My second favorite conversation with Sarah came about when she had a year of dental school under her belt and I was all “Okay. If people are only going to do ONE THING to take care of their teeth, what would that be?” (Not that I’m going to scale back from the 8-step tooth care process that I currently adhere to in order to keep my yearly root canal minimum under 4.) Sarah got understandably stressed out by this question. “There isn’t just ONE THING. It’s SO MANY THINGS.” Makes sense. 8 years later, now that we’re all still in touch but over our unhealthy separation anxiety issues, this is basically how we each describe our jobs before beelining for the open bar or a place to avoid the bouquet toss.

I have the same struggle when non-publishing people ask me what books to buy, especially as children’s gifts. There are SO MANY THINGS. There are also people who don’t ask what to buy, but then tell me after the fact that they bought Goodnight Moon as a baby shower gift then looking at me expectantly like they just KNOW they aced the quiz that I wasn’t giving. Listen, Goodnight Moon is great. There’s a reason every single household in America owns a copy. But, that’s the thing: Every single household in America owns a copy. I think there should be one position dedicated to being The One Who Buys Goodnight Moon, like how the mother of the bride is the one who is supposed to buy lingerie which, if you think about it, is beyond creepy. My mom stopped buying my underwear when I was 13, and if she ever starts up again I’m going to take her in for an MRI because something aint right. We should all sit down and decide who is in charge of Goodnight Moon for the baby shower, and then we should stick to it. There’s part of my brain that I can’t shut off that is constantly Counting Specific Things In Specific Places (e-readers on the subway, mustaches in Greenpoint, books with characters who have aspergers during list launch), and I once counted 7 copies of the Goodnight Moon board book at a single baby shower. Since then, I’ve been trying to talk people at work into making a floor display of board books where the header just reads “Everyone Already Has Goodnight Moon” and, while I am positive that would be incredibly effective, I also understand the many, many, many reasons why that line is not ideal marketing copy.

To that end, here is what I tell people to buy for new babies. Someone else will get Goodnight Moon. You should get these.

Sometimes I Like To Curl Up In A Ball. 2003 was a pretty awesome year for wombats in kids’ books. Diary of a Wombat came out in picture book, as did this bad boy, which is always my #1 board book purchase. It’s rhyming without being cloying or forced, and at the end the wombat falls asleep so it’s an awesomely sneaky “seriously, please pass out now” book that doesn’t have “Goodnight” or “Bed” or “Sleep” in the title. (When Jordan and I worked at his parents’ bookstore in high school, we used to play a game with the store’s inventory search program where we tried to guess what single word we could enter in that would spit out over 2,000 returns. Guess which ones were my first three tries?) I road-tested this on my niece Megatron when she was 1 and she had the whole thing learned by heart within weeks but she is a complete and utter genius, so you shouldn’t expect the same from the children in your life but you should expect that they love it, because it’s amazing.

Little Gorilla. I can’t buy this for family members because my mother purchases copies by the caseload and gives them to any baby that comes within 80 feet of her. This has always been her favorite, and she, like Megatron, can recite the whole thing, albeit with newly-added emphasis on each phrase that is not suggested by the author’s punctuation choices. “Once! There was a little gorilla! And every!body! loved him!” The gorilla grows up, and he worries that people won’t love him as much since he’s not little, but (SPOILER ALERT) everyone loves him no matter how big he is. I’m no doctor, but I think my mom’s attachment to this book is rooted in the fact that all of her children were freakishly tall at awkwardly young ages. Even if you haven’t mothered a fleet of giants, though, it’s a great book. And since it’s hard for me to look at this stuff in any other way than how I have been trained to do so for a decade, so I can’t resist pointing out that this is only $4.95. Do you know how cheap that is for a board book?? This is unheard of. You should buy 10.

Dinosaur vs. Bedtime. I love Bob Shea so much that I sometimes actually worry about what I would do if I were ever in a small enclosed area with him, like an elevator or Rhode Island, because if I don’t prepare for a situation like that I will almost certainly handle it by blushing and drooling. This is also why I am legit concerned about being within 100 yards of Bruce Springsteen. Dinosaur vs Bedtime is my favorite of his (though I’m A Shark is closing in fast), and this is another one that I focus grouped on Megatron, to great success. My baby shower gift theme (what? don’t YOU always have a theme??) for Megatron was chicks and ducks, and then when her brother Jack showed up his gift theme was Dinosaurs. I didn’t know it at the time, but Megatron was in the middle of learning about dinosaurs at preschool and seeing her 7 pound brother get a truckload of dinosaur books must have been a little rough on her, so I bought her a copy of Dinosaur vs Bedtime as a reward for having her irrevocably altered by the arrival of a baby brother, an experience I am familiar with. (…and one that, ultimately, worked out pretty well for me, as we all know because I never shut up about it). Dinosaurs will always be awesome, and this book will always be awesome.

Little Pea/ Little Hoot/ Little Oink board book box set. When this came out from Chronicle in ’09 I bought 4 copies of it: one for my apartment, one for my office, one for Megatron, and one to shove at people at work while saying LOOK HOW COOL THIS IS WE SHOULD MAKE ONE. The slipcase is a picture frame (THEY ARE GENIUSES) and, as if that isn’t enough, all of the books are adorable and beautiful and very kid-friendly. It’s under $20, and while I will spare you the full commentary from the sales robot in my frontal lobe on that price point, I will say that it’s awesomely reasonable especially considering it comes in a case that you will actually want to keep. The books are supremely clever (baby pigs who don’t want to get dirty, baby owls who don’t want to stay up late, baby vegetables who don’t want to eat junk food), and what’s cuter than this? Nothing, that’s what.

