Branches have cloaked chairs in plastic and switched seat covers, but an expert says the critters can hide in borrowed books
by: Kelly Pedro
Bedbugs are checking in at some Ontario public libraries, but at others the tiny scourge hasn’t cropped up, thanks to some sharp eyes and pre-emptive moves to keep them at bay.
London library branches have been throwing the book at the teeny biters, switching out furniture for seating that doesn’t give bedbugs a place to hide, the library’s Ellen Hobin said.
Chatham-Kent public libraries have done the same, covering computer chairs in plastic and switching out casual seating to vinyl or leather, said the library’s Tania Sharpe.
Though the changes help, they won’t stop bedbugs from getting into the library, warns Jeremy McNeil, a biology professor at Western University.
“If someone borrows a book and they’ve got them and then they read in bed, for example, and just drop the book on the floor or put it on the night stand, as (bedbugs) are crawling around and looking for little tight places to hide, getting in the back of a book wouldn’t be out of the question.”
Bedbugs usually attack at night, biting people to get a blood meal and then hiding until they’re hungry, McNeil said.
Bedbugs have hitchhiked their way into London, but the tiny crawlers aren’t a major concern, said Iqbal Kalsi, the health unit’s environmental health manager.
“The challenge is any public place where people can come and go can create a problem because bedbugs are opportunists.”
Though most libraries have avoided the critters — there haven’t been any issues with bedbugs in Sarnia, Stratford or St. Thomas either — bedbugs, it seems, keep checking in at some libraries.
Toronto public library branches have had to manage the pests dozens of times since 2011 and a branch of the Oshawa public library was shut down last month after a bedbug sighting. Last year a Windsor library branch was closed briefly after a similar reported sighting.
HOUSTON — “The Circle,” Dave Eggers’s runaway best seller, is a futuristic nightmare that seems to have touched a nerve. The Circle is a social networking firm with an Edenic campus and a totalitarian grip on its employees’ lives; it forces them to socialize online at a dizzying pace, constantly messaging, friending, liking and answering surveys. In this novel, 21st-century capitalism has gone far beyond “Metropolis” and “Modern Times.” The digital masters turn even personal lives into hard labor, and so all hours are suddenly working hours. Private space disappears as people make themselves “transparent,” recording and posting their lives for thousands, even millions, of “friends.”
In Eggers’s hellish future world, anyone who’s anyone measures her self-worth through the easily quantified markers supplied by social media networks: How many hits, how many thumbs-up, did you get today? Some of us are already living in this world, at least a good part of the time. Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram: The digital tsunami is absorbing, distracting and all-consuming — and increasingly it feels like work. Staying up to the minute is a grind, not a pleasure.
Bendik Kaltenborn
The result of the cool-or-not criteria that social networks urge on us is a flattened, analog version of life. We connect with others by cheering for our favorite things, turning ourselves into simple fans and ignoring the many-leveled, ambivalent selves that we actually are. One of the Circle’s disenchanted employees accuses the company of imposing an eternal adolescent immaturity on everyone: “I like stickers and unicorns” expanded to cover the whole human world. But a list of preferences is not a self, even though the Internet tells us to think of things that way.
The digital world offers us many advantages, but if we yield to that world too completely we may lose the privacy we need to develop a self. Activities that require time and careful attention, like serious reading, are at risk; we read less and skim more as the Internet occupies more of our lives. And there’s a link between selfhood and reading slowly, rather than scanning for quick information, as the Web encourages us to do. Recent work in sociology and psychology suggests that reading books, a private experience, is an important aspect of coming to know who we are.
It’s no accident that the click-happy online universe can sap our focus and make it harder for us to read a full-length book with rapt attention. But old-fashioned reading is still essential, because it teaches lessons about human identity that we can’t get anywhere else. Making your way through a long, realist novel means taking a journey with another self; you look into people’s inner lives as you could never do by watching a three-minute iPhone video.
The Circle works as a powerful warning to our culture. True, Eggers can’t seem to create convincing characters, but this seems somehow right for his theme. Two things are missing in his novel: the private self and books. The two absences are linked, since books help us discover ourselves. It’s telling that the library at the Circle is a gorgeous but unused relic: Being alone with a book is something antithetical to the plugged-in networking that preoccupies the company’s workers.
After all the Internet’s many diversions, people still yearn for the solitary refuge of reading, since a book provides a space for reflection, a private therapy that is hard to find online. Most of us remember from childhood the experience of being head-over-heels in a book, utterly absorbed. We entered into a strange, enchanted world and traveled with an author’s characters; we lived their lives with them. There’s nothing in the online world that can fulfill the promise that we get in a work of fiction to give us a sustained picture of the self.
A few months ago, Scott Simon, a host on National Public Radio, tweeted his mother’s last few days of life to his million-plus Twitter followers. Tenderly, tactfully, he shared his shocked realization that his mother was slipping away, and then gone. But I would bet that few of his followers lingered over the tweets for more than a few minutes; they won’t want to reread them next year. Books offer something different, and more.
They give us the time and space we need to pursue a full picture of other people, and by extension ourselves. When we think of Anna Karenina’s death, we remember Tolstoy’s stunning, compassionate effort to give a complete image of her life over hundreds of pages. She is selfishly misguided, self-thwarting to the point of ruin, yet somehow she still has our sympathy. She interests us from first page to last, and each reader feels compelled to ponder why she has such a hold on us.
All of us deserve to be seen fully, in the way that Tolstoy makes us see Anna. When we read about Anna, we see what it might be like to imagine a self. That’s why we reread Tolstoy, and why we read him slowly, drinking in every detail about Anna’s thoughts and her emotions. This is the way to build a self, not through a collection of personal tastes and opinions, the likes and dislikes that the Internet trades in.
We don’t yet live in Eggers’s dystopian Circle, nor will we ever. We know ourselves well enough to realize that we need some time away from the hopped-up, glittering online universe; we need solitude and careful thought and, yes, books to be read slowly and returned to often. These days especially we need to sound the alarm about reading, to practice shutting out distraction so we can have the time and space we need for books.
Young people are the ones in most danger from the electronic environment, but they are also just what they’ve always been, the most fervent and loyal readers on the planet. On the subway the other day, I overheard a boy of 13 or so say to his friends, “The Catcher in the Rye, I’ve read it like 12 times.” And so had I at 13, a good four decades ago. Despite all the dazzle of the digital realm, all the “new thresholds, new anatomies” (to quote the poet Hart Crane), when it comes to reading, not much has changed.
David Mikics is the author, most recently, of “Slow Reading in a Hurried Age.”
LAST month, when a moderate Sunni Muslim figure, ex-minister Mohamed Chateh, was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut, some Middle East-watchers detected a "Sarajevo moment" for Lebanon. In other words, a single violent event that could be a step on the road to a broader conflict across the region, or even beyond it—just as the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand in the Bosnian capital, a century ago, started a chain reaction that led to the first world war. An exaggerated comparison? It did at least seem true that the killing of Chateh—a critic of the Syrian regime and its Lebanese allies, the Shia fighters of Hezbollah—on December 27th marked a new twist in the contest between Sunnis, Shias and their respective allies and sponsors, even though Syria and Hezbollah denied responsibility.
Anyway, in a rather different and more literal sense, you might say Lebanon had a Sarajevo moment last Friday night. In the north Lebanese city of Tripoli, a library belonging to an Orthodox Christian priest, containing over 80,000 books and manuscripts, was set ablaze and two-thirds of the contents were destroyed. What triggered the act of arson was the alleged "discovery...of a pamphlet inside one of the books at the library that was insulting to Islam and the prophet Muhammed," according to an AFP report. The library's steward, Father Ibrahim Sarrrouj, is a locally respected figure who enjoys good relations with the town's Muslim leaders. He had convinced them that he was nothing to do with the pamphlet, and had managed to negotiate the cancellation of a proposed demonstration against the library, which includes Islamic texts. But at least one fanatic with a match proved impossible to stop. Tension in Tripoli has been running high because the port is a stronghold of Sunni Islam with a minority of Alawites, practising the same faith as Syria's ruling elite. But Father Ibrahim has been one of the city's peacemakers and he has continued calling for restraint even after losing his treasures.
For people who care about ancient book collections that tell a rich cultural story, the act of arson immediately recalled an even greater assault on the written heritage of a cosmopolitan city: the destruction of the Sarajevo library in August 1992. The Moorish-revival structure, built in the 1890s, had housed more than 1.5m volumes, including at least 155,000 rare books and manuscripts. They were an important legacy of the region's Christian, Muslim and Jewish heritage. The great majority of the contents was destroyed when the building was pounded with incendiary grenades, but librarians and ordinary citizens braved sniper fire to form a human chain to pass books out of the smouldering building. One librarian was killed. Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-born writer who now lives in America, believes the shelling of the library was ordered by his old literature professor, Nikola Koljevic, a Shakespeare scholar who horrified his students by joining the leadership of the hard-line Bosnian Serbs who were besieging the city. A troubled and conflicted figure, Koljevic committed suicide in 1997.
In all these ghastly situations, there are inspiring moments as well as horrifying ones. In Sarajevo, members of the library staff—Serbs and Croats as well as Muslims—worked on through the siege to catalogue the material they had salvaged. A new Sarajevo library is supposed to open this year, although some of its employees have had to work without pay recently because inter-ethnic squabbles have left them without a budget.
In the Lebanese port, one mildly encouraging thing is that on Saturday, hundreds of local Muslims staged a demonstration against the act of arson committed the previous night, with banners like "Tripoli, peaceful town" and "This is contrary to the values of the prophet Muhammed". The enemies of co-existence (whether their target is present-day symbiosis or the evidence of it in centuries past) never have things entirely to themselves.
New technology and download services allow for fast and easy access
by: Sandrine Cabut
It is a technological advance for which many are grateful: "For the first time, when the results of the French book prizes were published this year, they were already available for our members as computer-generated audiobooks," says Luc Maumet, head of the media library operated by the Association Valentin-Haüy (AVH), which helps blind and visually impaired people.
Thanks to new technology and systems such as Eole, a download service AVH launched in April, the visually impaired and other people prevented from reading by a physical or motor disability can also access, almost in real time, new publications: fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks and such. "When I started here about 10 years ago, audiobooks were on cassettes and our members sometimes had to wait years to borrow them," Maumet recalls, as we tour the ground-breaking library at the AVH headquarters in the seventh arrondissement of Paris.
The library is quite a surprise. Hundreds of CDs in white sleeves are arranged on wood shelves, with just a few lines of text in black print. Titles can be identified by their reference in braille on the back cover. Farther on are several metres of A4 spiral notebooks, also completely white. The contrast with the relatively dark floor helps visually impaired staff find their way around. "The advantage with books in braille is that access to the text is more immediate," Maumet says. "The problem is all the space they take up. An average novel is seven volumes long in braille. It takes two wheelie cases to carry The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littell, which is 1,400 pages long." The library is also equipped with special electronic devices: CD players and memory sticks for Daisy-format audiobooks, suitable for the visually impaired; PCs with braille terminals; video magnifiers that will enlarge text from a standard document as large as required, change the colours and adjust the contrast.
But most AVH subscribers do not actually visit the library. The staff of 17, half of whom are visually impaired, handle most of the demand by email, phone or post. An audiobook can be "burned" on a CD and dispatched to mainland France free of charge.
In the past few years, new technology has brought about major changes in the daily life of blind and severely visually impaired people – 1.2 million in France, 285 million worldwide. Services for downloading audiobooks have appeared in many countries. There are also special players for listening to books. PCs and smartphones now offer similar functions. Braille terminals are available too, with scope for reading and input.
