (with words),
Kevin

The latest edition of English Journal features a column by Traci Gardner on books for teenagers that seek to blend the multimedia world with traditional fiction. I have seen some of my sixth graders reading a few of these books but I have not done so myself (yet). I wonder if this will be more of a trend — shifting narratives into the wired world and using some of the facets of the wired world into traditional narratives.

Here are some of the books profiled by Gradner in the article:

• Click Here (to find out how I survived seventh grade) by Denise Vega — involves a secret web site that suddenly becomes public (oops).
• Bad Kitty by Michele Jaffe — is a narrative built on email messages, chat room transcripts and handwritten notes.
• ChasR: A Novel in Emails by Michael Rosen — showcases one side of an email conversation and ASCII artwork (smiley faces, etc) and forces the reader to interpret the other side of the conversations
• TTFN by Lauren Mryacle (is that her real name?) — is told mostly through IM and follows a group of girls in their social circles.
• The Secret Blog of Raisin Rodriquez by Judy Goldschmidt — is written entirely through blog entries that were designed to be private but suddenly become public and well, you can probably guess the aftermath.

Gardner writes:

“The texts communicate the emotions of the characters in authentic detail, as the characters themselves compose blog entries, email messages and IMs. Many of the multigenre and epistolary texts provide an interactive opportunity that invites readers to discover the story, like participants in a video game.“

One of the books on her list — Cathy’s Book — is one that I have read (based on a recommendation from Bud Hunt, I believe) and it was quite interesting and mostly drew me into its web of hints and plot devices. There are web addressed hidden in the book and a complete web presence that one could follow, plus a few phone numbers to call that give you more hints to the plot.

But I wonder — so many of these books are geared towards girls, it seems to me, and where are the books for boys? (Ok, I need to write one, right?)

Peace (in many forms),
Kevin

A few days ago, I posted a recommendation to buy and read The Invention of Hugo Cabret with any young people you know (or heck, just yourself). Then, through some blogging threads (thanks Bud! via A Not So Different Place), I found the actual 1902 movie referenced in the book called A Trip to the Moon by Georges Melies.

Gosh, the internet is a fantastic resource. Now I can show my sixth graders (and my children) the movie after reading the book (actually, I just ordered the Audio CD because it comes with a DVD documentary showing the author writing the book — cool!)

Here it is:

[googlevideo]-2872403246769762863&q=a+trip+to+the+moon&hl=en[/googlevideo]

Peace (with old movies),
Kevin

I just completed a very intriguing book called Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. In this fascinating graphic novel, McCloud (who, it turns out, lives near me or at least used to, according to the mailing address at the back of the book) ruminates on the way that we should view the development of comics as an important chapter in the development of art, and how little attention is given to it.

McCloud really engages the reader on many levels through his use of comics to tell his story. One area of interest for me, anyway, was his understanding that media would become more interactive (this book was first published in the early 1990s) and he wondered whether comics would integrate this turn of events (I don’t think it has yet).

This is what he writes (in comic form but I am using it as prose here):

For now, these questions (of whether stories need to be linear) are the territory of games and strange little experiments. But viewer participation is on the verge of becoming an enormous issue in other media. How comics addresses this issue — or fails to — could play a crucial part in defining the role of comics in the New Century. Time will tell.” — from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

That remark holds true for so many areas of publishing and writing and reading these days that I thought it was worth sharing.

Peace (in frames),
Kevin

I just finished up a book that I have to share with anyone who is interested in the merging worlds of novels, graphic novels, photographs and tangled (but resolved) plot lines. The book is called The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

I won’t give the story away, but it involves a young boy in Paris with a passion for clocks and mechanical objects, an automaton that can do something wonderful, a passion for the power of movies in our lives, and how fragile but powerful the connections are between people.

Here is a blurb from the introduction, just to set the stage:

“…before you turn the page, I want you to picture yourself sitting in darkness, like the beginning of a movie. On screen, the sun will soon rise, and you will find yourself zooming towards a train station in the middle of the city. You will rush through the doors into a crowded lobby. You will eventually spot a boy amid the crowd, and he will start to move through the train station. Follow him because this is Hugo Cabret. His head is full of secrets, and he’s waiting for his story to begin.”

I heard about the book from somewhere in my Bloglines aggregator and ordered it from Amazon (here is the link to order), thinking it would be a slim graphic novel. So I was quite surprised to find one of the fattest books I’ve seen in some time (500-plus pages) but is a combination of various genres and I read the entire thing in two days.

Now I wish I could order a class set for my students, but we don’t have the budget for that. Sigh. And, man, I just checked out the author’s flash site — very cool.
Peace (with gears fitting together like the reels of a film),
Kevin