Snowmen at Night. I love this author/ illustrator combo, and the Snowmen books are some of my favorites of theirs. They work really, really well in this size/ format (I know basically nothing about how books actually get made– one of the big reasons I picked to work in sales was because I wanted to spend most of my time/ efforts working with finished products, which I think as worked out best for us all since if I had to help conceptualize books they would all have pirates or dogs on the covers and the inside pages would be blank), but from what I’ve gleaned it’s really hard to turn a picture book into a board book without disrupting the art or the text too significantly. This is one of those board books that still feels like a picture book– the art is beautiful, and it takes you to that Toy Story-ish place of wondering what kind of partying your snowmen are off doing while you’re asleep.

Hug. As someone who is adamantly opposed to hugging in the workplace it should be hard for me to love a book about hugging that my industry produced, but, come on. Come ON. Just look at this guy! I have not yet done a monkey-themed baby gift but I see one somewhere in my shower attending future. My brother calls his son Jack “Monkey,” which is fitting to both his personality and his can-do attitude towards any structure he deems climbable, but Bud has recently started getting selective about the monkey products in Jack’s life. He’s about to grow into a particularly, uh, quirky set of monkey pajamas that Bud doesn’t approve of because “those are not pajamas for a MAN.” We should all be so vigilant in screening the monkey items our 16 month olds come into contact with. I don’t think you can argue with this book, though.

My First Book Of Sushi. I know a surprising number of new parents who have lived in Japan thanks to the military/ the JET program/ ambitious study abroad choices that I didn’t make for myself because I couldn’t handle the thought of being away from Colonial Williamsburg during the years of 1999- 2003. (Have you seen their tourism commercials? Don’t they make it look cool?? They worked a little TOO well on me). If I were running a NY-area bookstore I would have a permanent display of Books For Hipster Parents and I would pay someone to come up with less off-putting wording for the display signage and this book would always be on it.

A Good Day. In my first publishing job, I got to work with Kevin Henkes on licensing out rights for people to perform plays based on his books, and one time he returned a batch of contracts I had sent him to sign with a thank you note on which he had drawn Lilly and I thought I was going to have a stroke when I saw it. I still have it framed. In addition to him being The Nicest Person On Earth (when they called him to say he had won the Caldecott for Kitten’s First Full Moon and said he needed to keep it a secret for a few hours, he asked if it was okay if he called his mom and promised that she wouldn’t tell anyone), he makes wonderful books, and I love this message in this one about how some days are inevitably going to be bad but there are ways to make them good, and people to help you make things okay. Also awesome is this box of board books with Lilly and the mice characters if one Henkes board book is, understandably, not enough for you.

The Pigeon Has Feelings, Too! Mo Willems has a bunch of board books that are all fantastic and hilarious, but I went with this one just in case you know someone (other than my mother) who is always on the hunt for feelings education media involving emotionally complex birds (see also: Duck & Goose, How Are You Feeling?). Mo has books for every age up through easy readers so you can put off the heartbreak of aging out of your favorite author/ illustrator for some time after you become obsessed with these board books. Or you can go into children’s books as a career and spend your 20s buying yourself board books and getting flustered when the bookstore cashier asks if you need anything gift wrapped.

Urban Babies Wear Black. They have a ton of these– Rocker Babies Wear Jeans, Country Babies Wear Plaid, Winter Babies Wear Layers, Sporty Babies Wear Sweats– so pretty much all of your bases are covered. I tend to buy these for people who have vastly different lives than I do (ie, people with backyards, vegetarians, etc) as a way of silently acknowledging that I approve of their life choices even though they can’t get Thai food delivered at 4am AND I CAN. I would also bet that all the babies who have these books will intentionally do the exact opposite of the text during a rebellious stage later in life (country babies = teenagers with nose rings; sporty babies = mathletes) and I want to be the one to plant the early seeds of dissent.

Nutshell Library. These aren’t technically board books but they are teeny tiny and awesome and the exception was approved by the executive board of directors of this blog, so here we are. I’ve recently had a string of work friends have babies, most of whom aren’t just People Who Work In Kids’ Books but rather People Who Have Never Considered Doing Anything Else In Life and Who Think Of The World In Terms of Literature For The Under-18 Crowd, a club to which I am constantly renewing my membership even though it has cost me the chance to ever have a normal cocktail party conversation with a stranger. It’s hard to buy kids’ books for people who can name the last 15 Newbery winners in chronological order and also offer opinions on who clearly SHOULD HAVE won but was ROBBED, even though I always assume that getting them something they already have is a-okay based on my own plans to not allow my future children to touch my book collection until they’re 30. I think when they’re toddlers I’ll pretend to get violently electrocuted from touching the bookshelf, and that should take care of it. The Nutshell Library has been around since 1962 and it continues to be eternally fantastic even as its author continues to tell major news outlets that he hates children and hates children’s books but is still better than anyone else in the game. Stay Classy, Maurice. This is one of my automatic go-tos for When Book Nerds Procreate.

