I have a feltboard production of Anansi and the Strange-Looking Moss-Covered Rock. Everyone wants to take Lion home. And considering that Lion's favorite food is yams...

It went very well. A lot of stories today about animals with odd eating habits, though: vegetarian lions and spiders, a tea-drinking kitten who befriends mice and frogs in The Roaring Adventures of Rip Squeak... (The artist and author were in town doing a signing, so I did a story time for that too.)

If you want to talk about PC, we could start with kiddie lit. How much natural behavior ought we to expect of animals in children's stories, and how much are the animals to be, quoting the phrase May Hill Arbuthnot used to describe The Wind in the Willows, "ourselves in fur"? Do the less red in tooth and claw encourage a gentrification of our culture? Is this a good thing? Can one place a moral value on imagination? What lessons lie beyond the literacy skills, and ought there to be a wide variety of experience of any lessons, or need they be carefully censored (though not by me -- or do I?)?

Because I did today, but subtly. We usually display new books prominently. We received a copy of a young adult novel which is virulently anti-gun, including the donation of all profits from its sale to the Million Mom March. The novel is written by a popular YA author whose books come to us on standing order, like John Grisham and Stephen King and Maeve Binchy are in the adult collection. So -- since I can't find anything except Patrick McManus to balance this POV, and McManus is a humor writer -- I put the book out... and slipped it onto the shelf with the older fiction to be quietly ignored instead of allowing it the display that its fellows enjoy. Thus we do these things, quietly.

But this isn't CE, is it? More OT fodder.

Regards--
Mary Anne