Posted on October 12, 2011

Picks & Tweets from the Illustrated Word

Gorey's Black Spider (courtesy 50 Watts)

An entire month since I last posted a Picks and Tweets? For shame. No excuse, other than the usual craziness that is synonymous with September (in my day-job world), which is somewhat alleviated a month later by the arrival of Halloween candy on store shelves. There are goodies everywhere, and many, many empty wrappers, but it is the non-chocolate variety of which I speak. Where to start? Well, how about with some well-deserved accolades?

Just announced…Migrant, Along a Long Road & Ten Birds are among the nominees for the 2011 Governor General’s Award. All three have been reviewed in this blog, and all three are very deserving. Congratulations to the illustrators, authors, and publishers. Also, I Know Here, written by Laurel Croza and illustrated by Matt James, has won the Marilyn Ballie Award. Congrats all around.

One of several interesting articles from The Guardian: Maurice Sendak ‘I refuse to lie to children’. Yes, he always tells them where the wild things are. Turns out his His favorite story is Outside Over There. Mine too. Falling backwards is one of my many talents.

Really fascinating and disturbing. Loitering in Neverland: the strangeness of Peter Pan. Yes. It’s a strange story, about a strange boy, written by a strange man, co-opted by an even stranger man. Not one of my favourite stories for sure, but there is a very fetching edition of P.Pan with illustrations by Authur Rackham lurking about on my bookshelves. Kind of a palette cleanser. Via the Guardian.

David Bowie’s Space Oddity made into a picture book for kids. Child therapists everywhere rejoice! Seems a strange choice of songs, but the concept, by a Canadian, has proven very popular. My first choice would have been I’m Afraid of Americans, although the Berenstain Bears may have covered this one already. Wired.com

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Posted on October 09, 2011

A Dish of Revenge

In spite of many hours trolling bookstores and online websites, new and beautifully illustrated Halloween books are bone thin this year. Not that they have to be about Halloween per se; no gourds required. What is required is subject matter brewed in mayhem and mystery, with a soupçon of the supernatural. Checking out Lane Smith’s Curious Pages blog, I ran across Dillweed’s Revenge: A Deadly Dose of Magic, which looked suitably dark. I summoned the book to my doorstep, and found a story that is indeed dark, and funny, and deliciously bent. Perfect.

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Posted on September 30, 2011

I Want My Hat Back

I Want My Hat Back by Governor General Award Winner Jon Klassen is my favourite book of the year. Yes, there are still three months left in 2011, and yes, I have lost my heart to several wonderful books in the last nine months, but I stand by by my statement. A book about a bear looking for his lost hat, with simple yet breathtakingly lovely illustrations, and even simpler (but hilarious) text is a perfect creation. And I kinda knew it would be just from the cover. Some books, like some people, have a charisma that precedes them. Maybe it’s the bear, who looks like a beaver, all alone on the cover, with a slightly accusatory expression on his face. Bears already hold an esteemed place in children’s literature. Who doesn’t love Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle, or the perpetually troubled Berenstains? We may fear bears in the woods, but in picture books, a bear is a slam dunk, and in I Want My Hat Back, the bear is a star in the making.

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Posted on September 23, 2011

Mirror, Mirror

Beautiful Griselda is a fairy tale about the perils of narcissism and the difficulty of keeping your wits about you, especially the parts of your anatomy containing your wits, when confronted by the object of your desire. I think we can all relate…to a degree.

Princess Griselda is beautiful. Really, gobsmackingly beautiful. Everyone who casts their eyes upon her lovely visage falls head over heels in love with her. Literally. Their heads pop off like corks. Griselda is greatly amused by this, and makes a collection of her admirers, varnishing their heads and placing them under glass or on the walls like stuffed trout. Yes, grisly Griselda is a bit of a monster, more interested in perfecting her lethal form of beauty and growing her ‘collection’ than finding a nice little froggie to kiss. Lucky froggies.

To keep the princely heads rolling, Griselda’s daily beauty ablutions include bathing in cold spring water, slurping juice from sour Tasmanian fruit, posing in crystal shoes, and of course, stray hair removal, courtesy of her ladies in waiting (to have their heads pop off.) And, like all narcissists of the royal persuasion, Griselda takes more than a little pleasure in knowing that people throughout the land are obsessed by her beauty, misinterpreting fear for admiration.

And yet…a mirror makes for poor conversation, and even the self-absorbed get bored…

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Posted on September 07, 2011

Coppernickel

For many reasons, most of them involving packing tape, it’s been almost a month since I’ve reviewed a book in this blog. It’s become quite apparent that my brain cells must be somewhat settled before the words can flow. Not the opinions, which spew out of my mouthparts in spite of, and because of the stresses afflicting my grey matter, but writing a simple ‘I love this book’, however exuberantly expressed, just doesn’t fly in the cutthroat world of children’s picture book blogging. Nevertheless, I love Coppernickel, The Invention and I knew that once my discombobulated neurons got sorted and the packing tape put away, I would be in a position to expand on this premise. Turns out, all I needed was a blank sheet of paper.

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Posted on August 19, 2011

Picks & Tweets from the Illustrated Word

OK. I’ve been slack in the review department, and I promise that once things calm down in my life (moving), and as of the two days ago, my mouth (stupid tooth), I will ramp up the output on my little blog. Until then, please enjoy these lovely confections from the WWWeberville~

From the New York Times, an all-time favourite: The Snowy Day Celebrates 50 Years. What’s not to love about this sweet, and highly influential little book about the pleasures of winter precipitation?