Gossie & Gertie. There’s a series of board books with these guys (oh, look, another awesome box set with value pricing!) and they’re always the centerpiece of my Water Fowl Baby Shower Gift Basket. I gave a slew of them to Megatron and my sister-in-law liked them a lot, but she is an arbiter of great taste and has her masters in early education so I felt pretty good about them being a hit with her, but I can never really tell how my brother is going to react. Meg has all of the Silverstein poetry books, and when they started reading them I got a lot of voicemails from him devoted to explaining how messed up some of the poems are, and it was a good reminder for me that some of his stuff can be alarming if you haven’t seen that one with all the sex cartoons that makes Shel’s poetry collections look a lot more like The Wheels on the Bus and less like public service announcements about how to avoid being kidnapped by gypsies. When they moved to Washington state, I called Older Brother Bud and told him that I wanted to buy Megatron a pair of rain boots and asked what size she was, and he went “What are rain boots?” because he’s a dude, and a dude who wears boots to work anyway, at that. I explained what I meant and he immediately said “Oh, like in Ollie the Stomper” and I thought my heart would explode from loving him so much.

I Lego NY. In that same imaginary bookstore with the Hipster Board Books table I also have a Kids’ Books For Adults table, with I Like You and The Missing Piece Meets The Big O and Holes and The Westing Game and Yertle the Turtle (which I swear has something for everyone even if you did not, hypothetically, use it as your senior yearbook quote and haven’t, hypothetically, ever owned one turtle let alone many) and this book. The book’s creator did a piece for the Times in 2008 about how his sons are fascinated with the NY subway system and everyone pretty much lost their heads over it, and then earlier this month he drew his way through the NY marathon, just in case there were two or three people left in the city who were not already completely entranced by him. The Lego NY book is easy to love, regardless of where you pay taxes:

It makes you wonder if people actually see the world like this every day, like that episode of 30 Rock where you get to view the cast as each individual member does and Jack sees dollar signs on everything and Kenneth sees everyone as a Muppet. I’ve bought it for myself, given at least 4 copies as gifts, and have been given it as a gift as well. Everyone’s a fan, for good reason.

Sheep in a Jeep. This has been around since the mid-90s and was one of my go-tos when I worked at the bookstore and would get requests for “…something for, like, a new baby?” or “…one of those books where the pages aren’t paper?” Selling any kind of book is hard, but I didn’t realize until I moved to the publishing side how different it is fielding requests for gifts for children. I would get something like “I need a book for a 7 year old who’s learning to play the flute and likes dogs” or “I need something to explain outer space to a 4 year old with ADHD” or “I’ve never met this kid, but I think he’s in 4th grade and skateboards” at work every day, and I thought that was how everyone shopped for books. Then I realized I’d never gone into an adult bookstore and asked someone “So my dad like sweatpants, the Mets, and paying his bills on time– whaddya got?” Adult books are never anointed Universally Good For Everyone (not even if Oprah said so), but you need a lot of kids’ books that everyone will be, at best, in love with and, at worst, amused by for a few reads. This one is great for that, and if you want to keep up with the other ridiculous things the sheep do as a group, they also Go Out To Eat and Shop together. These are also Megatron-approved, as she once picked out a copy of Sheep on a Ship when I pointed her at a bookstore and asked what I could buy her. Older Brother Bud tried to block the sale, and his wife and I automatically assumed this was him wanting to keep his Navy Life out of his Family Life where possible, like the time our mom said she wanted to tour The Intrepid for Mothers’ Day and Bud respectfully declined to spend non-work hours on an aircraft carrier. Turns out he was just convinced that he would mess the words up while reading to his daughter and say “shit” a bunch of times. He powered through it.

Your Personal Penguin. When I started selling books thought I was super-cool for loving the Sandra Boynton board books and liked to hand-sell them at the store like she was some insider secret, kind of like how circa 2005 I called my mom and was like “I saw this movie I think you would love– it’s called Annie Hall, have you heard of it?” and my mom was all “Oh, that Oscar winner that your dad and I saw in the theaters three times? Yeah. Thanks for the tip.” Sandra Boynton is a rock star and all of her board books are wonderful (oh, hey, a box set!), and I think there’s some plush kicking around though I do really miss the Boynton Minimals line and wish I could tell my mid-90s self to buy up a ton of them and, while I was at it, maybe calm the eff down about the AP exams because they don’t matter.

I keep a copy of Personal Penguin at home, and one at work, and for awhile I had it face-out on my desk as an Awesomeness Litmus Test to see who would randomly veer into my office to go I LOVE THAT BOOK. When I get around to tricking someone into marrying me I will also trick him into using the text of this book in the ceremony. We can put it into Latin and pretend we’re being all Catholic about it. The book also comes with a free download of Davy Jones singing the text, which is a welcome beacon of listenability in the horrid landscape of children’s music (excluding They Might Be Giants) and it has inspired my 1 year old nephew to develop some killer dance moves.

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That’s my Top 15. What’d I miss??

