Imagine if you got to do this at primary school!

The good teachers at Parkdale School in Edmonton gave their students $25 each and let them run wild at a Chapter’s bookstore this week to help replenish the school’s library. Students from kindergarten up to ninth grade selected dinosaur books, ca magazines, and even a few Stephen King paperbacks. All up, the kids nabbed 410 books.

The Edmonton Journal reports that Parkdale is an “inner-city school that puts extra emphasis on literacy and writing”. My favourite bit of the article is this: “The field trip ended up being part literature lesson, part math class. With a price limit, students had to figure out each book’s Canadian price and how much money they had left. Some, with a few dollars left over, opted to pool their money with a friend and get an extra book.”

Can’t you just see the kids getting together and working out what coins would buy which books, like they were swapping marbles in the playground?

—Nikki Tranter

”I’m Sheila Heti, and I’m going to be reading a story called “The Princess and the Plumber” while having sex with my boyfriend ... Do you mind if we have sex while I read this? We’ll just do it ... slowly.”

And then Heti’s boyfriend proceeds to become cutely inflamed that his girlfriend has thrown away his sour dough. An argument breaks out: He was gonna eat it… She’ll buy him some more… It was perfectly good, he checked it this morning…

Do they end up having sex to the plumber story? You’ll have to buy the CD to find out. I might have to, too. Sex and a good book? That actually sound like my idea of pre-lights off bliss.

Can I say only at McSweeney’s? The upscale literary firm continues to change the way we look at and listen to our stories with its second audio collection, this one titled “Sweet Nothings and Essential Slow Jams”. This time, McSweeney’s authors including Heti, Ben Ehrenreich, Tony DeSouza, Chris Bachelder, and Pia Ehrhardt read stories featuring tales of best first dates.

Don’t expect, though, these stories to rival Danielle Steel with lusty grabs and longing dialogue. DeSouza writes about man-tree love, Heti’s story features talking frogs, and Ehrenreich’s is, so says the press release, a “post-apocalyptic love triangle between a man, a woman, and a giant squid”.

The stories are available in MP3 format from eMusic.com.

—Nikki Tranter

As this Guardian article points out, that’s favourite writer. Not favourite children’s writer or young adult writer, but writer. In front of Roald Dahl, J.R.R. Tolkein, Beatrix Potter, and J.K. Rowling. Blyton authored more than 800 books throughout her 50-year career including the Famous Five series and The Magic Faraway Tree. This new honour comes courtesy of the Costa Book Awards people and a poll of more than 2,000 adult readers.

Lucy Mangan at the Guardian explores Blyton’s life and work, and gets to the bottom of her enduring popularity:

I myself can barely bring myself to talk about my Enid Blyton years. Who wants to let daylight in upon magic? From the age of about seven to nine (I deduce from publication dates on my beloved paperbacks, bought from WHSmith by the yard by my parents and shovelled towards the ravenous prepubescent bibliophile welded to the farthest corner of the sofa), I consumed the Famous Five, Secret Seven, Mallory Towers, St Clare’s, the Five Find-Outers and Dog and Island/Castle/Valley/Sea/Any Other Concrete Noun Adventure series. They went down whole and never touched the sides. Milly Molly Mandy, The Worst Witch, Teddy Robinson, Maggie Gumption, The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark - they had been good. Blyton was better.

The Telegraph reports on Blyton’s honour. Columnist Rowan Pelling takes a closer look into just how the author “colonised childhood’s most innate comfort zones” in order to directly affect her audience: 

Blyton’s Adventure series is one of my guilty pleasures and, of a winter’s afternoon, I can still be found curled up with Jack, Lucy-Ann, Philip, Dinah and Kiki the parrot as they are abducted in an aeroplane, or uncover an ancient treasure map.

Information about Blyton and her books can be found at http://www.enidblyton.net/. The Costa Book Awards site features a press release on the recent poll, which includes a complete list of Britain’s 50 favourite authors.

—Nikki Tranter

Got a spare 30 minutes? Head over to the Mail Online for the most delicious read of the week: a long excerpt from Christopher Ciccone’s Life with My Sister Madonna. Just make sure those 30 minutes really are spare, because once you start, you won’t stop. This is first-class juice. And not the sort of Andrew Morton, third-party, he’s-full-of-crap juice. This is horses mouth stuff! It’s like Rupert Everett’s book all over again. Sure, it’s slanted, but if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be so damned enthralling.

