Hi, Miss Julie

On Saturday, February 2oth I attended the 10th Annual Children’s Literature Breakfast sponsored by Anderson’s Booksellers. Authors, eggs, coffee–what’s not to like?

This event is chock-full of authors. Not only were there the keynote speakers listed, there were tons of local authors. The best part of this event is that authors rotate among the tables. I actually wish there were fewer keynotes and more time to spend with the authors at the tables. I was with some savvy librarians, so we sat at a table that saw the majority of the bigger names. We were visited by Fred and Patricia McKissack and Richard Peck, but missed out on Henry Cole because one of the speakers ran long….oh, my, what a boring speech.

While the McKissacks were with us, James Kennedy ambushed our table, and utterly charmed the McKissacks with his booktalk for The Order of Odd Fish. Some of my more less catholic* colleagues were a bit weirded out by James, but I thought it was pretty awesome.

Richard Peck was charming beyond belief, and actually spent time writing and passing notes with one of my coworkers (she never did tell us what they were writing notes about, and probably never will). His speech was very impassioned and a bit acerbic, ending with the punchy tag line of “The Kindle may dwindle but books never crash.”

I enjoyed Henry Cole’s speech a lot. He, like myself, grew up on a farm, and he espoused the opinion that children today are too safe (I paraphrase greatly). I agree with this wholeheartedly—I think children today are too clean, too sanitized, too sheltered, and I think they are more prone to illness and less self-sufficient for it. But that’s highly off topic…

Patricia McKissack was also a lovely speaker, and told us a bit about some “monster rules” she learned as a child (including: when you’re completely under the covers, the monsters can’t get you).

All in all I wish there were fewer speakers and more time with the authors. Also, when they introduced the local authors at the beginning, it would have been nice to have all the authors up front so we could actually see who they were rather than having to whip our heads around to try and see who they were introducing.

*You know, I assumed catholic (lower case c) was synonymous with, you know, conservative or reserved, but it is not:

catholic |ˈkaθ(ə)lik|
adjective
1 (esp. of a person’s tastes) including a wide variety of things; all-embracing. See note at universal .
2 ( Catholic) of the Roman Catholic faith.
• of or including all Christians.
• of or relating to the historic doctrine and practice of the Western Church.

Shame on me for not being more careful! But fun to relearn a word and its meaning…