Summer Reading Challenge: And the Winner Is...

After a fantastic summer full of reading, I am delighted to announce that 

the winner of The Little Literati Summer Reading Challenge is 

Gianna from Michigan!

Gianna and her mom submitted the following fantastic list of books that you might enjoy, too. 

A book set in a place you’ve never been

Beatrice's Goat by Page McBrier

A book that teaches you how to do something

The Wonders of Nature Sketchbook by Colleen Monroe

A book that was your mom or dad’s favorite when they were a kid

Raggedy Ann and the Cookie Snatcher by Barbara Shook Hazen

A book with a funny title

Stone Soup by Jon J. Muth

A book with an animal as the main character

The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher by Beatrix Potter

A book about a make-believe world

Sheila Rae, The Brave by Kevin Henkes

A long book—one that is longer than you normally read

Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart Spell by G. M. Berrow

A book of poems

Bow Wow Meow Meow by Douglas Florian

A book about the sea or the sky

Whales and Dolphins by JJ Anderson

A book about people who lived a long time ago

Ruby's Wish by Shirin Yim Bridges

Congratulations to all the other Little Literati who finished their reading challenges! I loved hearing about your reading adventures and seeing your book lists! I'll be featuring some of those selections in the coming month as summer comes to a close. 

Thanks, too, to those Grown-up Literati who participated in The BIGGER Little Literati Summer Reading Challenge! I equally enjoyed reading your lists and plan on stealing many of your ideas for the coming year. I'll be sharing some of those here, too. 

One of the most delightful things I received in my inbox was a picture from one of the biggest Little Literati fans out there, Dr. Jill White! She took on The BIGGER Little Literati Challenge and commemorated the challenge with this picture. She has such terrific taste in books, I wanted to share the list to go along with the picture, as well, so that you could take it to the library, hand it over, and say simply, "This, please!" 

A book set in a place you've never been

Italian Neighbors by Tim Parks

A book that teaches you how to do something

Creative Metal Forming

A book that most people have read in school but that you somehow dodged--until now!

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

A book meant for young adults 

Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian

A book that was made into a movie

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

A book about another world

When the Emperor Was Devine by Julie Otsuko

A long book--one is longer than you normally read

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

A book of poems

Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield

A book with a bird or a fish on the cover

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quinlan

A book you've loved your whole life

The Flame Trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley 

To add to the excitement about the start of fall (or Summer, Part the Second, if you live in Florida like me), I'd like to invite you to join me at DeidrePrice.com, my new site which will feature Little Literati posts, book reviews, and essays on pedagogy, theology, and Priceology (where I'll write about peanut butter cabinets, battery drawers, and the shame of opening too-full linen closets for the bug guy when he comes around quarterly). 

There will be no recipes or helpful household hints without links to Poison Control, I promise. 

With chapters' worth of love in the meantime,

Deidre & the Little Literati

Last Call for Summer Reading!

In June I challenged readers to take part in The Little Literati Summer Reading Challenge, and I was overwhelmed by the response. From Jacksonville, Florida, to Missoula, Montana, Little Literati picked their books and started off on their separate reading adventures! My littles were included in this challenge (although they'll be going prizeless; my being their mother is likely prize enough, I'm sure), and we have delighted in old reads and new.

Libraries are free for most people, but the Prices racked up record fines this past month. I regret to inform you that we were not the best of bookish citizens. My personal apologies to anyone looking for Aquarium Fish on the Destin Library shelves in the past month. Some lunatic put it in a basket with things we could knit with if we knitted. It was E. She can't be trusted. 

Another E I'm especially fond of is one of our fellow Little Literati. Her mother is an avid Instagrammer and hashtagged her heart out during the challenge. 

Here is E working her way through her picks this summer. If this doesn't just inspire you to get thee to a library (or have half a dozen daughters), I don't know what will. 

Keep reading, everyone! The last day to send in your contest submission is August 1, 2014. 

And don't forget that very nearly equally awesome adult challenge here. 

