Psst! I’ve got company for the next few days, but wanted to drop by lightning quick to remind you that tomorrow, April 12th, in honor of our darling Ramona and Beverly Cleary it’s D.E.A.R. day — National Drop Everything And Read Day!
Salon has a touching piece on a mother who wrote a book for a son whose father has been deployed to Iraq again. It’s not that there aren’t hundreds of children’s books on the topic, several, even that are very good. It’s just that… talking about war is like talking about faith. Everyone has to do it in their own way. (Membership or site pass required.)
“A writer is often a lonely person, I think: Our worlds are populated by the things we imagine, the things we remember or dream. For me, the voice of childhood is the one I hear most clearly. And often it comes to me in the cadence and diction of the boy in The Yearling, a book I return to again and again.” NPR’s You Must Read This hears from Lois Lowery on the beauty and loneliness of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling.
I love the idea of Drop Everything And Read Day. I’ll be out of the house for part of it, but in the evening I’ll at least drop some things and read!
The Yearling was one of those books I had to read for a school assignment, I think it was in 8th grade. Each of us was assigned a different Newbery novel and then we had to create some kind of display relating to it and give a sort of oral report about it. All I can clearly remember is doing a really detailed drawing of a deer for my display.