Monday, November 29, 2010

Thanksblogging IX: I'm thankful for variety.

In trying to sum up what makes me thankful about the children's lit world, I keep coming back to this. Yes, I sure am thankful for my own favorites: for poetry, for middle grade books, for realistic fiction, for humor. But I'm also thankful for fantasy high and low, for YA, for graphica, for nonfiction... and it's not just because I'm glad there's something out there to satisfy people with favorites different from mine. It's that I'm glad those people exist, and they're reading and writing and keeping my own reading list interesting and challenging. It's why I have a job, and it gives us something to talk about--and I'm thankful the other readers and writers, young and old, who are part of this conversation aren't all clones. We'd all be competing in the same markets. We'd be reading the same picture books over and over to identical children.

The landscape of children's literature has changed so much even in the past few years. A brick won the Caldecott. Kids' books are starting to have online components. I never know what surprises are coming. And as long as I can keep talking about them on a blog named after a 1908 classic, I'm thankful for that.

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