Making It New / Review: The First Time We Saw Him by Matt Mikalatos

One of my favorite things about living in a house with people who are drawn to art and creative things is that we often find overlap happening among our current projects and interests (read: obsessions). The connections are profound sometimes, and so interesting to me that, despite our varied interests, we find so much common ground.

We’ll start with the one closest to the ground. Atticus, our three-year-old is hooked on Super Why! Thanks to this show and the benefits of having a literary mama who is obsessed with the written word—okay, mostly the show—Atticus knows nearly all his letters already, capital and lowercase. It’s impressive enough to justify my obnoxious bragging. What I like about the show is how it takes children’s stories and reinvents them by showing how changing a word or two can change the ending of a story, even save the day.  So, for example, in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, if we change the sentence to read that “slippers” were in bed instead of the wolf, boom—sad ending averted. No one dies. This model borrows from the old to make the new. It makes a story that was once passive become interactive.

Daina, our thirteen year old, has recently become fascinated with the show Once Upon a Time, a show that also takes known fairytales and makes them new by locating some of the storylines in the modern-day town Storybrooke. It’s no surprise that she loves the show since she also loves Doctor Who, which calls into question time’s being linear in nature and, consequently, conventional narratives. In both cases, there is rewriting being done. Reinvention is happening, and as a result, the same stories hit us in a new way—we are reawakened.

This is not a new concept.

The fragmentation and reassembling in an attempt to make something new is something we see in music as early as the 1960s’ dance hall in Jamaica. Prior to this, in art we see artists like Picasso fragmenting images and reassembling them, enabling us to see conventional images in unconventional ways because of how they’ve been newly pieced together—same concept, new format.

Prior to this, we have Ezra Pound’s modernist literature paired with the preaching of “Make it new!” and the hope of a new era of literature that broke away from all that had been done to death before.

Ezra Pound (poet among other things)

One of my favorite of Pound’s contemporaries is Gertrude Stein, writer and a friend of Picasso, who played with words in order to wake people up to the newness of them, to refresh the words—or at least refresh our eyes to seeing them in that new light. Of her sentence “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” she said the rose had never been as red as it was before that sentence.

Gertrude Stein (yes, she's a woman)

My husband Jonathan designs pedals and amps and does woodworking. He loves analog and throwbacks. His book stacks are stocked with books on fine woods and dovetail joints and joiners and other words I’m not comfortable using in sentences. He is investing his time in seeing how things were done when they were done well. Through his work, he is recreating what he loves and presenting it in a new way so that we also might appreciate it in a new way.

I have no idea what this is. Location: bathroom sink, circa 2014

The idea of taking something known and adjusting our vision so that we can really see it as we had the first time when it was new and all its details soaked into our skin, that’s the goal of so much of the literature I’ve been adoring lately. It’s not changing the content so much as it’s changing my perspective so that I can see it in a new light—really see it again as if for the first time.

I finished a book this evening that offers reinventions of known stories. In The First Time We Saw Him, Matt Mikalatos posits what the Biblical accounts of Jesus’s life would be like if they were to have happened in twenty-first century life.

The book upsets routine retellings with beautiful, poetic passages that illuminate new meaning like in the modernized version of Mary who takes a pregnancy test she buys at the convenience store. She sits at home, “staring at the test, waiting, and the small blue cross slowly appeared, bright and certain and shining like a star.”

The stories are intermingled with exegesis, in which Mikalatos explores familiar questions, such as where God is during dark times, in very unfamiliar ways. This is Mikalatos’s gift: He stays true to the core of the text, but he turns it on its head in such a way that you cannot see it the same way again. You simple can’t.

If chapters got shout-outs, I’d give one to Chapters 5, 7, 8, and 12 through the epilogue. You see, I was reading along, minding my own business, until Chapter 5 called “The Billionaire and the Teacher” high fived me in the face. I want to cut and paste his casserole joke here (something all Southern church-folk should ‘get’), followed by his explanation of what it must have been like for the disciples to bring their lives full-stop and follow him. I want everyone I know to read pages 62 and 63. He is honest about how bizarre some of Jesus’s miracles were, and he is honest about how we respond to these so many years later, many of us far too close to callous. We’ve just heard them so many times. Are we really hearing them? Is it possible to experience them in the same immediate way that his disciples did? Do we get it?

