Gift of Reading Club Selections - April 2010

Ever have one of those "duh" moments when you wonder why it took you so long to think of that simple, yet brilliant, idea?

Each month at the Odyssey Bookshop, I hand-select books for children signed up for our Gift of Reading Program. Usually a family member or close family friend signs up the child (age infant through teen), and each month I pick out, ring up, gift wrap, and mail out a book chosen specifically for them. The books have usually been recently published (within the last three months or so), and is chosen based on the age of the child, the gender (yes, I take that into consideration, though I do think outside the box) of the child, the reading level, if I know anything about the child's reading preferences, the literary merit of the book, the artistic merit of the book, and of course, my own personal taste.

Why I never thought to blog about my selections before is beyond me. I will now begin to do so, using only age and gender to identify the recipient of the book. Here they are:

April 2010 Gift of Reading Club Selections
(by age)

Baby (months old) female:

Gossie Plays Hide and Seek
by Olivier Dunrea 
9780547242965, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $13.99

1 yr/o male:

Trucks: A Mini Animotion Book
by Accord Publishing
9780740792007, Accord Publishing, $9.99

I Like Bugs
by Lorena Siminovitch
9780740792007, Candlewick Press, $6.99  

Zoo Parade!
by Harriet Ziefert, illustrated by Simms Taback  
9781593540142, Blue Apple Books, $8.95 

2 yr/o female:

Pepi Sings a New Song
by Laura Ljungkvist
9781416991380, Beach Lane Books (Simon & Schuster), $16.99 

3 yr/o male:

Giant Pop-Out Ocean
9780811874793, Chronicle, $10.99 

4 yr/o female:

The Sandwich Swap
by Her Majesty Queen Rania AlAbdullah of Jordan, with Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by Tricia Tusa
9781423124849, Harper, $16.98

Gumption
by Elise Broach, illustrated by Richard Egielski
9781416916284, Simon & Schuster, $16.99

The Django
by Levi Pinfold
9780763647889, Templar Books (Candlewick), $16.99


6 & & yr/o male:

Shark vs. Train
by Chris Barton, illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld
9780316007627, Little, Brown for Young Readers (Hachette), $16.99 


7 & 8 yr/o female:

Madame Pamplemousse and her Incredible Edibles
by Rupert Kingfisher, illustrated by Sue Hellard
9781599903064, Bloomsbury (Macmillan), $15.99


9 yr/o female:


Kaline Klattermaster's Tree House
by Haven Kimmel, illustrated by Peter Brown
9780689874031, Simon & Schuster, $5.99


8, 9, & 10 yr/o male:

Big Nate: In a Class By Himself
by Lincoln Peirce
9780061944345, Harper, $12.99

11 & 12 yr/o male:

Dangerous Book of Heroes
by Conn & David Iggulden
9780061928246, William Morrow & Co, $26.99

12 yr/o female:


The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place
by Maryrose Wood, illustrated by Jon Klassen
9780061791055, Harper, $15.99

15 yr/o female:

And Both Were Young
by Madeleine L'Engle
9780374303648, Farrar Straus & Giroux (Macmillan), $16.99

-Rebecca

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Happy Birthday Hans Christian Andersen

Thank you to Google for reminding me that today is the 205th birthday of Hans Christian Andersen. Google has a five-image series of Andersen's  Thumbelina surrounding their logo today.
Andersen was a Danish writer and paper-cut artist who not only recorded tales from the oral storytelling tradition (in the style of the Brothers Grimm), but who also wrote his own creations. His fairy tales were published in Europe beginning in the 1830s, but it wasn't until the 1860s that Americans first got a look at them (in an American English edition - maybe they'd seen them before elsewhere, people did travel back then, you know).

A man named Horace E. Scudder worked for an early version of the publishing house we now know as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, known then as Hurd & Houghton. At that time in children's publishing, children's magazines were becoming a big deal, with many publishers vying for the position of top-circulating, best-illustrated, most-engaging-stories-by-most-famous-authors children's magazine producer. The Riverside Magazine for Young People was first published by Hurd & Houghton in December 1866. Scudder had a close relationship with Andersen and was able to not only publish 17 of Andersen's fairy tales in The Riverside Magazine beginning in 1868, but Scudder also negotiated on behalf of Hurd & Houghton to publish the only authorized American edition of Andersen's stories (thank you to Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe for this information). Scudder was constantly encouraging Andersen to make the trip across the pond and visit the States, but sadly that never happened.

Andersen's tales have been made into movies - cartoon and live-action, plays, and ballets. They also continue to be collected in anthologies and illustrated as individual stories. Just last month in March 2010, Chronicle Books published a version of Thumbelina, illustrated by Sylvia Long (9780811855228, $17.99). One of my favorite versions of this story was illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger, published under the title Thumbeline (9780735822368, $6.95, NorthSouth). There is even a graphic novel version (9781434217417, $4.95, Capstone Press), and a re-imagined full-length middle grade novel with silhouette illustrations by Barbara Ensor (9780375839603, $12.99, Random House).

Of the hundreds of anthologies of Andersen's work, Lisbeth Zwerger has illustrated a beautiful edition in her signature dreamy watercolor style (9780698400351, $21.99, Penguin). W.W. Norton (a publishing house) has released an annotated collected works (9780393060812, $35), while Calla Editions, an imprint of Dover Publications, has published an immense, bound in a cloth binding with gold embossed lettering, gift edition (9781606600009, $40). Lastly, don't miss a collection of his paper cuttings - artwork that looks like reverse silhouettes, compiled by Beth Wagner Brust for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (9780618311095, $9.95).

However you prefer your Andersen, illustrated or performed, take some time today or this weekend to read a few of his treasured tales. I'd start with The Little Mermaid (if you're reading with older children or for yourself). This isn't a washed-out Disney version. It's the real classic. As it should be.

 - Rebecca

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