Another great interview from the impossibly good Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast~this time with with author/illustrator Jon Klassen (Cat’s Night Out, I Want My Hat Back.) Note: I will be reviewing I Want My Hat Back in September.

The London riots-Victorian style~thanks to The Age of Uncertainty blog for consistently bringing the funny to antiquarian bookselling.

Via Brainpicker~NPR’s Top 100 Sci-Fi, Fantasy Books Great list, and suprisingly I’ve read quite a few of them, but where’s EIFELHEIM by Michael Flynn? It’s quite possibly the best book I’ve read in the last five years, and I would not call myself a major Sci Fi reader. However, I do like books set in Germany, especially medieval Germany. The aliens are just a bonus.

Another great post from the New York Times: And a Frog Shall Lead Them: The legacy of Jim Henson . At the risk of aging myself, anyone remember the great muppets TV movie from the 70’s called The Frog Prince? I still recall the line ‘Break the ball in the handle of her cane!‘, and the song, ‘Sweetums lay your ugly head, down upon your wretched bed’ (I’ve been known to sing that to my cat on occasion.) Wonderful show, and I wish it would be released in a remastered DVD.

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Posted on August 11, 2011

Picks & Tweets from the Illustrated Word

Oh, the dog days of summer, which for me translates into a whiny sort of sluggishness precluding any activity more strenous than hoisting fruity beverages to my mouth and bending over to turn the fan onto maximum velocity. My heat-induced indolence is compounded by the fact that I am moving at the end of the month, so my posts have become sparse as I attempt to pack away decades worth of bibliophyllic overconsumption. Sure, they look pretty on the shelves, but they are a bitch to pack, and you might as well take out shares in Boxes-R-Us for all the stacks of neatly-packed product lining my hallways. Nevertheless, I do seem to find the time to check in with my favourite Twitter-folk and fellow bloggerists, and here are a few gems from the last couple of weeks~

The Story of Charlotte’s Web by Michael Sims – review via @guardian. This sounds like a very interesting book, about an interesting man, and some pig. Can’t wait to read it! And speaking of Wilbur, I might have mentioned in a previous post one of my favourite passages about this beloved porker. It’s early in the book and Wilbur is explaining to Templeton his typical day, but it seems to me that Wilbur is practicing a kind of philosophy of life that sounds less porcine and more Zen. The procurement of food (middlings, warm water, apple parings, meat gravy, etc.,) and naps plays a significant role in Wilbur’s daily routine, but so does stillness, and allocating time to watch “flies on the boards, watch bees in the clover, and watch swallows in the air…and to think about “what it was like to be alive…” I aspire to live my life according to the Tao of Wilbur, minus the ‘middlings’, whatever they are.

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Posted on August 01, 2011

Chicken Love

A perfect picture book is a rare thing. So much of what gets published is forgettable; poorly illustrated, drearily unoriginal productions that pander to popular tastes, however fleeting. Not to despair. There are children’s picture book illustrators, writers and publishers hell-bent on bringing excellence to the table with original stories, inventive language, gut-busting humour, and as I’ve said many times before, the most beautiful art to be found anywhere, in any venue. The current purveyer of picture book perfection is French illustrator Béatrice Rodriguez and her crew of animal adventurists, including a determined hen and the fox who sweeps her off her claws, a loyal but easily fatigued bear, his rabbit companion, and one mightily ticked-off rooster. Characters such as these cannot be contained to one book, and I am happy to report that Rodriguez has extended their adventures to two more rollicking tales, and the result is a trilogy of wordless picture books amongst the best to be published this, or any year. The Chicken Thief arrived first in 2010, followed by Fox and Hen Together in spring 2011 and finally, Rooster’s Revenge, to be hatched this September. I haven’t been this excited about a trilogy of books since Philip Pullman put armour on polar bears.

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Posted on July 22, 2011

Picks & Tweets from the Illustrated Word

Not Rupert Murdoch

You’d think there was nothing else going on in the world but the News of the World. I suppose I should be paying closer attention to the grim display of moral impoverishment playing out in the media at the moment, but all I can think of when I see Rupert Murdoch is that he looks like a Spitting Image character. Of course…I had to google it, and wouldn’t you know…he IS a Spitting Image character…amongst other things. Happily, the bits and pieces pasted together for this post were obtained via legitimate and highly respectable sources. No hacking, no bribes or backdoor dealmaking, just the usual I should be working but I’m reading blogs and following links on Twitter, as I am inclined to do on a rainy afternoon…

And speaking of tweets~

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Posted on July 17, 2011

Along a Long Road

Occasionally, children’s picture book art takes a left turn from traditional paint and pencil illustration into the somewhat sterile world of computer-generated imagery. Perhaps this is a moot point…it’s either good, or it’s not. Graphic imagery within a design context can be quite pleasing, but in general, I’m not a fan of digitalized art for picture books. Nevertheless, I suspect I am viewing it more often than I think I am. In fact, a few of my favourite artists use computers to augment their ‘old style’ illustrations, including Emily Gravett and Poly Bernatene, and I have to assume there are others. For what it’s worth, knowing that at some point an artist’s hands got messy is important to me. It’s like eating those perfectly peeled, tube-shaped baby carrots from the grocery store; they are so far removed from the dirt they are grown in, it’s hard to appreciate them as carrots.

But then…along comes Along a Long Road, a beautifully illustrated, completely charming picture book executed entirely on Adobe Illustrator. I can’t say whether or not Frank Viva’s hands got dirty making this book, but he was most certainly engaged in very detailed, creative work. And the medium, in this particular case, is perfect for the story. A digitalized palette is still a palette, even if nothing gets squeezed out of a tube.