]]> http://www.cristinstickles.com/2011/11/27/please-believe-me-when-i-tell-you-that-she-already-owns-goodnight-moon/feed/ 7 http://www.cristinstickles.com/2011/11/08/oh-is-that-what-its-like-a-history-of-my-failure-to-accurately-describe-books-using-other-books/ http://www.cristinstickles.com/2011/11/08/oh-is-that-what-its-like-a-history-of-my-failure-to-accurately-describe-books-using-other-books/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:16:33 +0000 Cristin http://www.cristinstickles.com/?p=2339 It’s about zombies in the same way that Jurassic Park is about dinosaurs, which is to say that it’s really about humanity and the haunting fear that our inner natures will bring about our destruction much faster than any common threat to us as a group in the same way that Jurassic Park is really about the perils of playing God and the importance of civil engineering in the theme park industry.

It’s like if the author of The Things They Carried watched a George Romero movie marathon and then wrote a cautionary tale about not repeating mistakes made during World War II with zombies instead of Nazis. ~ World War Z

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It’s like a supreme court case designed to prove how wrong I’ve been about avoiding all books with maps of imaginary places in the front and/or a glossary of author-invented terms in the back, crossed with the shock therapy session I needed to stop blaming the fantasy genre for all those years I had to sell Paolini books. ~Graceling

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It’s like reading a great Stephen King book but without the crushing weight of knowing that the author will certainly ruin it in the last 50 pages. ~Sharp Objects

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It’s like Long Day’s Journey Into Night but with blackberries. {Special guest contribution by little brother peej}

It’s like Woody Allen made a movie about my family and got James Thurber to consult on the script. ~This Is Where I Leave You

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It’s like he was watching a snuff film while reading Agatha Christie and thought that not only should those two be combined into a new literary genre but that he was exactly the man for the job. ~Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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It’s like Heart of Darkness except I actually wanted to read it and was able to understand it.

It’s like Holes or Life of Pi or A Prayer For Owen Meany in that you already love it before you get to the ending and after you finish it you’re eternally jealous of people who haven’t read it yet and still don’t know that they’re about to get their minds blown. ~State of Wonder

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It’s like she knew I needed fresh ammunition for my ongoing crusade to elevate great female essayists to a higher level of awareness so that we can someday all agree that it was a lack of suitable competition, and not contributions to the literary canon (real or perceived), that once made Chelsea Handler the leader of this pack. ~Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

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It’s like A Separate Peace meets Casey at the Bat meets Tobias Wolff especially if- HYPOTHETICALLY- you still feel bad for lying to your dad at age 12 because you wanted him to think you loved A Separate Peace as much as he does and didn’t understand how that book was supposed to make you feel until you read this one.

It’s like John Green shelved Looking for Alaska for a few years after finishing his thesis on John Updike’s nonfiction works to take a job recruiting college baseball players for the minor leagues. ~The Art of Fielding

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It’s like Chuck Palahniuk if he stopped taking writing cues from surgery documentaries on Discovery Health, except without people vomiting at the book signings and won’t give me a reason to immediately dump you the way I certainly will if you casually mention that Fight Club speaks to men in a way that I can’t ever understand. ~Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

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It’s like that movie Spellbound plus the Mathlete scene in Mean Girls plus Jeopardy Kids’ Week plus every Newbery winner minus the Newbery winners that no one feels comfortable calling terrible post-sticker plus my favorite middle grade book ever. Or maybe it’s just like my favorite middle grade book ever. ~The View From Saturday

Besides, I don’t think about “fired” in a Donald Trump reality show kind of way, I think about it like I’m being packed into a cannon by my fellow circus performers and aimed at an “X” in the middle of an inflatable mattress. This works nicely as a career transition metaphor for all you optimists out there that quickly identified the cannon as Opportunity and the mattress patched with duct tape as The Next Great Thing Waiting For Me Around The Corner. Most days I’m enough of a Pollyanna to see it that way as well, though I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t have dark moments spent wondering why I had to be surrounded by clowns, smelling like gunpowder while I try to careen in the general direction of the inflatable mattress and not into the waiting arms of that 12-fingered carny who wants to take me behind the cotton candy machine and make me his bride.

The best and worst parts of this have both been my parents’ reactions. When it went down, all I could think about was my parents, and how and what I was going to tell them when I got home. I knew this wouldn’t change how they thought about me or anything, but I also knew it was going to make them worry enormously, and as their One Child Who Can Always Be Reached By Phone And Rarely Leaves The Country, I don’t like doing that. All three of them handled it phenomenally, and we were able to transition directly into Accidentally Saying Inappropriate Things Near The Girl Who Just Lost Her Job, which I appreciated. I went home to NJ the weekend after my job-ectomy, and in passing my dad mentioned to my stepmom that he had to go to a meeting for the new job he was starting. “Maybe they want to fire you already!” my stepmom joked gleefully, then everyone froze and looked at me out of the corner of their eyes. My mom took half a personal day from her job to spend with me, and when we got in the car she crowed “Who’s so excited to not be at work right now?!” and then immediately put the car in park and apologized 8 times. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s Milk It, so all of this has been fantastic. For a month straight, whenever I didn’t want to deal with something, I played the job card. Can you put your dishes in the dishwasher? I’d love to, but I just got fired, and I’m really upset. I think it’s be better if I stayed right here on the couch, eating mac n’ cheese and watching Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman reruns.

