Monday, June 25, 2007

Hooking Young Readers

I am an NPR junkie. This morning I was delighted to hear Librarian Nancy Pearl and host Steve Inskeep taking about great reads for kids this summer. Here's how it began.
Well, summer vacation his here, time for kids to swim and hang with friends and go to the movies--and maybe read.
Even though Pearl had sent a stack of books to Inskeep, he hadn't read any of them, so she decided to convince him to read them by sharing great first lines. These are the books she shared.

Tanglewreck by Jeanette Winterson
At 6:45 one summer morning, a red London bus was crossing Waterloo bridge. . . . The bus and its passengers were never found. It was the first of the time tornadoes.

Millicent Min, Girl Genius by Lisa Yee
I have been accused of being anal retentive, an over-achiever, and a compulsive perfectionist, like those are bad things.
(Nancy even mentions that the next two books tell the same story from different points of view, though she doesn't name them. I will! They are Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time and So Totally Emily Ebers, both awesome reads!)

Ragweed by Avi
"Ma, a mouse has to do what a mouse has to do."

Feed by M.T. Anderson
"We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

Wemberly Worried by Kevin Henkes
Wemberly worried about everything.

You can listen to the interview here. Both Steve and Nancy have a lot of fun sharing first lines and talking about these books. For even more information about all kinds of summer reads, check out NPR's Summer Books 2007.

1 comment: