Friday, February 26, 2010

Introductions: or, What This is All About

Melanie is a librarian in Rhode Island. I'm a programmer in Philadelphia. We both grew up in Maine, as kids who loved to read. We first met at a scholarship dinner on my birthday during our senior year of high school, but neither of us remembered this encounter. We met again that fall, during our freshman year at the University of Maine, where we initially bonded over a shared love of Winnie the Pooh. This time it stuck. Imagine our surprise when the scholarship dinner photos came back, and we recognized each other in the awkwardly posed group embrace!

Pooh doesn't come up much anymore, but we both still love to read, and we both think that there's a lot to be said for the quality of some children's literature. Melanie told me recently about the latest Newbery Award winner, and it reminded me of a project I'd thought of doing several years ago: reading all of the Newbery books. So I made a spreadsheet, and colored in the books I'd read so far. I forwarded it to Melanie, she did the same, and we compared notes. And then we got thinking that this would make a good blog.

So here we are! We'll read some books for the first time, reread some where our memories are tainted by being forced to read them one chapter at a time and journal, and review them from an adult's perspective as well as our best guess at what our opinions would have been as kids.

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