On page 92, he calls me out. Just gloss that. Keep walkin’ by. Try not to cry like I did on page 94.

Around Chapter 8 is when you begin to hope the book doesn’t end. It’s powerful.

Most refreshing to me about The First Time We Saw Him is that it offers not only a new way of seeing Jesus but also a new way of seeing ourselves. It invites us to engage more deeply with these texts and to think critically about the ways we’re living—or not living—in response to them.

If I had a billion dollars, I’d buy you all a copy. Because I don’t, you’re on your own, with a pocketful of promises from me that you’ll love it.

This book does exactly what I love about books in general. When I finished, it left me different, and that's an incredible thing and an incredibly hopeful thought, that we can rewrite ourselves and make better pages of our days, that we can make new things--be new people. That nothing's done and nothing's perfect, that we're all works in progress with the power to revise and be revised. I just love that. 

Thank you for reading.

I know I write long.

Bless it—and me—and you.

Getting through the Caterpillar Years: My Son and Eric Carle

My son Atticus is three years old. I call him a "young three" sometimes when I attempt to explain him and his ways. 

I saw the wall clings while shopping for nursery decor once the ultrasound forecast a blue future. I saw the definition of boy: noise with dirt on it. I thought maybe, but maybe not. I'd had his sister Daina for a solid ten years already, and my home had been impervious to even her worst tantrums. 

Daina's messes were largely contained to my bedroom, consisting mostly of blankets, books, and Barbie shoes, lined up in perfect pairs and predictable gradations, moving from pinks to greens. Even her falls were predictable. She liked to run on the long couch and would fall in the same spot every week or so, knocking her head on the black lacquer coffee table edge. For a solid year, her pictures reveal bruises in still predictable gradations, moving from purples to yellows. 

My son, however, is, well, unpredictable. 

I have never apologized so much in my life as I do for Atticus's transgressions in public spaces. 

This shall be all that I say about it, as he may well be a writer someday, and these private and bizarre moments should be reserved for his own safekeeping and/or exploitation. 

I will say this: His ascent into Northern Aggression has become so steep a climb that before he exits the car, he lists his own promises, as though rehearsed: "I not hit. I not push people. I not spit." This list, sadly, goes on. 

As a measure of comfort, a dear friend sent me to this article, which made me realize Atticus and I were not alone. There were others living our days.

But all at once and without much warning, my son caught me by surprise in the most beautiful of ways on Sunday. I had set him on the bed and was putting on his shoes while he grabbed for The Very Hungry Caterpillar book we'd read dozens and dozens of times, nearly all of which he'd sat silent through from start to finish. 

The most peculiar thing happened. 

He read it to me.

Now, of course, I know he wasn't reading-reading. He knows a few letters, can spot an A and say it's for Atticus, and he understands we move from left to right on a page and front to back in a book. But he can't read. He can't. 

But he did. For him, I suspended all reality of his illiteracy and just fell in love with his voice all over again, his smallish teeth, his bold, wide eyes. I believed with him that he was reading-reading. Together, we pushed aside the impossibility of it all. 

I stopped everything. I even tried to silence the cheering inside my own head. I might have teared up a little. 

Page by page, his little voice said, "BUT, he was still hungry." Every day in the book was Monday. Every number was three. 

I didn't care. It was the finest version I'd ever heard. 

It's incredible with these little people how much drinking in they do, how much they watch and listen, how much they absorb from just sharing space with us. It's such an incredible responsibility I try to forget most days; it's overwhelming. But it's an honor I love to remember. 

When Daina was little, I read her Stinky Face every day. It became a ritual, and it became one of those memories that you pack just beneath your skin so that wherever you go and whatever you do, it's just there, hovering in the space just above your soul with you. 

By the end of the book, the small caterpillar becomes a big, fat caterpillar then a beautiful butterfly. My son says beautiful with the longest U sound I've ever heard. It's a little like a stretched out song, kind of full-bellied with hope and joy all mixed together. It sounds like the feeling I get when I watch him, dwelling and learning among us. 

Our home is a cocoon of gentleman standards and a very lax dress code. I think his wings are itching some days. When the space seems tighter, it's just because he's getting bigger. Because the world is full of chocolate cake, salami, pickles, and too many hungers to count, I pray that, like the caterpillar, he finds some leaves and rest. 

Because one soon day, I know he'll fly away. 

The BIGGER Little Literati Summer Challenge for Adults (and Other People Who Pass as Adults)

I’m over the moon that so many of you are eager and excited to start the Little Literati challenge with your kids this summer. I’m excited about the memories you’ll make and stories you’ll share.

Me, actually being an adult with an infant at the doctor's office holding my business cards. This is so very adult that I should be able to vote twice during each election. 

It came to my quick and mostly focused attention that somewhat less-Little Literati might enjoy the challenge, too. So, I’ve written an adult version for the Bigger Literati among you.

Here is your mission.

Find and read ten books that fit the descriptions below, and keep track of your progress. When you complete the challenge, email your name, mailing address, and list of ten books to thelittleliterati@gmail.com.

All who meet the challenge will receive a snail-mailed Little Literati envelope from the Prices with Little Literati tokens of affection. The drawing for the grand prize will be held only for the kids.

Submissions must be received no later than Friday, August 1, 2014. Only one submission per person.

Happy reading!

1.     A book set in a place you’ve never been

2.     A book that teaches you how to do something

3.     A book that most people have read in school but that you somehow dodged—until now!

4.     A book meant for young adults

5.     A book that was made into a movie

6.     A book about another world

7.     A long book—one that is longer than you normally read

8.     A book of poems

9.     A book with a bird or fish on the cover

10.   A book you’ve loved your whole life

Instagram #littleliterati with photos of you and your book picks so that we can see your progress along the way!

Invite your friends! The more, the merrier.

Coffee that says, "You can stroke people with your words." I believe that.
And I believe in coffee.

The Little Literati Summer Reading Challenge

Get your readers ready! The Little Literati in my house are challenging The Little Literati in your house to some summer reading with a scavenger-hunt twist!

Find and read ten books that fit the descriptions below, and keep track of your progress. When you complete the challenge, email your name, mailing address, and list of ten books to thelittleliterati@gmail.com.

All who meet the challenge will receive a snail-mailed Little Literati envelope from the Prices with readerly tokens and things that inspire little literary ones. All those who complete the challenge will also be entered into a drawing for a mystery book box full of reading and reading accessories (worth over $100). 

Submissions must be received no later than Friday, August 1, 2014, to be included in the drawing. Only one submission per child. Children through rising eighth grade may participate. The winner will be notified by email the first week of August.

Happy reading!

      1.     A book set in a place you’ve never been
2.     A book that teaches you how to do something
3.     A book that was your mom or dad’s favorite when they were a kid
4.     A book with a funny title
5.     A book with an animal as the main character
6.     A book about a make-believe world
7.     A long book—one that is longer than you normally read
8.     A book of poems
9.     A book about the sea or the sky.
    10.   A book about people who lived a long time ago

Instagram #littleliterati with photos of your literati pursuing the prize so that we can see your progress along the way! 

Secretly, we’ll all know that the reading is the real prize, but you don’t have to tell them that.

Plenty excited about this but don't have any littles to participate? Share this post on Facebook or Twitter and cheer us on in the comments below.  

Why Mom Blogs Matter: Me, the Moonshine of Virginia Woolfs

Lining her pockets with river rocks, Virginia Woolf walked into the water in a woolen coat, wandering and waiting on death to come rushing over her, as if to her aid.

I replay deaths that preceded my life over and over again, like I’m watching for quarterback mistakes. I live in Monday mornings. I am louder than a referee.

Names and dates ebb, barely touching the shore where the reasons lie dry and futile in the sun. Plath in ‘63.  Sexton in ’74. Details cling to me and bloom like barnacles, waiting for Virginia Woolf, in some form or another, to pass by.

We’re all trying for her in our digital streams of consciousness, struggling to traverse the distance separating wine from moonshine.

We are a million Mrs. Dalloways, deciding to buy the flowers ourselves.

“So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. ”

                                                                        --A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf