Skip to main content
Hello Lovelies!

Wow! It's been a long time since I've done just a general update-y post.

As you might remember, I've been swamped with school things lately, but because of Columbus Day (blech what a terrible "holiday"), I don't have class on Monday, so I had a bit of extra time this week. Also my school hosted the Boston Globe Horn Book Awards on Friday night which I was lucky enough to be able to attend, and holy oh my goodness.

First of all, the winners were very gracious people. They all got to give little speeches except for a few who were unable to attend, and it was so nice hearing them speak! I love listening to writers and illustrators talk about their creative process and how they get ideas and what they do with them. I think it interests me because I so desperately want to be a writer.

While it was very interesting listening to all of them speak, and I was definitely in awe of all of them, I was most excited to see Gene Luen Yang. And I was not disappointed!!! There were signing tables afterwards, and he signed my book:



I get really awkward around people I find impressive -- like even professors and general people around me--and he was very nice. He asked me whether I was going to school or working, and I said going to school and I talked about how weird it was moving from Montana to Boston, and he was really kind and didn't seem bothered at all that I was basically a stuttering mess. I'm sure he gets that a lot though.

I wish I had been able to say more. I wish I'd been able to say, "I've only recently started to realize how white-washed the field of young adult literature is, and a huge part of that is because I read American Born Chinese at the same time that I started to follow more blogs that dealt with diversity in young adult literature. And I wanted to thank you for reminding me how important it is to have representations of all people in literature. I recommend your books to everyone because they're fun and funny and while they're serious about the problems Chinese-Americans (and Chinese people in general i.e. Boxers & Saints) face, they are also about so many other things." I also maybe should have mentioned that I was studying fan responses to his works for one of my classes, but that felt awkward too.

I'd been having a sort of rough time with school lately because I was getting frustrated about the constraints of academia and the fact that I want to graduate in two years while apparently most people complete the program in two and a half years. So going to the Horn Book Awards was such a nice way to remind myself of why I want to do this, and how even though it's scary to be going to an expensive school in an expensive town, I chose to for this reason. It made me feel good about my choices again.

Also, I spent like 20 minutes talking to this woman who worked for Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, and that was really cool because her job is one which I had been considering quite a bit. And it sounds soo cooool. So that was quite fun too.

In the last week, I also made a pretty amazing apple streusel pie and went to Maine and saw a lighthouse and listened to good music. So overall, it's been a pretty fantastic week.

What have you been up to lovelies?? Let me know in the comments. And feel free to reach me via other social media -- check out my pretty new links in the top right!!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Diversity in Your Book Diet

Hello Lovelies! As usual Top Ten Tuesday is brought to you by the lovely people over at The Broke and the Bookish . Today's topic is Top Ten Books for People Who Like X, and I'm going to go with... Top Ten Books for People Who Like Diversity Thanks to the efforts of groups like We Need Diverse Books, diversity is having a resurgence in young adult and children's books. For the last couple years, I have been trying to read more books with diverse characters or by diverse authors. (Diverse in this respect includes race, sexuality, gender, and disability). I haven't endeavored to challenge myself to only read a certain type of book i.e. only those by women of color or anything that isn't by a white heterosexual male, but I try to be extra aware of the characters and ask myself if they actually are white (sometimes the text doesn't say it, sometimes people just assume it!) and if being white is necessary for the character or not.  But here are my top t...
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll  is a very entertaining classic. I think everyone knows the story of young Alice who follows a White Rabbit into the world of Wonderland where everything is just slightly (or significantly) strange. For some reason, every time I've picked up Alice's Adventures before, I've put it down without making it more than 10 pages or so. But this time, I managed to finish it. It's a quirky sort of book, but I enjoyed it. It did make me think of The Phantom Tollbooth (here's my review of that classic), but I preferred Carroll's novel to Juster's. There's some great play on words and delightful misunderstandings because of homophones and characters not paying attention to each other. I think this is a worthwhile classic, but I don't actually have that much to say about it. Middle Grade March Count: 5

TBT: The Witch of Blackbird Pond

In middle school, I was a member of this reading club where we had a set of books to read as a team, and then we did like little quizzes on them against other teams. (SUPER NERD!). And now, I'm not entirely certain, but I feel pretty sure that club was where I read this book for the first time. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare is a Newbery award winning historical fiction novel. Orphan Kit Tyler has been moved from her home in the Caribbean to her puritan relative's home in Connecticut.  She feels like she has nothing in common with these relatives, but she does form an attachment with an old Quaker woman and a young sailor, Nat. Of course breaking out of the mold is not without its price, and Kit learns this for herself when she is accused of witchcraft. This is one of those books that I think about constantly. I haven't reread it in several years, but I always want to. I recommend it frequently to other. This is a book for readers...