Drink, Talk, Be Merry, and Eat Cookies!

Last night, a dozen or so child_lit contributors gathered at long-time list member Monica Edinger's apartment -- one floor above the festivities of a New York City "neighborhood" Halloween Party (read: in the lobby for the kids in the huge apartment building on West 111th Street.)

Philip Pullman and wife Jude were the honored guests for the night. We chatted about the "lineage" of our child_lit involvement.. from the creation of the list by Michael Joseph, who was there with Constance Vidor, his lovely partner, and Head Librarian at Friends' Seminary. We thanked Michael for creating a space in the cyber world for us to exchange ideas and forge otherwise unlikely friendship. GraceAnne DiCandido, Kirkus reviewer and my Library School teacher, was responsible for the two reviews of His Dark Materials' 2nd and 3rd installments. Other child_lit pals who came to help celebrate the occasion were Waller Hastings, English/Children's Lit. professor from South Dakota, now visiting professor at Rutgers this year, Pooja Makhijani, writer at Children's Television Workshop/Sesame Street International, Cheryl Klein, editor at Arthur Levine Books/Scholastic, John Peters, Supervising Librarian of NYPL's Donnell children's library, past Newbery Chair, and prolific reviewer, Uli Knoepflmacher, English Professor at Princeton University and expert on Victorian and children's literature who just recently joined child_lit, and Kerry Mockler, 4th-year PhD student and teacher of children's literature and baker of a host of His Dark Materials inspired butter cookies. They were incredibly yummy. My students in the sci-fi/fantasy club thanked her for this gift (the next day, while sharing the story Mimsy Were the Borogoves)!

Our dinner was 3 pizzas from, some salad, wine and champagne -- but the main ingredient was the non-stop conversation around the room: all about children's books and once in a while some weird child_lit history surfaced.

Here are just three pictures to mark the evening for me:

This is me talking to Philip. (I didn't quite wash off all my zombie make-up from the day and had to do a little photoshop-doctoring before posting it on the Journal. Haha.)



This is the tray of cookies waiting to be revealed...



This is a picture of Kerry and Philip. We were all so pleased with this perfect ending for a perfect evening. Yeah for Kerry!

Full Circle and Then Some

I found an entry on my pre-blog reading notes, on the day of finishing reading The Golden Compass for the first time, eleven years ago. The date was 9/11/96...

I wrote,

"I was Devastated.

How could the book end such way? I was all hoping for a completion, a happy reunion, a resolutioin.. and was thrown the cliff-hanger for BOOK II -- which is NOT available yet. Oh.. what agony.

/complaint mode off!

What a treat. What a complicated and yet simple, deep and yet playful, violent and yet gentle, and moving and yet chilling book!

One thing that is so charming and yet so unsettling about Lyra is that, even though she has a truth-reader, and she is a truth-teller -- she also masters the art of lying. She knows the truth about the people (or creatures) that she confronts, and then uses that knowledge to manipulate them and gain upperhand. Even though, since she is pure at heart and means only well, she does not apply that skill to harm people (just to kill the bad ones!) She is indeed the same as her mother, who is also a master in the art of deceit.

Pullman's portrayal of a parrallel world to 19th century earth (Oxford, London, The Arctic, etc.) is almost hypnotic. The fascinating description of Daemons (substantial representations of humans' souls that live and die with their humans and share all pain and joy with them) and the strong BOND between them and the humans is what draws me to the book in the first place and still is what works for me all the way til the end.

This is the 1996 Andersen award winner and rightly so."

I couldn't find an even earlier note about how by that time, I was losing heart at the state of Fantasy fiction for children and how I seemed to have lost my appreciation of this genre but The Golden Compass saved me and rekindled my love and faith in this genre.

Then... 11 years and 1 month and 20 days later -- I sat in a friend's apartment, at a small gathering of children's lit. lovers, eating pizza and sharing stories and toasting the upcoming movies, the online community of child_lit listserv, and the friendship we forged through discussing children's books -- with Philip Pullman! I told him in person how I felt when the first book ended. He asked my opinions over which Harry Potter to read (The Third, of course) and also whether I liked Jonathan Stroud's work and Megan Whalen Turner's books and genuinely valued what I had to say about them. We talked about the bench and he related the tender story of discovering a wooden heart left on THE BENCH, with the carving dedicating it to Lyra and Will.

I still couldn't quite believe that this night had happened, but I do have this to prove to myself: