Tuesday Things

Thing One: The first round of the Tournament of Books, as mentioned here, begins on March 9th. First round highlight: Shadow Country vs. The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks judged by Anthony Doerr. Every battle has it's own judge. Later judges include John Hodgman and last year's winner, Juno Diaz. Bets can be placed here, and for a good cause, too.

Thing Two: Monday was Dr. Seuss's birthday. Him being the man what introduced us all to those indelibly and abstractly named creatures of chaos, Thing One and Thing Two. His books have influenced a lot of people but had very little affect on me.

Thing Three: Kevin Brockmeier on things he loved to read growing up.

More than anything else, I read comic books. And I read a lot of them. And I spent almost all of my allowance money on them. I’m talking just the superhero stuff, the typical Marvel and DC comics. If you’re talking about text, rather than text and picture, my favorite writer when I was a kid was Daniel Pinkwater. He’s still one of my favorites today. He wrote a book called Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, that I fell in love with when I was about ten years old, and then any number of other great books as well: Lizard Music, The Hoboken Chicken Emergency, basically these funny little fantasies involving average kids in very strange situations. I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure series when I was a kid, too. I’ve got a story in tribute to those books in my latest collection. And then I grew up in the era of Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary and writers like that. All of my classmates were reading them and I was reading them too. But on my own, aside from comic books, I gravitated to the children’s fiction that had elements of science fiction and fantasy to it, and then, when I got a little bit older, to actual science fiction and fantasy.


Tune in tomorrow, readers, for additional things, including more from Kevin Brockmeier on his favorite authors, the mysterious garden in his backyard, and/or the apocalypse.

ttfn.