When I think about this happening to me, though, I keep coming back to my parents’ initial reactions. Coming from a family where everyone has the same face, same voice, and same mannerisms, I’ve always been a little obsessed with identifying things that I “got” from my various parents, and this was no exception. Watching my parents respond to this was the clearest illustrator of how the three of them had built me from scratch. I was most worried about my mom; my mom is made entirely of little blocks of empathy, and having something bad happen to one of her children is torture. When I get a papercut, I am positive that my mom feels it, and that it hurts four times as much. I called my mom to tell her that morning and I thought she was going to cry– not because she was disappointed in me, but because she knew I was trying not to cry. “I’m coming to get you,” was the first thing she said, because she knew I needed my mom right then, and she knew that part of me wanted to lay in her bed and hide from people until I thought I could deal with it. The first thing my dad said was “Did you sign anything?” which is absolutely the first thing I would have said to anyone in my situation. And when I spent the next three days scouring paperwork and crafting Excel grids and strongly worded emails and telling myself before phone meetings “you have no reason to be scared– it’s not like they can fire you AGAIN,” I knew that had come directly from my dad. Telling my stepmom was particularly hard. With my mom & dad, I always have the fallback excuse that anything I screw up is actually their fault– it’s either nurture or nature, right? so I can blame them for everything– but I like to tell myself that my stepmom got to pick me as a daughter instead of being blindly assigned to try to turn me into an adult the way my mom and dad were, and I also like to tell myself that she made an extremely intelligent decision that has paid off great dividends. (After I got through what we in the Stickles fam like to call Cristin’s Awful Phase, known to the population at large as High School. I was a nightmare. Pretty much every move I make at this point in my life is designed as a silent apology to my family for having to deal with me when I was 13-18 years old). Because of that, all I could think to say to  my stepmom was “I’m sorry,” and she, rightfully, told me to shut up. “You listen to me. You do not fucking apologize for this.” Once I got done trying to remember the last time she had used the eff word, I figured out how right she was, and I decided to stop being a self-loathing little bitch about things and go back to being someone who Does Not Fucking Apologize when it’s not warranted. This is how the three of them made me, and none of that will ever change. Especially not as the result of something like this.

But like I said, I’m not going to talk about any of that. I’ll talk about it some day, once I’ve entered an era where I can comfortably watch and discuss Up In The Air without breaking out in hives, because one of my favorite things that has already come out of this is a noted high peak in Unintentional Comedy on the Hilarity Graph of my life. Like how in order to retain your unemployment benefits, the state of NY requires you to fill out a job experience form that asks if you have welding skills. That one had me singing the Flashdance soundtrack for days.

I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to tie this into my Joint Custody Prepares You For Life thesis; children of divorce, myself included, make excellent packers and travelers. I have a minimal standard set of things I bring everywhere with me and I always have it on hand. If you need me in Chicago tonight, I can be out the door in 20 minutes, provided that I have enough podcasts already downloaded. I enjoy The Podcast for that In Between state of attentiveness where I’m not quite alert enough to hold a conversation or follow the plotline of a moderately complex novel, but don’t want to surrender to the blank stare/ head tilt that I get when I listen to music. It’s nice to have someone who just keeps talking to you about vaguely interesting stuff without caring if you listen. Reminds me of college.

I am a huge fan of Slate’s Culture Podcast, which looks at everything from The Dark Knight to Pants on the Ground to French film directors to Jersey Shore with the same critical eye and has never failed to amuse/ inform me. I am particularly in love with Dana Stevens, one of their movie experts, for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the fact that she titled her review of that depressing movie Brothers “Let’s Get Emotional In The Snow,” and that she enjoyed Jennifer’s Body, a movie that recently delighted me to no end. They post a new podcast to iTunes every week and they’re free and you really have only the flimsiest of excuses for not listening, especially if you have any kind of commute to work.

They mentioned something in passing on a show from a few weeks back that I just listened to last week at the airport, and it’s sticking with me. There was a guest television commentator on doing a Decade In Review and when it was pointed out that she didn’t mention Buffy as one of her Best Shows of the 00s, she replied that she had never seen an episode but was saving it, in its entirety, for the future when she needed something to look forward to. This was matched by someone confessing that she had read all of Virginia Woolf but was saving To The Lighthouse for a great bout of depression or another future need.

I kind of can’t believe that this hasn’t already occurred to me. I’ve loved the idea of something being there for you when you truly need it since I became obsessed with King Arthur in college and read several medieval claims that he would return when Britain truly needed him (I am taking his absence to mean not that this myth is untrue but that Britain is doing a-okay thus far), and when Jo Rowling invented the Room of Requirement in Hogwarts for Harry Potter. Recently, I’ve said this about Battlestar Galactica to at least a dozen people unfamiliar with the show: it comes to you when you’re ready for it, and not before.

It’s going to be hard for me to keep anything in The Vault because I’m a Media Completist and want everything of what I like immediately if not sooner. Actually, I guess I’m kind of an Everything Completist, since this also extends to my attitude towards things like soda and sleeping and jelly beans. The average shelf life for a Cherry Craisin, can of Diet Pepsi, unwatched episode of Arrested Development or unread Pretty Little Liars book left unattended in my apartment is roughly 6 hours. I’m pretty sure that all the horror stories told around the campfire at the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Factory are about my apartment, as no peanut butter cup has ever made it through a night alive there.

So I’m going to combine this idea with another one that I come back to pretty frequently, which is the lingering presence of The Great Gatsby on my Best Books I’ve Never Read List. The gamble of putting something into The Vault for later consumption is the possibility that it might not live up to expectations and you’ll realize your whole life has been a sham (see also: why no one should save sex for marriage). But I’m pretty confident that there’s no way I’ll hate The Great Gatsby, so I’m keeping it on retainer until the universe tells me that I’m ready for it.

