We have yet to start the PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge in our household – the boys are getting geared up to have their first book read by the end of this month for their individual reads, but I’ve decided to wait till April to start on our readaloud together, to take advantage as much as possible of school holidays. They both seem to have so many different evening activities during term-time that reading to both of them at the same time has become a challenge in itself!

However, it is definitely time for a round-up of those people who have been reading already – and it’s great that the Challenge has been taken up for “grown-up” reading too. Sometimes I get so immersed in children’s books that I lose sight of books written for “my age” – but there are some fantastic booklists appearing on various blogs, which means that I now have an enormous list of books I want to read!

Susan at Black-Eyed Susan, from Detroit, Michigan, US, leapt in straight away with two books – Faith by Maya Ajmera, Magda Nakassis and Cynthia Pon (a Global Fund for Children Book/Charlesbridge, 2009) – which was recently a PaperTigers Book of the Month; and 14 Cows for America by Carmen Agra Deedy, Thomas Gonzalez, Wilson Kimeli Naiyomah (Peach Tree, 2009).

PaperTigers’ own Corinne, in Vancouver, Canada, has read The Shepherd’s Granddaughter by Anne Laurel Carter (Groundwood/House of Anansi, 2008).

Eva at A Striped Armchair, who lives in the U.S. Rockies, has already chosen the countries she is going to focus on in each continent and has put together what she calls a pool of books to choose from – I would call it a sparkling lake – if you’re looking for inspiration, dive in – so far, she has read The God Who Begat a Jackal by Nega Mezlekia. And an aside – just take a look at the wonderful maps Eva produced of the books she read in 2009…

Tiina at A Book Blog of One’s Own, in Helsinki, Finland, has posted reviews of her first two reads – she covered Asia in January with Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali and Europe in February with The River by Rumer Godden.

Edi at Crazy Quilts has also ticked off a couple of continents with one of my favorite reads of 2009, Rukhsana Khan’s Wanting Mor; and a new one to me that has gone onto my to-be-read list: The Other Hand by Chris Cleave – which she points out is published as Little Bee in the US.

Olduvai at Olduvai Reads, in the Bay Area of San Francisco, has also, like Eva, produced an extensive reading list for the countries she has chosen: Antarctica remains as Antarctica, then Morocco, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Portugal, Canada and Argentina… She’s already taken a couple of books out of the library and is reading Terra Incognita by Sara Wheeler.

And what about you? If you haven’t joined the Reading the World Challenge yet, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time. Find out about how it works here, and let us know what you’re reading..

A very Happy New Year to all our readers old and new – in the words of our current editorial over on the PaperTigers website, all of us on the PaperTigers team wish you a 2010 filled with books, peace and understanding!

…And in order to help you ensure that you have plenty of books to read, it’s time to launch our Reading the World Challenge for 2010. You may have noticed that this year we have a wonderful new widget (Thank you, Eun Ha!): please do use it on your blog if you have one; and if you don’t, do let us know about your book-choices – we would love to feature them here. I know there are many book-challenges out there but do join us if you can.

The criteria will be the same as last year, with one slight difference. You can choose at what point between January and June your 7-month period begins, in order to have completed the Challenge by the end of the year. So here’s what we have to do:

Choose one book from/about/by or illustrated by someone from each of the seven continents – that’s:

Africa
Antarctica
Asia
Australasia
Europe
North America
South America

Have the books read aloud to you or read them yourself; share them as part of a book-group or in class. Combine your choices with other reading challenges.

The books can be picture-books, poetry, fiction, non-fiction… the choice is yours.

You can find lots of ideas in the PaperTigers Reviews and Reading Lists sections – and if you have any ideas you’d like to suggest to people joining in from different continents, please do!

Happy Reading!

And P.S. If anyone would like the code for adding the button to their blog, please email me – marjorie(at)papertigers(dot)org – and thank you to all of you who have already taken it for getting the word out…

I realise that the last update I gave of our progress in the PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge 2009 was just beyond the half-way point – however, the deadline was over a month ago now, at the end of July, so I thought I’d better round it off!

For our last three books we read together:

Toad Away by Morris Gleitzman (Puffin, 2004). All about a brave cane toad wanting to make friends with the human race and traveling with two cousins to the Amazon to find out the secret of their ancestors as to how to achieve this… My two loved this and laughed uproariously at the rather revolting antics that cane toads are wont to get up to. I have to admit that I would probably have encouraged them to read this one on their own if I’d realised at the outset what it was going to be like – but actually, it was good to be a part of something that so appealed to their typical-boy sense of humor…

Super Jack by Susanne Gervay, illustrated by Cathy Wilcox (Angus & Robertson, 2003). The sequel to I Am Jack, this story focuses on Jack’s relationship with his family, especially the newly-introduced son of Rob, his Mum’s boy-friend. A family holiday intended to help everyone get to know each other is certainly eventful before the desired outcome is achieved… This is to be recommended to older children who may be trying to make sense of complex family relationships in their own lives.

Tom Crean’s Rabbit: A True Story from Scott’s Last Voyage by Meredith Hooper, illustrated by Bert Kitchen (Frances Lincoln, 2005). A very special, true story which is a great way to introduce early Antarctic exploration to young children – you can read a review from Create Readers here. This had the added kudos for my children of being a story which their grandad, who spent a year in the Antarctic quite a long time ago now, did not know…

Older Brother rounded off his Book Challenge with (more…)

Last week Black-Eyed Susan had a bit of a rant and threw down the gauntlet to “teen bloggers and those who blog for teens”. Read her post and you’ll understand why. And then consider taking up the challenge:

I’m making a 30-day challenge here. From now until August 30th, how many multicultural books will you read and review on your blog? Don’t know what to read or how to make this a success? Join us for CORA Diversity Roll Call and check out books reviewed for the Diversity Rocks! Challenge.

We’ve been incorporating the Diversity Rocks! Challenge into our reading for the PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, and will be continuing with it until the end of the year… we’ll see how we do in August too.

If you’re stuck for ideas, look no further than Susan’s fantastic Unofficial List of Great YA Books by or About Women of Color.

It seems to have taken a while to get this year’s PaperTigers Round the World Reading Challenge off the ground in our house – but we’re flying now! We’re following a similar pattern to last year: a readaloud and the boys each reading their own choices…

The book we all read together was Planting the Trees of Kenya, which I blogged about a couple of weeks ago…

Older Brother, 10½, has read The Cat who Went to Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth and illustrated by Raoul Vitale (Aladdin Paperbacks, 2008). First published in 1930, this is a short, beautifully written fable which centres around the Buddhist legend that the Buddha blessed all animals except the cat because a certain cat “was not overcome with awe”. It was a Newberry winner and was discussed recently, as it happens, in a fascinating post on The Newberry Project blog, which is where my quotation above comes from. The story certainly worked its charm on Older Brother:

It’s about an artist in Japan and his housekeeper bought a cat instead of their food with their money. They were very poor so the artist was not happy with her at first but then after a while he was able to start selling paintings. Then a priest came to his house and ordered a picture of the Buddha’s tomb and all the animals he blessed. He blessed every animal except the cat so the artist did not draw the cat at first – but his cat always looked upset that there wasn’t a cat in the painting so the last thing he did was paint a cat in it… and I’m not going to tell you what happened but there was a miracle.

It is actually a beautiful story. You know, there was a shelf in the artist’s room and the cat sat and looked at a special statue of the Buddha belonging to the artist and they both prayed in front of it. I like art and I thought that I was actually standing there watching it happening (that happens to me quite a lot in books, by the way – sometimes I think I’m the main character, sometimes I’m up in a tree watching).

And Little Brother, just turned 8, read Grandpa’s Indian Summer, the second of Jamila Gavin’s three Grandpa Chatterji books (Egmont, 2006 – and you can read PaperTigers’ full review here):

I loved this book. Especially the bit where Sanjay eats all the cakes and then he gets scared because all the ants come and he jumps onto the metal chest with all the cakes in. Everyone’s looking for him. And he’s got two cakes in his hands and he eventually gets found. Then Grandpa Chatterji gets into trouble because he’d been eating cakes and Sanjay found him and wanted to have some too, so it’s all Grandpa Chatterji’s fault!

I really liked the last page. The last sentence was the best!

It made me want to go to India because it’s a wonderful, colourful place. And I also like peacocks, although there aren’t any in the book. I also want to play cricket – and that is in the book!

Do let us know how you are getting on with our Reading the World Challenge – or if you haven’t started yet, here’s what it’s all about – there’s still plenty of time…

Jeanette Winter’s Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa (Harcourt Books, 2008), is featured as a new review in our current issue of PaperTigers and I very much look forward to seeing this version of Wangari Maathai’s story as I love both Jeanette Winter’s illustrations and her turn of phrase.

We have recently read instead, as part of our PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, another version of the same true story, which also came out last year – Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai, written and illustrated by Claire A. Nivola (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). It was recommended to me by the wonderful Willesden Bookshop in London, and I’ll be blogging about my visit there soon! Like Wangari’s Trees of Peace, Planting the Trees of Kenya tells the story of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai’s campaign to save the landscape of Kenya and, through the foundation of her Green Belt Movement, to enable people to help themselves.

It begins, just as a book aimed at a young audience should, with her childhood and progresses through her time as a student in the US, to the changes she discovered in the landscape of Kenya when she returned. My two were so engrossed that Little Brother immediately took in the disastrous implications of Wangari standing in the midst of agricultural workers, gazing at the stump, which was all that remained of her beloved, sacred fig tree. However, Wangari did not just sit down and lament. She began by (more…)

January is moving on apace so there’s no time to lose! It’s time for this year’s PaperTigers Reading Challenge! Last year, we set about reading five books from/about/by someone from each of the five geographical areas on the PaperTigers map – but this year, as we have spread our wings all the way around the world, our Reading Challenge is going to do the same.

So, without further ado, here it is:

Choose one book from/about/by or illustrated by someone from each of the seven continents – that’s:

Africa
Antarctica
Asia
Australasia
Europe
North America
South America

Have the books read aloud to you or read them yourself; share them as part of a book-group or in class.

The books can be picture-books, poetry, fiction, non-fiction… the choice is yours.

Tell us what you have chosen/read, as and when, by leaving comments on our monthly updates – and complete the Challenge by the end of July 2009!

There are plenty of ideas for books in the PaperTigers Reviews and Reading Lists sections – and if you have any ideas you’d like to suggest to people joining in from different continents, please do!

It would also be great to join this to the Diversity Rocks! Challenge - this is a wonderfully adaptable challenge: it includes levels for The Overlapper, or even the Non-Joiner, which asks you to read one book by an author of color by the end of February 2009… Or if you’re a “Challenge Addict”:

Commit to reading 6 books, 12 books, or 24 books by authors of color in 2009. If you already read a lot of authors in one group, branch out.

Pick one or more of your challenges and commit to read four different authors of color: perhaps a black author, a Latino author, an Asian author, and a Native American author.

Well, I think at that point you could be an Overlapper AND an Addict, both while taking the PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge!

We’ll be following a similar programme to last year – each month, we’ll have one read-aloud and each of my boys will also choose their own. We’ll keep you posted – and I hope you will too!