Since my last update on this year’s PaperTigers Reading the World Challenge, we have added some great books to our list.

Together, we have read two new autobiographical picture books: Allen Say’s Drawing from Memory (Scholastic, 2011) and Ed Young’s The House Baba Built (Little, Brown and Company, 2011) – both wonderful, and I’m not going to say much more about them here as we will be featuring both of them more fully on PaperTigers soon. Those are our reading-together non-fiction books for the Challenge.

As our local book, we tried reading a book of folk tales from the North York Moors, where we live in the UK, but discovered the stories formed part of a tourist guide, including instructions for getting around… we extracted what we could but it wasn’t a very satisfactory read. It has made us not take beautifully illustrated and retold folk tales for granted!

Older Brother has read Rainbow World: Poems from Many Cultures edited by Bashabi Fraser and Debjani Chatterjee , and illustrated by Kelly Waldek (Hodder Children’s Books, 2003).  He dipped in and out of it through the summer break and we had to renew it from the library several times…

Older Brother has also been totally captivated by A Thousand Cranes: Origami Projects for Peace and Happiness. After reading the story of Sadako for the Reading Challenge way back in its first year, he’s wanted to know how to make the cranes but I have two left hands when it comes to origami – or at least I thought I did, until I received a review copy of A Thousand Cranes from Stone Bridge Press.  Recently revised and expanded from the original book by renowned origami expert Florence Temko, it’s a super little book, with good clear instructions for beginners like us, and giving background about both the offering of a thousand origami cranes as a symbol of longevity, and specifically the story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes.  Older Brother, now that he is older, (more…)

Head on over to Uma Krishnaswami’s Writing with a Broken Tusk to see a presentation from Tulika Books called “Multilingual Publishing – Walking the Tightrope” – it’s quite a long read but definitely worth it. Presenting different languages in children’s books is something I’ve been musing for a while – especially after reading Patsy Aldana’s interview with PaperTigers recently, in which she said:

I have always been opposed to the use of bilingual books, however given that Spanish-only books hardly sell at all, I have had to accept that books in Spanish can only reach Latinos if they are bilingual. This goes against everything I believe and know to be true about language instruction, the joy of reading in your mother tongue…

..and also having just read Nancy Bo Flood’s Warriors in the Crossfire, which raises dilemmas of language/writing in a colonial language (look out for our review in our June issue).

This is definitely a topic that needs to be pursued further…

Hop on over to Writing with a Broken Tusk to see what author Rukhsana Khan had to tell Uma Krishnaswami in an interview about her new book Wanting Mor. Read a review of Wanting Mor in our recent update…

Thanks to Writing with a Broken Tusk for pointing the way to this interview with writer Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, part of the Brown Bookshelf‘s 28 Days Later celebrations of children’s literature for Black History Month.

28 Days Later is nearly over for this year but you can still catch the last couple of writers hot off their bounce into the Kidslitosphere – and continue to enjoy the fruits of The Brown Bookshelf’s labor of love until next year (you are going to do it again next year, aren’t you?)… So check out the other 27 writers and illustrators highlighted. Click on the poster to see who they are and follow the links to read their interviews…

About a month ago now, we were thrilled to be chosen by Just One More Book for the Butterfly Award. Thank you! And now it’s definitely high time the butterfly winged on its way through cyberspace…

So, we are passing this award on to these great blogs:

All at Create Readers
All of the Blue Rose Girls
Annie at Here and There Japan
Cynthia Leitich Smith at Cynsations
Debbie Reese at American Indians in Children’s Literature
Jen at Jen Robinson’s Book Page
Margriet at Margriet’s Blog
Mitali Perkins at Mitali’s Fire Escape
Uma Krishnaswami at Writing With a Broken Tusk
Zarah Grace C. Gagatiga at School Librarian in Action

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