Canada Reads

It’s that time of year again…..the book selections for Canada Reads 2010 have just been announced and this year, there is a reading challenge!

First of all, what is Canada Reads? It is a three month challenge whereby five Canadian books are selected and defended by a panel of celebrity judges.  These celebrity judges will defend their favourite book and each night, a book will be dropped from the list until the final book remains.  This will be the book that Canada should read in 2010.  The debates will take place on CBC television, be broadcast on CBC Radio and you can also hear them on Sirius satellite radio. All of the times and channels are posted here.

There will also be an official blogger this year, so if you are interested in reading what she has to say about each debate, you can find Flannery’s blog here.  Or find out a little more about the blogger herself here.

If you’re up for the challenge of reading all of the books and then voting on the one you think will win, you can find more information on the Canada Reads 2010 Challenge website here. You have until March 6th, 2010 to read all six books so that you can participate in the debates that will take place from March 8 – 12.  There will be prizes, and if nothing else, hearty discussion about some great Canadian novels. So go ahead, Canada…..Read!

Can you write a novel in a month?

November is almost here and once again, it is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNo WriMo for short.  Just what is this all about? Writing a novel….not for quality, but for sheer quantity and excitement, of course.  Participants begin writing their novel on November 1st and must complete 50,000 words by midnight on November 30th.  Sound difficult?  I’m sure that it is.  Last year, over 119,000 people participated and more than 21,000 people finished the task, so it is possible!

You must sign up (but you can do so at any point) and begin writing.  Then, once you reach the 50,000 mark,  the officials will verify your word count and you will be amongst the people who can brag! You’ll receive a winner’s certificate and a badge you can add to your webpage or blog so that everyone will know what you’ve accomplished.  You cannot submit something you’ve previously written, and you cannot write one word 50,000 times, but other than that, there’s not much else to it.  The website is fun and interesting with inspirational exercises, ideas for getting started and even plot suggestions.  They aren’t looking for the next Hemingway, just people who want a great sense of accomplishment.

So, if you’re interested, limber up those fingers and get your word program ready.  You can find out all the information you need on their website here.  Have fun!

What’s up with YA books?

Have you read a YA book before?  YA, in case the lingo is not familiar, constitutes Young Adult books (ages 11-18).  Lately, there has been a surge in YA fiction and our own YA section grows each week.  The books fly off the shelves, and it is interesting to note that it isn’t just teens who read these books.  Parents are taking an interest now, wanting to know just what their kids are reading.  The great thing about this is that the books can be very well written, and many times, adults will come back for more in a series or just to check out new authors.

The thing that puzzles me is that the books are getting stranger and stranger.  Of course, there has been a surge of vampire books after the Stephenie Meyer books went viral, and really, we could do without any more.  Harry Potter left readers wanting fantasy and fans of Christopher Paolini’s Eragon dragon books have filled the need (along with countless others).  But why do these new YA books need fantasy or science fiction or superheroes to be interesting?  What’s wrong with a great story and great characters?  Take a look at a few recent  and soon to be released YA books and their plot lines and you’ll see what I mean:

Claim to Fame by Margaret Peterson Haddix centers around a young TV star who can hear whatever anyone in the world says about her.  (Now there’s talent!)

Powerless by Matthew Cody is about a boy who learns that his friends are superheroes who mysteriously lose their powers when they turn thirteen.

Wish You Were Dead by Todd Strasser has high school students disappearing after being mentioned in a blog.

As You Wish by Jackson Pearce is about a teen who falls in love with the genie who is sent to grant her three wishes.  (Didn’t this already happen on I Dream of Jeannie?)

So why are young people flocking to these types of books?  Are they bored with reality?  They live in such a computer-generated society that the real world and its topics can seem pretty mundane.  Or maybe they just want a bit of escapism.  Whatever the reason, authors are giving them what they want.

David Lubar has posted an interesting topic generator for YA writers.  You might want to check out the link which allows you to create a bizarre and creative way to come up with ideas for your own YA novel.  So go ahead, read a YA novel and see what they’re all about.  You might be pleasantly surprised!

Invisible books

We have all read books where an author will quote from another book or will just mention a book title as a way of either furthering their own plot or revealing something about a character (as in, he reads books about architectural design).  But these book titles are not always authentic. Either an author just can’t find a book that would make sense to the reference, or it is easier to make up a title which would sound authentic.

The Invisible Library is a great blog which has taken it upon itself to list all of these books that are not real, but are referenced in some form of fiction.  It is fascinating to read the titles,  many of which sound perfectly reasonable (and interesting.)  And now, INK illustration has gone one step further by finishing up a gallery exhibition that displays fake book covers representing some of the titles from the Invisible Library list, along with book flaps written by real authors.  You can see more of the work here.

I wonder if the authors who wrote the fake book titles into their works ever thought they’d see an actual hard copy of the work? Life imitating art?  Or art imitating life?

Potatoes used to be the only things that were mashed!

These days, just about anything can be “mashed”.  A mash as we now know it refers to something that is put together from multiple sources to cover a very specific topic.  For example, someone who is interested in coffee might put together a Google map locating all of the coffee houses in a particular city, with information about each one.

So what is StoryMash?  It is a fun website which allows authors to collaborate on works of fiction.  Writers contribute chapters, vote for storylines and leave writing criticism .  The really fun thing about this is that writers can earn 50% of the advertising revenue on chapters that they write, so why not join, write and earn a little cash on the side?  This could be useful to help with writer’s block, or just to push yourself to do something a bit out of your comfort zone, creatively speaking.

Will you Mash?

Green eggs and ham on a bet

We often just read books and never think about how or why they were written, especially children’s books.  Sometimes, the reason is obvious (a book about children with diabetes, for example), but most of the time, we just think that authors are very creative and come up with a book out of thin air.  If you’ve ever written anything creative, you’ll know this isn’t true at all.  Many times, authors have been influenced by a story in the news, a world problem or just a simple picture and an idea is born out of that.  What about one of the most creative children’s authors of our time, Dr. Seuss?  It turns out that there are some interesting facts behind his books.

Bennett Cerf, Theodor Geisel’s (Dr. Seuss) editor, challenged him to write a book using 50 words or less.  He actually made this challenge when Seuss was writing The Cat in the Hat (which used 225 words) but Geisel never backed down from a challenge and wrote Green Eggs and Ham with exactly 50 different words.  Those words are:

a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

Do you think you could write a book in 50 words or less?  Although the effort seems enormous, the beautiful simplicity of this book is what has made it timeless to generations of readers.  You can find out a lot about Dr. Seuss and the ideas behind his books at Mental Floss. If you’d like to know more about the life of Dr. Seuss, Wikipedia has some great information as well as plenty of great links.  Or you can visit the official Dr. Seuss website for some fun and games here.