Unrelated, But Awesome: Rolling Stone recently quoted my little brother on his epic drinking habits. I love everything about this. It also dovetails nicely (this is something that people actually say at work with a straight face when they’re talking about any kind of ideological overlap. Really.) with my plans to do a series of blog posts wherein I annotate lyrics off the new Titus Andronicus album from the point of view of Patrick’s sister, a vantage point that I am particularly and exclusively designed to deliver. It’s going to be amazing. Trust me.

The Unsolicited Recommendation: The Droid. For Christmas, The Boyfriend upgraded my cell phone from a fairly awesome one to a Holy God This Is The Best Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me awesome one. I had to switch cell carriers to get it, which I’m okay with because I wasn’t under contract with my old one and didn’t wind up with any fees, and it lead to some hilariously embarrassing Look At The Young Couple Shopping Together moments for the two of us. I was unaware that he couldn’t be in a Verizon store for more than 7 minutes before wandering off to play with the newest blackberry, but I certainly found out quickly enough when he left me and the sales associate with a “I’ll be over there; call me when you need me to pay for something.” I understand that that statement is something akin to “I love you more than anything in the world” to some girls, but it mostly just made me want to sink into the floor and/or sing one of many girl power hip hop songs I have in my karaoke repository about not needing a man to buy me things. I tried to get back at him later when I asked the Verizon girl if I needed to sever ties with my old carrier myself and she responded to my “So, I have to break up with Sprint now?” with a “Nope, I just broke up with them for you,” and I cleverly fired back a “Great, do you think you could break up with him for me while you’re at it?” while jerking a thumb at the nearby boyfriend. “Don’t you want to wait until after he pays for your new phone?” she joked. Touche, Verizon chick. Tou. Che.

That said, the Droid is a total game-changer. I’ve never had an iPhone, but it really seems to be all the awesomeness of one without any of the sucky reception issues that Luke Wilson is always trying to tell us don’t exist on those awful commercials, and without selling (more of) your soul to Apple, as they already have a considerable chunk of mine. Mine is synced with my gmail contacts so I finally have everything in one place and no longer have to live in fear of losing everyone’s mailing addresses when I accidentally delete my Christmas card spreadsheet or lose my day planner, which I’ve actually had nightmares (multiple) about before. Some other thing it does: web browsing, facebook, twitter, quizzes me on the presidents, tells me my daily horoscope, gives me Yelp suggestions, holds all of my music/ beloved podcasts, shows YouTube videos, takes pictures and video, displays eBooks, gives me GPS directions, and has a giant  compass display to tell me which way is north for when I get up out of the subway station and am confused. (The Boyfriend: “I just remember what direction the train is going, and then I can figure out which way is north.” Cristin: “Well, it’s NOT QUITE THAT EASY for those of us who frequently get lost in their office building trying to get to the floor they have worked on for four years.”). I’m already so attached to it that I feel like I’m a few steps closer to needing one of those battery heart plug-ins that Iron Man has in order to survive, but I don’t even care because life with the Droid is so beautiful and magical.

The ALA Awards (including the abovementioned Newbery) were yesterday, which proved to be a Very Fun Day to work at my company, as we did spectacularly well. In particular, there was one book (When You Reach Me which, if you haven’t read, I am jealous of you because you get to read it for the first time, which is pretty much the greatest thing ever. You should buy it, especially since I can’t get you a copy because all the ones we had in the office are being guarded ferociously by their owners, which is totally understandable) that we have all been in love with since we read it forever ago and were all pulling for so much that we were scared to say it out loud because we didn’t want to jinx it.

We were so Almost Positive that it was going to win (as you’ll hear me say in the video, the only way it couldn’t would have been if the librarians had “gone f!cking rogue on me,” as librarians sometimes do) that WorkFriend Jen and I made plans to have a viewing party of the awards webcast with started at SEVEN FORTY FIVE IN THE MORNING on a Monday holiday from work (yesterday). I got up earlier for this kids’ book awards presentation that I didn’t even have to watch for work than I almost ever do for my actual job in kids’ books. And since internet “reaction videos” are all the rage these days, we taped ourselves watching When You Reach Me win. That’s right.

Nerdcast 2010: Watch Jen & Cristin watch When You Reach Me win the Newbery from Cristin on Vimeo.

(Apologies to Maggie– at the beginning of this clip, I look through the ballots for the ALA betting pool and I make the somewhat unfair comment that you are perhaps not the best at predicting awards winners. When I send out the results you will see that, in fact, none of us were good at choosing winners, I just picked you to rag on because you had already commented on how poorly you did. Emily picked the Glenn Beck picture book to win the Caldecott, so you certainly did a lot better than she did).

Some notes: Jen has a far more intense job than I do, as I merely sell the books but she has to manage all of their inventory. And I only have one inventory manager- Jen- but she has like 20 sales reps in addition to me that she has to deal with, and each of us thinks we’re more important than everyone else and we like to do things like walk into her office and go “So I didn’t estimate for this title, but I’m going to need 30,000 of them. And they have to ship by Tuesday.” So after we finished watching the awards I went to Barnes & Nobel (it’s around the corner from Jen’s apartment), sent 2 work-related emails, and took a 5 hour nap. Jen didn’t move from that spot on the couch all day because she was managing the crap out of everything. Her job is really hard, and she still gets up at 7 to watch the awards because she loves them, which is pretty amazing.

Also, because awards make so much more work for Jen than they do for me (8 hours of juggling on your day off vs. shopping and napping on your day off. You do the math), she knew about the winners 2 hours before I even got there so she could get started on evvvverything she has to do. And because she’s a great friend and because I had begged her not to tell me ahead of time, she poker faced it, Lady Gaga style, through the announcements so that I could enjoy, Christmas morning-style, finding out that we had won. And it was awesome.

Unrelated, but Awesome: Here is my favorite outtake from when Bud & Peej and I went to Sears to have our pictures taken:

Awkward Family Photos- Outtakes from Cristin on Vimeo.

Gentleman in New Orleans Loses Chunk Of Arm In Possible Zombie Attack. (via Boing Boing. This is not fake news, amazingly)

Not since George Romero’s seminal bloodfest Night of the Living Dead has so much flesh been munched by so many reanimated corpses.

“Other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race,” says Max Brooks, author of the 2003 best seller The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead, of the undead’s popularity. “Zombies are slate wipers.”

~USA Today article that features The Forest Of Hands and Teeth, which is easily my favorite book that RHCB is publishing this year.

And across the pond: The public’s unanticipated desire for the unusual conflation of Regency romance and the undead this morning sent Seth Grahame-Smith’s zombie mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies soaring to the top of Amazon’s UK “movers and shakers” chart, which monitors the books which are experiencing sudden demand from consumers. ~Guardian UK

I am so not above saying I Told You So. Zombies are awesome, guys.

Unrelated, Not Awesome: Stay Classy, Glen Rock.

Unrelated, But Awesome: I started making my Peep diorama last night for the Easter festivities. You have no idea how hard it is for me to NOT post a picture of the work in progress here (you know this particularly well if you’re one of the 8 people I’ve already emailed it to– it’s too awesome to keep to myself). I spent four hours building this thing out of a shoebox yesterday and I haven’t concentrated that hard on anything since the SATs. I’m adding the Actual Peeps tonight and will photo-document shortly. Let me just say this– I am Totally Effing Bringing It in terms of Peep scenery, you guys. You’d better be prepared to Bring It in return. My Peeps have a nicer apartment than I do. Now I can’t WAIT for Sunday.

1- Those top left two cubbies are my autographed books, which I photographed and itemized and logged with my insurance company when I moved even though most are sentimental favorites and not worth much scratch. Highlights include: All 4 Traveling Pants galleys; The View From Saturday; The Book Thief; Kiki Strike; King Dork; and Mysteries of Harris Burdick, my favorite picture book that doubles as Autographed Copy From The Author I Was Most Scared Of During The Signing. I’ll tell that story someday.

2- There’s the GMAT book I haven’t opened for the very good reason of Not Having Signed Up To Take The Test Yet. I’d much rather annotate my bookshelves. We’ll mark this one down as reason number 329 I should reconsider grad school.

3- That’s The Westing Game on the right and Fantastic Mr. Fox on the left. I reread each of these about every year or so and find myself using them as verb in casual conversation more than I should. Like when my parents talk about their wills I can’t resist being all “Are you going to Westing Game it and make the three of us search for your vast fortune?” or when I was discussing where in NYC I would choose to hide from zombies during what I know is an inevitable zombie apocalypse I thought “I would really love to hide in The Container Store as long as I could Fantastic Mr. Fox a tunnel into a nearby bodega to get food.”

4- I collect windup toys.

5- And Mr. Potato Heads.

6- You can’t see it very well, but that little book up front is I Like You, which I enjoy giving to people who don’t hear frequently enough from me how awesome they are. I have a copy of it in my office, as well, which I use as a fun Are You As Cool As I Think You Are test (if someone comes in and goes “Aww, I love that book!” then they are as cool as I think they are).

7- The essay/ memoir cubby. Standing up is EB White’s Here Is New York, which I bought during my 4 month layover in New Jersey this summer and then couldn’t read because it made me miss living in New York too much. I saw someone reading this on the D train the other day and I wanted to check and make sure he was a resident of one of the boroughs because if not, it’s just depressing if you love it here. I’m not a huge fan of memoirs but I love a good essay collection, especially since my Grow Up To Write A Book Like Sloane Crosley’s fantasy surpassed my Practice Your Acceptance Speech For Best Original Screenplay fantasy. I think I could wring an essay collection out of Stories About My Family on this godforsaken website alone, and then we would just have the task of making non-Stickles want to read it. Something to marinate on. On the bottom of that shelf is The Game, the pick-up artist book that Maggie became obsessed with back when we were at Harper, and that we all reference constantly (ex., “Everyone at the ugly sweater party was so friendly, and I talked to all these strangers. But I think that’s because the ugly sweater is unintentional peacocking.” ~Webmaster Kyle). Also in there is the Anna Quindlen book about her dog (Good Dog. Stay.) that made me cry like a baby, and the Ann Patchett book that made me weep like a child. (Those are the same thing, I just didn’t want to totally repeat myself. I wasn’t putting, like, shades of meaning in there or anything).

