Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld is one of the more recent in a long line of books based in a "prep" or boarding school. Similar coming of age stories include:
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and A Separate Peace by John Knowles. Both novels are often assigned for high school English classes (which can ruin the experience of reading any book I've always thought.)
There are also the true prep school stories, biographies or memoirs like Stand Before Your God: an American Schoolboy in England by Paul Watkins (1995), Old School by Tobias Wolff (2003), and Black Ice by Lorene Cary. These and many other such books explore the idea of the outsider's experience which is made more painful by being an adolescent.
From the teacher's perspective there is the classic, if sentimental and dated, Goodbye, Mr. Chips by James Hilton. Even the Harry Potter series could be considered part of this (sub)genre.
A subject search of the catalog using the phrase "preparatory school students - fiction" or "boarding schools - fiction" yielded Limony Snicket's Austere Academy, The Little Princess by Frances Hodgkins Burnett, The Finishing School by Michelle Martinez (2006) and The Headmaster's Wife by Jane Haddam (2005) among others. Clearly there is an enduring interest in private school life. Often the portrait painted of those schools is anywhere from horrific and brutal to, at best, bittersweet and poignant. The students who attended the schools often seem to have mixed feelings and conflicted memories, those people who didn't enjoy/endure this form of education wonder what they missed.
Have you noticed that the word of the last week is schadenfreude? "The enjoyment obtained from the mishaps of others,"(Webster's Third) which is used lately in connection with the Opal Mehta plagiarism story, but is now popping up everywhere in that virus-like way that ideas/phrases/words have on the internet and blogs (discussed in this blog entry, the L-Magazine noticed this word-overuse first apparently.)
What got me thinking about all this was my high school reunion last weekend. One topic of this reunion was the book that one of our classmates wrote about our girls boarding school and specifically about our class at "Brangwyn." Not a pretty picture was given in the Moth Diaries, a gothic story of vampires, petty jealousies and lust, drugs and rock and roll at an "elite" (aren't they always?) boarding school on the Philadelphia Main Line. In the book, Lucy dies (am I giving too much away here?) after being bitten by a vampire -cum-boarder and another girl dies by falling off the gutters of the Victorian residence where the boarders live. Did this provide a literary schadenfreude for the author? Schadenfreude as literary revenge? What e v err! as todays teens would say.
Monday, May 8, 2006
College Guides - Hysteria in the Stacks
Peterson's, ARCO, Fiske, College Board, U.S. News: all these publishers have college guides. The library keeps the most recently published version on the reference shelves; the older copies in the stacks circulate for twenty-eight days. (Dewey # 378.) There are also books about scholarships, writing essays, and studying for the SAT's, AP's and other tests. A subject search using the terms "colleges and universities" yielded 224 "hits" in the BHPL catalog. As if there isn't enough stress and hysteria for parents of high school seniors and the seniors themselves, even the library has "TOO MUCH INFORMATION!" But wait, that's not all: every university has a website and the internet in general is teeming with college information. What's a parent/senior to do? Take a deep breath and ask your friendly reference librarian to guide you through the muddle of college publications.
College directories: The Insider's Guide to Colleges 2006, students on campus tell you what you really want to know, compiled and edited by the staff of the Yale Daily News. This is the guide that is "written by students for students" as the book jacket tells us. It has statistics and quotes from students who attend the university as well as some quirky lists like "Top Ten Schools with the Rowdiest Parties." (Unfortunately my own offsprings' university is on that one, I just realized.)
U.S. News- America's Best Colleges ranks 1,400 schools.Like most of the other college directories, there are sections on the application process, scholarship information, and advice for the parents and student on everything from decorating your dorm room to health concerns and so on. There is a pullout (please don't pull out the library one though) calendar from freshman year of highschool through senior year that details what to do when. In this way, college anxiety can be spread over four years instead of just one or two. Isn't that helpful?
There are specialized college guides like The Hidden Ivies, Thirty Colleges of Excellence and Colleges that Change Lives, 40 schools you should know about even if you're not a straight-A student. There are guides to individual colleges like the new College Prowler series which features student opinions.
Next are books on how to get into college like Peterson's Best College Admission Essays and many others along those lines. Then there are the books that prepare parents and students for life after leaving home like, A Parent's Guide to Sex, Drugs and Flunking Out and Getting Ready for College, everything you need to know before you go from bike locks to health care. (Just researching for this article is giving me flashbacks to the "college process" in my household not long ago.)
But we end with the part of this whole adventure that really makes the stressometer go off the scale: financial aid! Again there are piles of books about this topic. How to Go to College Almost for Free was written by Ben Kaplan, a young man who made it his mission to find every financial aid dollar available to him and then topped that feat off by writing a book about it. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
Here are some online guides to websites that are helpful:
A "Pathfinder" for higher education from the Camden County Library System website which lists books and websites for the college bound. Here is another Pathfinder for financial aid from CCLS. BHPL does not have all the same books as Camden, but we do have a lot, and of course the websites are available to anyone.
Good luck, future collegians, and remember, if you want to earn money for college while enhancing your chances for admission, consider writing a college guide with some kind of original gimmick - everyone else on the planet seems to be writing college guides, why not you? Just remember, don't plagiarize.
College directories: The Insider's Guide to Colleges 2006, students on campus tell you what you really want to know, compiled and edited by the staff of the Yale Daily News. This is the guide that is "written by students for students" as the book jacket tells us. It has statistics and quotes from students who attend the university as well as some quirky lists like "Top Ten Schools with the Rowdiest Parties." (Unfortunately my own offsprings' university is on that one, I just realized.)
