Well-Read Life™

Kate DiCamillo’s mouse that soared

When author Kate DiCamillo addressed the American Booksellers Association’s award luncheon a couple years ago, I was smitten. Few authors speak as powerfully in person as on the page, and Kate is one of them. She told of how, as a young girl, she discovered books in her town’s small local bookstore, and how it changed her life forever.

Years later, Kate DiCamillo would change the lives of countless young readers herself. She did it with the help of a very small mouse.

The Tale of Despereaux is the book that not only won the most prestigious award given to children’s books—the Newbery Medal—but also gave to children and adults a story that will likely endure alongside those from Hans Christian Andersen, A. A. Milne  and E. B. White. Despereaux, you see, is a little mouse with the big ears and bigger heart who is desperate to save a princess.

Despereaux went Hollywood several years ago, with a full-length feature film from Universal Studios. In 2012, Kate and Levenger conspired to bring him into 3D as a bookend. And this bookend itself tells a story.

Levenger Press editor Mim Harrison spoke with Kate about Despereaux’s morphing from an idea in her head to an object on her shelf. Here’s their conversation: 

Levenger Press: What has it been like to have a two-dimensional mouse made into a three-dimensional bookend?

Kate DiCamillo: It is an odd and humbling thing to sit alone in a dark room in the early hours of morning and try to imagine your way into the heart and soul of a (smaller-than-average) mouse, and then to watch him come to life in so many different ways. It truly seems like a dream to me.

LP: How is it different from seeing him being made into an animated film?

Kate: There is something wonderful about being able to reach out and actually touch the top of Despereaux's head. It was grand to see him up on the screen. And it is comforting to think about having him on my bookshelf.

LP: When you’re first creating the characters for your books in your head, do you see them in 3-D?

Kate: I do!  They are whole, complete, multi-dimensional, complicated and confounding in my mind.

LP: Despereaux is a children’s book—the recipient of the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, in fact—and yet you use grown-up words like coda in it. How do you write to appeal equally to children and adults?

Kate: I just work on trying to tell the story in the best way I am able. That is, I try to get out of my own way and let the story tell me what to do.

LP: For readers who haven’t read Despereaux (cripes, as Despereaux’s brother might say), what would you want to tell them about why there’s a spool of red thread on the bookend?

Kate: Something like this: that red thread is there to remind us all that there is a way through our troubles.

LP: Your message on the bottom of the bookend says, “Reader, I hope you found some light here.” What did you mean by that?

Kate: Stories are light to me. To read a story comforts me. To tell a story comforts me. The reading and the telling both illuminate. And that is a grand, grand thing.

And now to you, dear reader: what was the book where, as a youngster, you found light and comfort? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Have yourself a Google-less Christmas

Have you ever wanted to Google something and not done it just to see if you could remember? Recently I couldn’t remember the name of a famous actor. I’d even read his memoir, which I could visualize: on the white dust jacket was his black silhouette ambling away with a cane. The title of the book (ironically) was My Name Escapes Me, and he starred in that famous movie The Bridge on the River Kwai. I was frustrated with myself, feeling my brain going to mush, so I refused to pick up my phone or ask anyone. I believed I would remember with enough attempts and decided to let my brain struggle. Three or four times I thought on it.

Then, on the morning of the third day, after my first cup of coffee, it suddenly snapped in—Alec Guinness! Reflexively I seized the dome of my head with my right hand and beamed my biggest smile. It felt so good!

Will the neuroscientists in the room please explain this?

Don’t we all delight in the ease we now have to find facts? Yet does this also give us a renewed appreciation for how good it can feel when you make your mind do its own internal search?

Likewise, mobile, virtual gaming is exploding in popularity. An estimated xxxx million people (I would tell you how many, but I’d have to Google it) the world over now play mobile games, mainly by tapping the tips of their fingers on small glass screens. There’s no arguing how captivating these games can be, yet should they also give us a renewed appreciation for how good it can feel to play with our full hands as we manipulate real, three-dimensional objects?

We believe so.

That’s why here at Levenger we’ve been elfishly busy all year developing this season’s harvest of heritage gaming technology to delight your senses.

They are designed to connect mind and hand, and to activate connections between generations. Go ahead and Google, but not all the time. Play, also, with your full human, physical powers to connect with your loved ones, and yourself.

I love our Shut the Box,  Game Room in a Box, Domino-a-Go-Go  and Solitaire Times Two for the warm wood they put in your hand. The same is true of the Mancala game, which I also like because of its ancient origins that still connect us after all these years.

Even our puzzles—one of a Churchill painting, the other of a 14^th-century illuminated manuscript—are all wood, with the images created on archival paper.

I’d like to be like the Ghost of Christmas Present, invisibly watching generations old and young as they banter and tease and guess the answers in our Dickens Christmas Carol board game. (If you want a not-so-unfair advantage, read this edition of the book first. Some of the multiple-choice answers are found in the introduction…and would be hard to find even on Google.)