Chris on Guy Ritchie:

Guy’s pride in his own heterosexuality swells noticeably when he’s in the presence of a gay man like me. And in his wedding week, with these after-dinner toasts seemingly aimed at underscoring his overt masculinity, he is in his element. I, however, am far from amused when many of the speeches trumpeting Guy’s heterosexuality include the word ‘poofter’, a derogatory British expression for gay.

Chris on the Madonna Mythology:

She is a middle-class girl who propagates the story that she landed in Times Square with just a pair of ballet shoes and $35 to her name. But that’s pure mythology and the further she progresses, the more mythological her life story becomes ... Far from being this lost and friendless little waif who didn’t even have a crust of dry bread to eat, when Madonna went to New York she had money in her pocket, plenty of contacts and a support system all in place.

Chris on “Mrs. Ritchie”:

In August 2002, Madonna invites me to her birthday party at Roxbury. The invitation is from ‘Mrs Ritchie’. When she was married to Sean, she never called herself Mrs Penn. Now she has relinquished practically the most famous name in the universe—just to make Guy feel better about himself.

So, you can see, he’s not pulling any punches. He doesn’t so much out his sister as a vicious bitch, but more a confused woman who’s spent so much time trying to remain relevant through so-called re-invention that she might not really know who she is. Ciccone appears to want to let us in on just how a tough-talking all-American chick from Detroit who represented individuality and personal freedom became an English castle dweller with fancy cutlery and a bigoted husband. This is the “great tale” he has to tell, Ciccone told Good Morning America. It’s not about revenge, he reckons, but revelation.

ABC Online also has a story up about Ciccone’s book. In it a family therapist is consulted to help us understand where Ciccone is coming from with his unflattering stories. The bottom line? Envy, as if we didn’t know. Marshall is quoted: “If [Ciccone] was on the Madonna gravy train and she cut him off, he could feel like he’s going to get his no matter what, one way or the other ... When people operate at primitive levels and get their feelings hurt or nose out of joint, they always want the other person to pay for making them feel neglected or like a failure.”

Either way, it is a great story. It’s all perception, though, and until Madonna has a go at her own book, it’s the best we’ve got. I wonder, though, if Madonna’s not secretly thrilled about the book, considering I haven’t cared about anything she’s done since “Cherish” and here I am reading about her, blogging about her, pondering her life choices. She’s relevant again and she hasn’t lifted a finger!

—Nikki Tranter

From this week’s Denver Post:

The 34-year-old Denver man also was sentenced to 10 years in state prison Tuesday for checking out roughly 1,400 books and DVDs and reselling most of them online. About 500 items were recovered when Pilaar was picked up on an unrelated arrest warrant last year.

Working in a DVD rental outlet myself, I’m all too aware of this thing people have with renting and borrowing other people’s merchandise and somehow, for some reason, laying personal claim to that merchandise. It’s as difficult a notion to describe as it is to fully understand. Placing myself into the mindset of the particular renter/borrower I’m talking about means I subscribe to a list of commandments that might read like this:

1. I paid for this rental product, therefore I can treat it poorly.
2. I do not own this rental product myself and do not wish repeated use of it, therefore I can treat it poorly.
3. I paid for this rental product, and while I do not rightfully own it, I can keep it if I want to for as long as I want to.
4. I paid for this rental product, and if I return it late or damaged, it doesn’t matter to anyone at all.

Case in point: The Bucket List, a much-anticipated rental, was released on DVD on Wednesday, 2 July. By that weekend, I dealt with the following issues directly related to the above commandments:

1. More than one customer required a swap because the not-yet-one-week-old DVDs were scratched.
2. Such a big release meant many customers placed weekend reservations. At least one of those customers was forced to hire something else for their weekend viewing as copies of the DVD were not returned when due.

Anyone who’s worked in DVD rental knows these issues well. On a larger scale, it means repeated customer dissatisfaction and major loss of revenue. My store has tried and tested systems in place for combating these issues, and while they work well, they cannot hope to eradicate the problem entirely. No amount of late fees, I’ve learned, will deter certain customers from continued delinquency. And, as the Denver library case highlights, no amount of precautions taken when signing up new customers will remove the possibility of outright theft. I’ve spent the last three months stocktaking my store’s weekly rentals. The amount of items I’ve had to mark as damaged or stolen is absurd. Because of it, I’ve tightened my store’s procedures for signing up new customers even further. 