A French law, passed in 2006, requires publishers to make their source files available to certified organisations, enabling the latter to transcribe books into sound or braille – on paper and digitally – and to distribute them. This exception to the law of copyright, on the grounds of accessibility, may soon become universal, a global treaty having been signed in Marrakech in June 2013. At AVH hundreds of volunteers take part in recording audiobooks, but increasingly this process is being automated. In just a few hours a computer can use synthetic speech to generate a whole audiobook.
Eole, one of the largest French-language digital libraries, already has more than 6,000 audio titles. "In six months we have registered over 1,600 users, downloading 30,000 files. The challenge now is to make this service known to a larger audience," Maumet says, adding that users need a certificate from an eye specialist or to be already registered as more than 80% visually impaired. "We would like to offer the service to people with other disabilities, such as dyslexia, as is the case in Sweden, but it's not legal in France," he explains. "We are catching up, but other challenges lie ahead. How, for instance, can we translate a coffee-table book on luxury cars?"
Eole already has plenty of satisfied subscribers. Pascale Isel, for instance, has downloaded books in all the available formats: audiobooks recorded by real people, or software, or in digital braille. "On public transport I prefer my little braille notebook. At home I listen to audiobooks on my iPhone while I'm doing the housework," she says. Born blind, she is quick to adopt new technology.
"It's a fantastic service," says Caroline Dunoyer, an interpreter who has been visually impaired since birth. She consumes large numbers of audiobooks, but also checks the papers thanks to a subscription to a voice press service, vocalepresse.com, which provides audio access to more than 50 papers on the day of publication.
This story appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde
Books by JK Rowling and Roald Dahl are falling out of favour with children, a new study show.
by: Jasper Copping
For generations, they are the books that defined childhood.
But Asterix cartoons, the works of Roald Dahl and even JK Rowling appear to have followed the fate of
authors such as Enid Blyton and Judy Blume and fallen out of favour with younger readers.
An analysis of lending data from British libraries going back almost three decades reveals how children’s reading preferences have evolved, with many fondly-remembered favourites now left on the shelves.
The study involves a comparison of the ten most borrowed children’s books and the ten most borrowed children’s authors each year, as far back as records began, in 1984/85.
Both sets of figures show how authors like Dahl, Blume, Blyton, Rowling and René Goscinny, who, with illustrator Albert Uderzo created the Asterix series, once dominated the charts before falling in popularity.
Blyton, responsible for around 800 books including The Famous Five series, was the most borrowed author for the first three years covered by the survey, before entering a gradual decline, and finally falling out of the top ten in 2008/09.
Dahl, responsible for around 20 children’s works, has seen his once eminent position in the charts fall over the same period, although he remains in the top ten, as the ninth most borrowed author, in 2011/12, the most recent year for which figures are available. Blume, who wrote novels for girls, and Goscinny fell out of the lists in 1989/90 and 1997/98, respectively.
Rowling, who published her first Harry Potter novel in 1997 and only wrote seven books in the series, never made it into the “most borrowed authors” list, but her works did come to dominate the charts for the “most borrowed children’s books”, taking up the top five places in 2000/01 and 2001/02. Since then, though, her presence in that chart has declined, and she dropped out entirely last year.
The new study has been conducted by Public Lending Right, part of the British Library, which monitors data from libraries and collects payments for authors.
It also shows how other children’s series have emerged, bringing periods of dominance for their authors, among them: Jacqueline Wilson (Tracy Beaker), Francesca Simon (Horrid Henry), Daisy Meadows (Rainbow Magic), Lauren Child (Charlie and Lola) and Stephanie Meyer (Twilight). Julia Donaldson, responsible for The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man, is another who has dominated in recent years.
However, the data shows that some old favourites have endured. Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963, was regularly one of the most borrowed books in the 1980s, before disappearing from the lists.
