New book coming!

I think it is a little ironic when (mostly) younger teachers and librarians come up to me at conferences and say, "Hey, aren't you that Blue Skunk guy?" For many educators, the fact that I have published four books, written dozens of articles, and hacked out  columns ad nauseum over the years is not salient when it comes to my "claim to fame." It's moments like these that make me feel that the world is moving past me - and I will never catch up.

Still I am excited since I have a new book coming out soon, hopefully in time for it to be available at AASL in Charlotte in early November.

School Libraries Head for the Edge: Rants, Raves and Reflections. Linworth, 2009 is an edited, somewhat updated, collection of my Head for the Edge columns I've been writing since about 1995. My son Brady did the wonderful illustrations for it.

Books are a surprising amount of work, even when they consist of things mostly already written. I took a full week last February of doing nothing but writing and editing to get this one into draft form. I spent another couple full days just going over the first draft. I have a real publisher who is anal about things like footnotes and permissions and such. This is hard for me since when it comes to writing, I am a much better sprinter than marathoner.

Now and then I get asked how one gets started as a conference speaker or consultant. My only advice (which should be considered suspect since I never deliberately planned to be such a low-life) is to write a book or two. Books still cast an aura of credibility on a person that blogs or tweets or other forms of self-publishing do not - at least for many. Often others assume that people who can write can also speak. There is no correlation as far as I can tell.

This may well be changing and I am sure there are other paths to being infamy in educational circles.

Anywho, I am always excited about a new book coming out, even if I have already read it - too many times. I know my mom will be proud and I will send the hometown library a copy so she can look me up in the catalog.

Write a book. I'll bet your mom would be proud too.

Cave in and read the book

A North Shore Wedding

Certain place names simply conjure up adventure. I noticed this on the trip this weekend to attend a wedding on the North Shore (the area between Duluth and the Canadian border along Lake Superior). How could you not find excitement in places like:

• Castle Danger (sounds like an Alistair McLean novel)
• Gunflint Trail
• Devil's Kettle
• Magnetic Lake
• Gooseberry Falls
• Cascade, Temperance, Knife, Devil's Track and Baptism Rivers
• Tettegouche (sounds sort of erotic)

In my experience, only Arizona with its colorful place names like Rattlesnake Frontage Road, Heat Stroke Township and Dead Man Meadows subdivision* comes close to the North Shore in great names.

Goliath Cave is another place name that carries with it both excitement and a bit of dread. The cave itself is one of the main characters in Cary Griffith's latest book, Opening Goliath. (Full disclosure: even if this book was really bad, I would still say I liked it since Cary is a true friend. Happily, I can say this is a very enjoyable book, and keep both my friendship and my credibility.)

Like Cary's book Lost in the Wild, Opening Goliath is a natural for both adults and young adults who enjoy true life adventure stories. Each of three sections of a book details the exploration of separate cave systems in Minnesota, one which resulted in the loss of life. Written in the present tense like a news documentary, the story relentlessly pulls the reader along non-stop.

Anyway, pick up this book for your middle and high school readers who want a claustrophobic thrill.

* Names reconstructed from memory.

How long do you keep reading?

One of my favorite authors, Dan Simmons, has a new book - Drood. It is not science fiction, is 800 pages long, and has received mixed reviews. And the Kindle version sells for $14.99 instead of the normal $9.99. All those extra bits and bytes for such a long book, I suppose. Simmon's last book, The Terror, was a grueling read. I think I may wait and check this one out from the public library.

The thought of starting such a long book started me thinking... How many pages do you give a book before you put it down and write it off as just "not for me"? The librarian's librarian, Nancy (Book Lust) Pearl, once gave this advice on NPR: Read 50 pages and if it hasn't grabbed you by then, give up. Unless you are over 50 years old. Then subtract your age from 100 and give up at that page number. (I can stop reading at page 44 now.) She opined that time becomes more valuable the less we have of it, so no use using those last few breaths reading something that doesn't grab you. Good point.

Is there a classic book you know you should like and have started a number of times but just can't get into? Catch 22 is that book for me. I want to like it, but I always give up.

Seth Godin in Revinventing the Kindle (part II) writes that e-books should change the reading experience:

8. Allow all-you-can-eat subscriptions if the author or publisher wants to provide it. Let me buy every book Seth has written, or all the business books I can handle, or "up to ten books a week." Remember, the marginal cost of a book is now the cost of the bandwidth to deliver it, so buffets make economic sense.

Just think of a Netflix for books. Just one of several interesting ideas about making reading more social as it becomes more digital Godin writes about.

I still can't get my head around how libraries will handle circulating digital books - or if they ever will. The whole economic raison d'etre for libraries - that it is cheaper to buy one book and share it than buy a book for every individual - isn't vaild when books, like songs, get down to a few cents a piece. And they will. The cost of cataloging, staffing, housing and delivering a print book - even if shared - would probably be more than just giving all citizens a voucher for all the books they could read. OK, I know it's not that simple.

Or is it?