Discussions about delinquent renters are favoured between my mum and myself. She’s a long-term librarian, and we live and work in the same small town. We know each other’s pain and understand each other’s frustration—sometimes intimately as her delinquents are, more often than not, my delinquents as well. These discussions almost always end in us shaking our heads as to why people think it’s okay to treat rental and borrowing services so poorly. My DVDs come back scratched, her books come back torn and battered, if they come back at all. Is theft not theft when money is handed over, or when a person behind a counter hands you the item in question? Is the passing between hands giving, not ever to be confused with taking?

Recently, my mum kept me updated on a situation involving a specially ordered book for a customer that subsequently went missing. The customer—or patron, as mum calls them—special ordered an old book on farming from the State Library of Victoria. This included a surcharge of about $5.00. Such orders are rarely placed, as responsibility falls on the ordering library to make sure the book is returned in excellent condition. Mum’s crew, wishing to do their job and to assist customer with their needs, ordered the book. The money was paid, and the customer and book promptly disappeared. The book came back just a few weeks ago, several months after it was “borrowed”. Not coincidentally, the borrower returned soon after to begin borrowing again.

This is not an unusual occurrence, which again speaks to that mentality customers have that they can use and abuse libraries as they see fit. What makes that above-mentioned patron think he will be welcomed back with open arms? And yet, there he was. Had he taken a rental car, and returned that a few months after the due date, you think he’d know not to go back in for another spin. But a library? Who really cares, right?

I have the same issues at my store. We’re a town that sees a lot of seasonal workers during the Summer months. They will often start memberships, rent DVDs and leave, only to return the following year to have another go. “You still have these movies out,” I might tell the bronzed backpacker. “That was ages ago,” they might respond, expecting a clean slate after just so much time has passed. I’m constantly arguing with customers that just because a late fee is five years old, doesn’t automatically invalidate it. Are you going to ask a bank for a home loan in 2008 when you’ve not made one single attempt to pay off your car loan from 2003?

Libraries, mum and I often conclude, are just not viewed in the same way as other businesses. Customers have been known in both establishments to become enraged over late fees or replacement charges. Some become quite abusive. All of my colleagues, past and present, have stories of threats and abuse regarding fees and charges. One of my former co-workers endured a customer who, after being denied service due to a large late fee, took a moment when exiting the store to turn back and run his finger across his throat from ear to ear in the universal sign for “You’re dead”. What is it about our service that riles people so much, to this kind of response level? You abuse the service, there are consequences.

You know, I would be willing to bet rather heavily that the Denver man, sitting in his prison cell, is flummoxed that library theft got him 10 years. As flummoxed, I’d further bet, as the abusive people mum and I run into on a weekly basis would be at the consequences of their actions should we start reporting them.

But we can’t be doing that, can we? After all, they’re just books. 

—Nikki Tranter

While Jason Bateman spends the morning dishing with MTV about the “bent and twisted” script that may one day become the Arrested Devlopment movie, his Arrested co-star Henry Winkler is on the road in the UK getting Brit-kids into books.

Winkler is in London promoting his Hank Zipzer series of books featuring a 10-year-old protagonist with dyslexia. His tour of London schools as a representative of the First News for Young Minds group kicked off at St. Matthews Church of England School in Westminster. UK Schools Secretary Ed Balls was on hand to help Winkler in promoting 2008 as the UK’s National Year of Reading.

Winkler is quoted in the Epsom Guardian discussing his objective with the Zipzer stories: “Just because we learn differently, that does not mean that we are not incredibly smart human beings. That’s something I need every child to understand.”

The Hank Zipzer novels boast some great titles like I Got a ‘D’ in Salami!, The Curtain Went Up, My Pants Fell Down, and Barfing in the Backseat: How I Survived my Family Roadtrip. The latest (they’re up to 14!) came out in May. It’s called The Life of Me: Enter at Your own Risk and features Hank putting together a memoir-scrapbook while dealing with the ups and downs of a major crush. They’re published by Penguin.

Winkler takes on the Independent‘s “5-minute Interview” here.

—Nikki Tranter