U.S. News- America's Best Colleges ranks 1,400 schools.Like most of the other college directories, there are sections on the application process, scholarship information, and advice for the parents and student on everything from decorating your dorm room to health concerns and so on. There is a pullout (please don't pull out the library one though) calendar from freshman year of highschool through senior year that details what to do when. In this way, college anxiety can be spread over four years instead of just one or two. Isn't that helpful?
There are specialized college guides like The Hidden Ivies, Thirty Colleges of Excellence and Colleges that Change Lives, 40 schools you should know about even if you're not a straight-A student. There are guides to individual colleges like the new College Prowler series which features student opinions.
Next are books on how to get into college like Peterson's Best College Admission Essays and many others along those lines. Then there are the books that prepare parents and students for life after leaving home like, A Parent's Guide to Sex, Drugs and Flunking Out and Getting Ready for College, everything you need to know before you go from bike locks to health care. (Just researching for this article is giving me flashbacks to the "college process" in my household not long ago.)
But we end with the part of this whole adventure that really makes the stressometer go off the scale: financial aid! Again there are piles of books about this topic. How to Go to College Almost for Free was written by Ben Kaplan, a young man who made it his mission to find every financial aid dollar available to him and then topped that feat off by writing a book about it. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
Here are some online guides to websites that are helpful:
A "Pathfinder" for higher education from the Camden County Library System website which lists books and websites for the college bound. Here is another Pathfinder for financial aid from CCLS. BHPL does not have all the same books as Camden, but we do have a lot, and of course the websites are available to anyone.
Good luck, future collegians, and remember, if you want to earn money for college while enhancing your chances for admission, consider writing a college guide with some kind of original gimmick - everyone else on the planet seems to be writing college guides, why not you? Just remember, don't plagiarize.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
Exhibits of Children's Book Illustrators
MSNBC reports that the Rhode Island School of Design Museum has created an exhibit with a real room just like the "great green room" in the classic picture book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown with pictures by Clement Hurd.
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art currently features and exhibit of Dutch picture book artists and an exhibit of Leo Leonni and Eric Carle's art.
At Rutgers University, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum features children's book illustrator Petra Mathers until July 16 (2006.)
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art currently features and exhibit of Dutch picture book artists and an exhibit of Leo Leonni and Eric Carle's art.
At Rutgers University, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum features children's book illustrator Petra Mathers until July 16 (2006.)
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
"Novel Twists" a collaborative book
From the Glasgow Herald yesterday comes this piece about a new novel written as a collaborative effort. The right to write each page is auctioned on E-Bay for one cent. Phil MacArthur of Argyll, Scotland, came up with this unique approach to creating a novel. So far ten pages have been written. If you are interested in contributing, go to Phil's website and read through his FAQ's.
Monday, May 1, 2006
The Da Vinci Code Read-a-Likes:
BHPL's own Reference Department Assistant, Linda, has suggested that the following book will interest fans of the DaVinci Code, The Serpent Garden by Judith Merkle Riley (c.1996)
Publishing books that have religion and mystery themes combined has become a whole subset of publishing lately, a new genre. This month's book display features books that will be enjoyed by fans of The DaVinci Code. Some "read-a-likes" are:
The Sixth Lamentation by William Broderick
The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
Genesis Code by John Case
Kissed a Sad Goodbye by Deborah Crombie
The Darwin Conspiracy by John Darnton, reviewed in this blog in February
Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman
Mary, Called Magdalen by Margaret George
Enigma by Robert Harris
These are just a few of the books on display and the Reference Department has a list of many more read-a-like titles.
If you click on each title above, the hyperlink will take you to a review of the book. There are many review sources on the internet, some more objective than others. I linked some titles to the publisher or author's website, some to book review blogs or journals, some to online bookstores to show the variety of opinions on the internet. Here is an interesting article from Rebecca Skloot of Critical Mass, the new book blog of the National Book Critics Circle. She refers to an article in the Boston Globe in which Scott Kirsner notes that, "Have you noticed how many no-name critics are suddenly serving up pithy opinions about movies, books, music, and video games on the Net?" He wonders if professional book critics may be replaced by bloggers and other amateurs. I think there is room for all of us, professional and amateur, because there is so much readily available information to sift through these days that we need all the help we can get.
Publishing books that have religion and mystery themes combined has become a whole subset of publishing lately, a new genre. This month's book display features books that will be enjoyed by fans of The DaVinci Code. Some "read-a-likes" are:
The Sixth Lamentation by William Broderick
The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
Genesis Code by John Case
Kissed a Sad Goodbye by Deborah Crombie
The Darwin Conspiracy by John Darnton, reviewed in this blog in February
Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman
Mary, Called Magdalen by Margaret George
Enigma by Robert Harris
These are just a few of the books on display and the Reference Department has a list of many more read-a-like titles.
If you click on each title above, the hyperlink will take you to a review of the book. There are many review sources on the internet, some more objective than others. I linked some titles to the publisher or author's website, some to book review blogs or journals, some to online bookstores to show the variety of opinions on the internet. Here is an interesting article from Rebecca Skloot of Critical Mass, the new book blog of the National Book Critics Circle. She refers to an article in the Boston Globe in which Scott Kirsner notes that, "Have you noticed how many no-name critics are suddenly serving up pithy opinions about movies, books, music, and video games on the Net?" He wonders if professional book critics may be replaced by bloggers and other amateurs. I think there is room for all of us, professional and amateur, because there is so much readily available information to sift through these days that we need all the help we can get.
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