However, it returned in 2010/2011 - before the death of author, Maurice Sendak, in 2012 - and remained in the top ten last year. We’re Going On A Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen, published in 1989, entered the top ten in the same year.
Mick Inkpen, responsible for Kipper the Dog and Wibbly Pig, has appeared in every top ten “authors” list since 1997/1998, while Allan and Janet Ahlberg, whose books date back to the 1970s and include Burglar Bill, Woof! and the Jolly Postmen, have also fared well. They were in every author list from 1989/90 to 2008/9.
Mr Inkpen said: “My books are written for readers aged about two to six, and that is a tranche that comes round fairly regularly, whereas for someone like Rowling, their books are not going to be re-read.
“My books take all of five minutes to read, so people are going to borrow in volume. And I imagine that once people get hooked into borrowing books, they get hooked into authors. Parents will look out for a particular author.”
Jim Parker, the head of PLR, said: “It is nice that some old names are still knocking around. I remember when Blyton, Bloom and Dahl were the big names. But things change and fashions change. Parents have a lot to do with this and there is a different generation of parents now.
“Some of the works that have endured are those that seem timeless. There are books which could have been written in the 1970s or yesterday and you cannot tell. You can’t say that for all the books.”
R.J. Palacio's best-selling novel "Wonder" was born in a moment of panic. She was getting milkshakes with her two sons in Brooklyn when she saw a little girl with a severe facial deformity. She rushed her sons away as her three-year-old began to cry. She instantly regretted it, and wished she'd stayed to talk to the girl. That night, she scribbled the first sentence of a novel on a Post-it Note: "My name is Ian. To me, I'm an ordinary kid."
She wrote the novel—the story of a 10-year-old boy with a horrible facial disfigurement who struggles to fit in—with a middle-school reader in mind, because her oldest son was that age. "I wrote something I thought a fifth-grader would like, with short chapters, lots of action, sentences that weren't too complicated," she says.
But after the novel was released in February 2012, in a bright, cartoonish hardcover edition clearly aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds, something unexpected happened. Prominent adult novelists, including Emily Giffin and thriller writer Brad Meltzer, heaped praise on the book and urged their fans to read it. Fan mail began pouring in from adult readers, not only from parents and teachers who embraced the book's anti-bullying message, but from single people who found the narrative sophisticated and moving. In the U.K. and five other countries, publishers released adult editions of the novel. "Wonder" shot to the top of the best-seller list and has hovered there for nearly two years, selling more than a million copies.
Illustration by Kagan McLeod
Fans of "Wonder" say it defies categorization. "To look at 'Wonder' and say that's a book for young readers is a complete disservice," said Mr. Meltzer, who recommended the title to his 35,000-plus Twitter followers. "To me, a good book is a good book."
Middle-grade books have become a booming publishing category, fueled in part by adult fans who read "Harry Potter" and fell in love with the genre. J.K. Rowling's books, which sold more than 450 million copies, reintroduced millions of adults to the addictive pleasures of children's literature and created a new class of genre-agnostic reader who will pick up anything that's buzzy and compelling, even if it's written for 8 year olds. Far from being an anomaly, "Harry Potter" paved the way for a new crop of blockbuster children's books that are appealing to readers of all ages. Recent hits include Rick Riordan's mythology-tinged fantasy books, which have sold have sold some 35 million copies; Rachel Renee Russell's "Dork Diaries," which has 13 million copies in print; and Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," which has sold more than 115 million copies. The eighth and latest book in Mr. Kinney's series, "Hard Luck," which came out last month, sold more than a million copies in its first week, and had a massive first printing of 5.5 million copies. It's currently No. 1 on Amazon and tops The Wall Street Journal's fiction best-seller lists.
"People don't think of it as reading down anymore," says Seira Wilson, children's and teen-books editor at Amazon. "There's less of a stigma."
The growing appeal of children's literature reflects a broader cultural shift as the taste gap between generations collapses. Pop culture today—from frothy hit songs to clever Pixar movies—increasingly caters to both parents and kids. Hip urban parents ride skateboards, play videogames and eat gourmet Popsicles, while their children check their cellphones and sport skinny jeans. Rock bands like They Might Be Giants and Bare Naked Ladies have released children's albums. The Sundance Film Festival recently announced that it will start screening children's movies "to reach our youngest independent-film fans." It's no wonder that parents and children who watch the same TV shows, listen to the same bands and wear the same clothes have similar taste in literature.
"It used to be that kids would emulate what their parents were reading, and now it's the reverse," said David Baldacci, a best-selling crime novelist who will release a new middle-grade fantasy novel with Scholastic next spring. "A lot of the most interesting work in fiction is coming out of that genre."
Mr. Baldacci is one of several big-name authors who are angling to get in on the action. Blockbuster novelists like John Grisham and James Patterson have launched children's books series in recent years to extend their reach, often bringing their adult fans along with them. (Mr. Grisham jokingly said that he created his "Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer" character after Harry Potter knocked him off his usual No. 1 spot on the best-seller list.) Commercial juggernaut Mr. Patterson recently launched a new middle-grade series, "Treasure Hunters," and will add another, "House of Robots," next year, further expanding his line of books for young readers, which have sold 27 million copies and now include seven series. Mr. Patterson says he prefers writing kids books to "murdering people on my pages."
Neil Gaiman, author of best-selling adult fantasy books like "American Gods," says he's often surprised, and slightly chagrined, when adults read his children's books. This fall, at a London reading of his best-selling middle-grade book, "Fortunately, the Milk," he was unnerved to see that the crowd of 2,500 people was mostly adults. The illustrated book features dinosaurs, pirates and aliens. Sometimes, he gets mail from grown-ups who read not just his young-adult books, but his picture books for very young readers. "Occasionally I feel like apologizing to them," Mr. Gaiman said. "You see these reviews on Amazon for 'Chu's Day,' a book really aimed at kids that can't quite read yet, that say, 'I'm a big fan of Mr. Gaiman's novels but I found this a little thin.' "
Some children's-book authors are deliberately shaping their books for adults. Mr. Kinney, author of the mega best-selling series, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," said he first envisioned his illustrated books about a middle-school kid named Greg as wry cartoons for adults. His first draft was 1,300 illustrated pages. His publisher, Abrams, convinced him to target kids, arguing that the sassy young narrator would appeal to children, and adults would follow. Mr. Kinney was skeptical at first. He thought kids might miss the fact that his protagonist, Greg, is an unreliable narrator (not to mention a bad role model). But it proved a savvy move. "The books have found a much bigger readership by going through the kids," Mr. Kinney says.
Mr. Kinney says he still writes for adults, and is often surprised to see children at his public appearances. "I'm so focused on the adult reader that it's always a strange thing for me to get out on the road and meet lots of kids," he said.
Children's books have evolved in recent years to meet the tastes and expectations of multigenerational audiences. Many children's book covers have gotten more muted and mature looking—better for the self-conscious adult reader to pull out on the bus or subway. The stories themselves have grown longer and more complex. "The House of Hades," the fourth installment Mr. Riordan's "Heroes of Olympus" series, is nearly 600 pages long. The first four books in his series weigh in at around 2,300 pages, which makes C.S. Lewis's seven-book epic, "The Chronicles of Narnia," seem relatively slim at around 1,400 pages.
Middle-grade authors are tackling tougher and more realistic themes, making their works appealing for adult book clubs. Sharon Draper's best-selling middle-grade novel "Out of My Mind" is narrated by a paralyzed girl with cerebral palsy. In "Counting by 7s" by Holly Goldberg Sloan, a 12-year-old genius struggles to cope after her parents die in a car accident. "Wonder" took off as a crossover hit in part because it deals with bullying and life-threatening disorders, themes that made it a popular title with book clubs, teachers and librarians.
