A virtual roundtable discussion of childrens books and children reading, with seven friends and colleagues in New York, New Jersey, Fayetteville, Arkansas, London and Milan, including discussions of reading to children in Austria, Sweden and Ghana.
Tell Me What You're Reading #8: Conversation with Youngna Park, Executive Director of Parenting at The New York Times - Children's Books; what to read to your kids!
Youngna discusses what she’s reading to her “almost” three year old, how and when children start to read, rhyming and musicality, cadence and sounds, silliness, and darkness, illustrations, the lasting power of children’s books about broad subjects, perhaps especially the moon, and more generally about the children’s book genre.
Tell Me What You’re Reading #7: conversation with Payton Turner of Girls At Library - Women’s anger and, sometimes, rage
Peyton discusses The Blazing World and Now My Heart is Full, and also her own experiences as an art student, and the meaningfully ways she has responded to anger and rage.
Tell Me What you’re Reading #6: Conversations at Marty’s Mercantile in West Shokan: our geological beginnings, Of Mice and Men and Moby Dick, dystopian tales and sobering memories of war.
Marty and Dominick are interesting, but it is Victoria and Emily who offer thought provoking interest in dystopian tales, leading to reflections on the ability of George Orwell, in 1949, to predict the future, and it is Adrianna who introduced me to The Things They Carried, which led to sobering reflections on the Vietnam War, the Korean War and as far back as WWI.
Tell Me What You’re Reading #5: Maya Prohovnik - a Stephen King “Superfan”! + Detective tales and Maya’s “favorite book of all time”, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time.
Maya’s enthusiasm and reverence (love) for Stephen King jumps off the page (or out of the podcast): horror, romance, character development, magical experiences, clowns, music and 11/22/63 time travel
Tell Me What You're Reading #4: Emma Holland on the love of words, reading, highlighting, rereading . . . The Art of Reading + "Too Much and Not the Mood", by Duga Chew-Bose.
Emma’s enthusiasm and love for reading is infectious. Emma reads almost entirely for words, rather than story, Emma loves to hold her books in her hands, highlights compulsively, is usually reading several books at a time, rereads her comfort books, and comfort passages from those books, and, according to her terrific interview with the online journal Girls at Library, loathes lending books to others, even to her Mom. This is a woman who truly loves literature and her books.
Tell Me What You’re Reading #3: Jim Finnegan on a literary tour de force, from Haruki Murakami to Joe Ide, Jennifer Egan, Stephen King and many others
Jim provides an impressive tour of novels, short stories, histories, detective and spy tales, magical realism, library books and the travail of audio books, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, “By the Book” from The New York Times Book Review, and Symphony Space on the upper west side of Manhattan. Hard as it may be to believe, there is a bit of a connection between and among the 30+ books and other materials we discuss.
Tell Me What You’re Reading #2: Dr. Hardin Coleman on rival regional cultures; President Grant; and finding common interests to address inequality
Hardin comes from many generations of teachers, social workers and Episcopal ministers (one of whom operated the Underground Railroad in St. Louis, helping slaves flee their captivity). Hardin’s depth, commitment and passion, likely borne out of his rich heritage, comes through in his remarks.
Tell Me What You're Reading #1: Dr. Frank Burbrink on Comic Books
Dr. Frank Burbrink, molecular evolutionary biologist and curator of reptiles and amphibians at the American Museum of Natural History... and a student of the history of comic books, which were, for many of us, the very first books we read.