I have a couple of tidbits I’ve been wanting to share with you, so get your pens and paper ready.
1. Congratulations to Professor Annette Gordon-Reed for winning prize after exquisite prize for her incredible, important, must-be-read-by-all-Americans book, The Hemingses of Monticello. In addition to taking last year’s National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Pulitzer for History earlier this year, it was recently announced that Hemingses was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition.
2. Christopher Moore, curator of the Schomberg Center and one of the generous vetters for Chains, has written a book with his eight-year-old son Matthew based on a 400 million-year-old boulder that is now in a park near their home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The book is not published yet, but the story has been turned into a musical, Matthew Takes Mannahatta, which opened last weekend. Bravo!
3. An independent bookseller (who is NOT my daughter) has written an open letter to all authors about the vital bookseller-author relationship. Please read it.
4. The first two books of my Vet Volunteers series have been translated into Japanese!!! Squeeeeeeeee!
And that is all the Tidbits from the Forest today.
UPDATE ON THE ZOE VOTE AND THOUGHTS ON BREAKFAST TABLE READING:
I know you guys are getting sick of this, but the contest is almost over. Zoe still needs one vote a day, every day, if she is to stand a chance at winding up in abox of Cheerios next year.
When I was a kid, I lived in a house that had the most ridiculous rule in the world: no reading at the breakfast table. This meant that I read the cereal box obsessively. I can still recite way too many lists of ingredients.
When I grew up and became The Boss, I made a new rule: you MUST bring a book to the breakfast table. And now, because all the stars are lining up, one my books – THE HAIR OF ZOE FLEEFENBACHER GOES TO SCHOOL – could be the book that winds up on a million breakfast tables. This is most important to me because a lot of the kids who get a book in their cereal live in families who don’t have the extra money for books. Because of this fun contest, if they eat a good breakfast, they get a free book. That is pretty cool.
But Zoe still needs your vote. Please!
1. Go to the voting page.
2. In the bottom right corner, click on MORE BOOKS twice. (Yes, this is the tricky part. No, I don’t know why Zoe is buried at the absolute back of the pack. Kind of makes you feel sorry for her, huh?) That will take you to ZOE.
3. Click on the yellow box that says VOTE!
4. Notify all of your friends, neighbors, family members, the folks at church
or temple or mosque or other house of faith, the rest of the PTA, the people at the firehouse, everyone in your classroom, and tell them all pretty, pretty please with a headful of unruly red hair, PLEASE VOTE FOR ZOE.5. Do this every day until the end of October. That is only a few more days!
TOMORROW: A FRIEND OF THE FOREST HAS DONE SOME RESEARCH ABOUT THE PROGRAM THAT SUPPLIES THE BOOKS TO THE CHEERIOS BOXES. HEART-WARMING AND FASCINATING!