After hearing David McCullough say that he doesn’t write histories or biographies but rather, he tells a story, I want to better appreciate the storyteller’s craft. So I’m going to try out my storytelling skills using our Scheherazade Storytelling Game.

Tell me, dear reader, have you recently decided not to Google? Can you share a story of renewed appreciation for your full human capabilities? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Giving Thanks

“Still must I very thankful be

For things that are a part of me.”

—E.B. White, 1926

 

Still, in this twenty-fifth year of Levenger,

I am so very thankful for what is

so much a part of me—

you, our customer.

 

Happy Thanksgiving.

Steve

 

Feliz Noël

Do you want to learn another language?

As some of you faithful readers know, for nearly five years now I’ve been studying Spanish. I’ve progressed from setting my iPhone and ATM to Spanish to actually conversing with my tutor.

And just recently, I’ve found myself having to grope for a word in English—a reach that sometimes, startlingly, eludes my grasp. Fortunately, my brain’s synapses are not misfiring (at least, not over this). Some scientists now report that for bilingual speakers, both languages keep up a lively buzz in the brain. Where once there was one, now there are dos.

It turns out that all that buzzing is good for you: it gives your cognitive muscles a workout. And though it seems counterintuitive, given that bilingual speakers are more acutely aware of what’s going on around them, bilingualism helps your brain stay focused and better resist distractions.

Muy bueno.

Multilingual learning, anyone?

I doubt that I will ever seriously venture beyond Spanish…and yet. Languages exert a force-field attraction. Language begets other languages—at the very least, an interest in them.

This holiday, then, if you shop around Levenger for brain boosters of a bilingual nature, you’ll find quite a number of languages ready to tease you and teach you and, we hope, please you.

Our popular Crossword Picante Spanish-English crosswords game, which sold out last year, is back, and this year we’ve added a French-English version, Crossword Santé. Since the games are set up so that you can spell a word in either language, proficiency is not a requisite. We also encourage players to use dictionaries. ¿Por que no?

We learned a lot while developing our Multilingual Learning Blocks. Each block spells the same word in six languages: Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Latin and English.

We gave each language its own color and design. And how did we choose which six languages? We put on our research hats and selected those languages most commonly taught in American schools today. (Latin? A pleasant surprise.)

Next, how to choose the words? We turned to our friends at the Long Now Foundation, who spearhead The Rosetta Project, a critically important effort to preserve the world’s endangered languages.

Laura Welcher of The Rosetta Project turned us on to the Swadesh List, named after the linguist who compiled the most commonly used words across different languages. We then winnowed the list to 28 words whose meaning in English was limited to one definition.

I find it fascinating to turn these blocks in your fingers to see not just how different the words can be from one language to the next, but how similar some of them are. It made me rethink the idea that Latin is a dead language when I saw cor (heart) beating strongly in the Spanish corazón and the French coeur (and in the English coronary).

The price for these multi-language blocks is higher than the single-language blocks we offer (Chinese,  Hebrew,  Greek), but there’s good reason: they’re a custom-made set, made just for Levenger customers.

A written language with no alphabet

One of the many languages UNESCO has marked as endangered is Cherokee. We were intrigued by these Cherokee language blocks because the written Cherokee language has no equivalent of our A, B, Cs. Instead of an alphabet, Cherokee has a syllabary.

These are characters that represent syllables, and a Cherokee named Sequoyah created them in the early 1800s. Until then Cherokee, like most world languages, was not written but oral. Sequoyah recognized that having a written syllabary would give the Cherokee a chance to communicate through writing. They called their syllabary “talking leaves.”

How to learn 10 languages as easily as uno, due, très

For a fast and fun survey course of ten languages—Arabic, Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish—pocket a pouch of our ten-sided dice, each one with 1 to 10 in one of ten languages. It comes with a cheat sheet of simple phonetics (compiled with the help of native speakers), while listing the spelling of each number in the language. Seeing these spellings side by side helps to show the similarities among several of the languages.

The number six in English is the Danish seks, German sechs, Swedish sex, French six, Portuguese and Spanish seis, Italian sei. The same ribbon of familiarity runs through the word for nine: ni, neun, nio, neuf, nove, nueve, nove.

H’mmm. Maybe multilingualism isn’t as daunting as I thought.

How admiring I am of people who are fluent in three, four, and more languages—people like Steve Kaufmann, who helps so many others learn. How lucky they are—just imagine how toned their cognitive muscles are.

Are you one of them, dear reader? Or is there another language you’d like to learn? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Meantime, if you’d like to read a couple interesting pieces on benefits of bilingualism, try these:

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/04/135043787/being-bilingual-may-boost-your-brain-power

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-benefits-of-bilingualism.html