Boys and Girls, again - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

revisiting last week's blog post--new evidence that girls don't civilize boys, and yet another claim for children's literature...


Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Boys and Girls, again - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Do girls "civilize" boys? Should they?

Boys, girls, books, and gender balance in this week's blog post...

Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Gender balance, again—this time in books - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Blog U.: On children's literature and academic administration - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

Today's blog post is about how Where the Wild Things Are and Alice in Wonderland help me through academic meetings....

Blog U.: On children's literature and academic administration - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Finished Objects

I was away over the weekend for a fabulous conference in Charlotte, NC. Like many of my fellow conference-goers, I'd never actually left the airport in Charlotte before--many flights from here seem to be routed through there, though, so the airport itself is pretty familiar. (I'd visited Charlotte some years before by car, but that was different.)

It was nice to get out of the airport. The conference was great--full of smart people saying interesting things about wonderful books. As always, I came back energized and excited to keep up with the work that I presented--though, as always, I'm also swamped with all kinds of other things and so will probably not get back to it right away. So that's not the finished thing.

But traveling gave me the opportunity to get a good bit of knitting done (knitting! remember that?), and I finished a good-sized project, a lace shawl. Here it is, knit out of gorgeous silk-cashmere that Mariah gave me for Christmas. I ran out of yarn before I ran out of pattern, so if you see other shawls that claim to be the same pattern (Swallowtail shawl) they will look different, but I'm still delighted with it.


Another thing came to an end this weekend and that was my column for Literary Mama. I'm in a little bit of denial about this one. I've been writing for LM since 2003, when it launched. At first I wrote a column called Midlife Mama (hmm, sound familiar?) but after a year I began writing Children's Lit Book Group, and I continued to write that column either bimonthly or (briefly) monthly for five years. I'm sorry to see it go. I'm still working on children's literature, and I still have a lot to say about it, but right now my time and therefore my energies are directed elsewhere. Still, I will miss it.

Reading aloud

I'm blogging about reading aloud at the Mama, PhD blog at Inside Higher Ed today; I also blogged about the president reading aloud over at my other blog just last night. (Click over to it to see the video...) Synchronicity!

Thinking about the Other Mother...

Sometimes my friends and I joke that we need clones—one for work and one for home, perhaps? Wouldn't it be great, some days, to have someone else to help raise the kids—someone who wouldn't be bored by the endless play with Lego, who would miraculously make healthy meals they'll eat, who would come up with rainy day activities that are fun for the whole family? Of course on bad days at work I want the clone to sit at the computer while the "real me" goes off to play with the kids. It's all a matter of perspective.

Read the rest in this month's Children's Lit Book Group column....

(cross-posted from the other blog)

Christmas in the country

We're headed south today, leaving my parents' rural retreat and heading back to the city. But my Christmas column is all about the joys of the country Christmas, and of The Wind in the Willows. Enjoy!

(cross-posted)

On running for office

While I'm deeply invested in the outcome of this election, I have to admit I'm tired of the campaign. Running for president seems to me almost nothing like being president, and I'm tired of the minute-by-minute scrutiny of folks doing a job that isn't the job we're electing one of them to do.

This month my column at Literary Mama takes up some books in which children learn a similar lesson. These are books that implicitly say: democracy is hard. You might not actually want to be a leader. Gone are the inspirational stories of my own childhood, in which children embrace leadership and optimistically look forward to making the world a better place. These stories are, in fact, a little depressing in their realism about presidential politics.

Read the rest here...

(cross-posted at the other blog)

Books for Babies

I went to buy a book for a colleague who had a new baby recently...

As I picked up each book, the anonymous big-box store faded away as the memories flooded in: sitting in the frayed armchair with Nick in my lap, late one night, reading Little Bear's Visit until we reached the part we wanted to hear. Initiating the call-and-response of Eric Carle's Do You Want to Be My Friend? with Mariah, and hearing her echo back the text. Laughing together over the smart dog who travels along with the safety officer in Officer Buckle and Gloria. I could outfit a different library for a new baby every day of the week, if I had money enough and time, and all the libraries would be good.

Read the rest here...

(Cross-posted, as usual.)

"Reading" pictures...

Everything is new to the infant. I remember seeing my tiny daughter, only minutes old, lying in her father's arms drinking in the scenery with eyes wide open, and suddenly realizing what an odd world we'd brought her into.

Shaun Tan and Brian Selznick show us that odd world in their remarkable picture books (or are they graphic novels?) for older readers. Read more about The Arrival and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, here...

(cross-posted at Lessons from the Tortoise)

On Road Trips and Picture Books

As I mentioned in my last, Mariah and I were out on the road last week, finishing up a college tour that put about 1200 miles on our car, allowed us to visit lots of old friends and a weekend with family, and got her much much closer to a decision about what she'll be doing next year. The whole thing had me thinking about picture books. Read this month's column and you'll see why...

(Cross-posted at the other blog...)

Children's Lit Book Group

This month I read Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books and write about vampire love in my Literary Mama column: "Vampire stories are . . .perfect for teenagers. Vampires stay out all night, scare the respectable citizens, take crazy risks, and live, seemingly, forever." You can read more about the books, and my take on vampires, here.

Smek-Day and the Cybils

(Cross-posted at Lessons from the Tortoise)

My new column is up over at Literary Mama. In it I talk about why I liked our fantasy/sf winner in the middle-grade category, The True Meaning of Smek-Day, and what intriguing commonalities I found in the books we read. Here's a taste:

the story [of Smek-Day] is as action-packed and adventurous as [several of ] the others . . . which feature plot twist after plot twist, fascinating superpowers (invisibility and flight are the best), and intriguing ways of engaging with technology -- hovercars, a super-reinforced Mercedes, cellphones, convenience stores. These are not, that is, "sword-and-sorcery" fantasy novels, but books fully engaged with modern life and imagining how magic or the supernatural might interact with our technologically-enhanced world.

Read the rest here...

Boy Books and Girl Books

(cross-posted from the other blog...)

This month I remember my past, and look at my son's future...

When I was in the tenth grade our English class took on "coming of age" novels. We read The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, and (one of my favorite, though still under-read, boarding school novels) Good Times/Bad Times. All three are set in single-sex boys' boarding schools, and there are few women or girls in them. My (male) teacher, I remember, told us we should be able to "identify" with these characters because they were teenagers like us.

Did I mention that this was an all-girl class? Did I even notice, at the time, that we had read not one novel about a girl?

This column may not actually go in the direction you expect it...let me know what you think!

Another column

Although last week's snow is long gone, and it's warm and sunny out today (disconcertingly so!), I have still been thinking about Christmas and books...

Christmases in my family have always involved books. The packages telegraph their contents by their solid heft and neat rectangles--even the sloppiest wrapper can make a book look good under the Christmas tree. But just as Christmas often involves books, many books--both Christmas-themed and otherwise--also involve Christmas. My own list of "Christmas books" is idiosyncratic, no doubt; I recall not only the charming tales of happy families but also the clear-eyed evocations of loss and ambivalence. Together they make up my own personal Christmas reading list.

read the rest here...

Happy Father's Day

I spent a surprising amount of my childhood hoping to be my dad when I grew up. Oh, I didn't want to be a boy or anything -- having two brothers pretty much dispelled any mystique of masculine superiority -- but I did want my dad's job. It looked like a pretty sweet deal to me: a little telling people what to do, a little dressing up, a little singing, and a lot of reading, writing, and being at home when other people's dads weren't. Yes, he did have to work on Sundays, but then again he was home at least one day during the week to make up for it.

Read the rest here...