"The quality of the literature for children out there is just astounding," said Erin Clarke, an editor at Knopf Books for Young Readers, who edited "Wonder." "It's been that way for a long time, but the general population is just realizing it."
In an entertainment landscape where hits often come and go in a flash, the word-of-mouth sensation "Wonder" is developing the aura of a classic. E-book sales were up nearly 150% in 2013 over 2012, suggesting a growing adult audience.
R.J. Palacio's real name is Raquel Jaramillo. She lives on the first floor of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with her husband, their two sons, Joseph, 9, and Caleb, 17, and their two rescue dogs. She used her mother's maiden name as a pen name to avoid awkwardness at work. Ms. Jaramillo has worked in publishing for more than 20 years, as an art director at Henry Holt and then as the director of children's books at Workman Publishing. Her husband is the executive art director at Simon & Schuster Children's Books. She knew many of the editors at major children's-book imprints and didn't want to appear to be cashing in on her connections.
Ms. Jaramillo, 50, started writing "Wonder" six years ago, right after she saw the disfigured girl in the ice-cream store. "I obsessed about it all day," she says. With two kids and a full-time job, she had little time to write, so she would wake up at midnight and write until three in the morning. She kept her odd nocturnal schedule for a year, working in a cluttered walk-in closet that serves as her home office.
"Wonder" opens as Auggie prepares to enroll in a Manhattan private school, after years of being home-schooled. He is devastated when he overhears his classmates making cruel remarks about him. "I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse," he says in the book's opening pages. The novel alternates between Auggie's narration and the confessions of those around him, including his big sister, Via, and his friends, Jack and Summer.
Bits of Ms. Jaramillo's life wound up on the page: the adoption of a dog named Bear, her mother's sudden death in the middle of the night, her job (Auggie's mother is a former children's book illustrator). She re-created the ice-cream store incident from Jack's point of view, as Jack remembers gasping in alarm when he first saw Auggie in front of an ice cream store when they were both 5.
"Wonder" wasn't an easy sell at first. Ms. Jaramillo's literary agent, Alyssa Eisner Henkin, says several publishers rejected the manuscript because they worried it would only appeal to a "special needs" niche. Knopf bought it and had modest expectations, printing just 22,500 copies in February 2012.
The audience proved much broader than anyone imagined. The novel has gone through 38 reprints, selling more than a million copies. Foreign rights sold in 36 countries, and six publishers overseas released adult editions of "Wonder." Requests for an author appearance poured in from schools, libraries and book clubs. Ms. Jaramillo is working on a spinoff to "Wonder," which will distill the novel's message into a book of precepts.
Lions Gate optioned the film rights and hired a screenwriter to adapt it. Impatient fans who can't wait for the film have already taken to YouTube with their own amateur movies based on the book.
A few months ago, Knopf released a collector's edition of "Wonder" that includes 10 pages of fan letters, emails and cards, many from adults. "I've now joined the increasing legions of grown men reduced to tears," a man named Nick Langley wrote. Another note came from Rosalind Gordon, a 91-year-old woman from Connecticut who emailed the author to say that the book brought back memories of being taunted in a lunchroom more than 77 years ago. "I understand what Auggie felt," she wrote. "I had no scars, but I was a skinny, vulnerable teenager."
Must-Reads for 8- or 80-Year-Olds
A sampling of books written for kids that adults will love too.
The result was a space that looks and feels like a high-end store but provides all the services of a modern library. The 16,000+ shelf-feet of books are arranged by lifestyle categories that would be at home in a bookstore (travel, health, etc), and all books are displayed cover out. This combination, Concrete says, fosters browsing and discovery, rather than the more conventional library system of finding a particular book’s cataloging number and then searching for it specifically in stack-like shelving.
Seating is also built into the shelving areas, much like I remember from my favorite Borders, along with study and work areas. A cafe sits next to the computer workstations, and the children’s area has big, movable foam pieces for seating and play.
Seems pretty great to me? Thoughts from heavy library users or librarians?