8- Adult Fiction, fronted by World War Z (how many times do I have to tell you how good this book is before you read it?) and Beowulf. My biggest regret about college is not, as you might guess, that class I failed Freshman year, or the fact that I didn’t drop that class before I failed it, or that guy I made out with Senior year while he was drunk from doing shots of listerine (stay classy, Delta Phi)–it’s that the Old English professor was on sabbatical I didn’t get to take an entire class on Beowulf. We’ve all got our weird things.

9-Nonfiction books about professional baseball, 60% of which are about the Mets. I have read none of these books in their entirety, but I’ve read parts of all of them.

10-Weird Nonfiction. My Walt Disney biography and three books about how weird Disneyworld is, two books on the mistreatment of munchkins during the filming of Wizard of Oz, one on Jim Henson, three books about Lincoln’s assassination, two on how collections in Natural History Museums are built (one of which tells you how many Eskimos had to die for the AMNH in NY), one on how people have died at the Grand Canyon, one on the black plague, and two on Sesame Street.

11- The top is a rotating display so none of the spines get messed up, but This Is New York always stays face-out.

12- One of two YA Fiction shelves with Honey, Baby, Sweetheart and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn face out. I’ve never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. The other day I was searching upcoming shows on my DVR because I wanted to find the TLC special on Tree-Man (who, I’m told by Annette, lives in some third world country and has some version of HPV that causes his skin to become bark-like) and it wasn’t available but a movie version of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was, so I taped it. But still haven’t watched it. I guess I just don’t want it bad enough on this one.

13- My riding chaps. These were my major Christmas gift from my grandpa when I was about 11- by that point, Grandpa Herb had a whole baseball team of grandkids and they were becoming hard to keep track of, so our parents would just buy us something off our list and Herb would bankroll it later. He knew I was a big-time pony girl, but still did a lot of “What the hell are THOSE for??” when I unwrapped them. My chaps have lived in my bedroom at home, in the trunk of my dad’s car, at summer camp in New Hampshire, at college in Virginia, and now in New York. I “retired” from riding after college (though the girls that were on the equestrian team with me at school might say that I really hung it up well before then based on my dedication and performance) but I like having my chaps somewhere where I can see them– if I had to pick one article of clothing to save from a fire, it would be these guys. I like having a reminder that I loved something that was good for me and was good at something that I loved, and I know I’ll get to go back to it at some point.

Unrelated, But Awesome:I have decided to have an Easter Egg Hunt on Sunday in honor of living in a big empty building and in honor of our risen savior. If you live in Brooklyn and are friends with me and I forgot to email you about this, please let me know. I just switched to gmail (I KNOW, right? Way to swing at a pitch 7 years late!) and am a bit confused as to where my email contacts are. Initially, I was all jazzed up about hiding eggs, but now I’m mainly jazzed about Things We Can Do With Peeps. FOR EXAMPLE:

Take Pictures Of Peeps At Historic Landmarks And Upload Them To The NatGeo flickr Pool.

Come Up With Needlessly Elaborate Scenes In Which The Peeps Shall Play. (I’m rooting for this one. Specifically, I plan to construct the CIC of the Battlestar Galactica when the Final 5 are standing in their Opera House Vision formation. How many of you understood a single word I just said?).

Depict Episodes of NBC Shows.

Explore the science of Peeps.

Have a Peep-Off. (A Peeps eating contest, pervert. Get your mind out of the gutter).

Study the gestational rate of Easter candy.

Make our own Peeps.

Get placement at the Denver Art Museum.

Recreate a Klan meeting with Peeps and almost get kicked out of your Virginia high school. (kids are idiots).  

Do some microwave Peep jousting.

Make S’Meeps.

This week my TV remote control just up and stopped working. I could get some buttons to light up but I couldn’t get it to scroll through the 8 hours of battlestar galactica I had saved (spoiler alert: my TV gets fixed, and I get to watch all of them. Aside from Friday’s episode, I am officially caught up. Eventually I’m going to add up how many hours of the last month I spent watching battlestar galactica just so I can quote it relentlessly in shock and awe, not unlike what I know my reaction will be when I finally add up this year’s Amazon purchases for my tax return. Yikes). For three days I tried to fix it myself, but the extent of my attempts were “unplugging and plugging back in” and “reading a book instead.” On Friday, I finally caved and called Time Warner, knowing that I had had a fairly rough day/ week at the office and figuring that it would be fun to have someone to get upset with.

And then I couldn’t. Because they were awesome. I know. I know. When in your life has customer service ever been awesome? I was floored. So floored that I wrote this ridiculous thank you email via their online form and saved the text so I could look at it later and decided if I was being obsequious. Turns out I wasn’t.

I just spoke with Andre in customer support about a problem I was having with my DVR (I believe the phrasing I used was “my remote control and TV aren’t speaking to each other. Please help”) and he was fantastic. I have about as much technological know-how as a crack addicted ferret and he was still able to explain the problem to me in a way that not only immediately fixed it, but gave me the (perhaps unfounded) confidence that I could take care of it on my own should the problem arise again. I’ve never written a note of gratitude to a customer service rep before (likely because (a) most customer service I encounter is terrible and (b) who has that kind of time on their hands?) but I feel like this experience deserves acknowledgement and applause. With all the horrors of today’s world, having a cable customer service guy who can fix your problems in 40 seconds and make you laugh in the process is pretty fantastic. Please thank Andre for me.

Also turns out that saying Thank You is really fun. No, seriously. I think I had a better time with this than Andre did. And I’m okay with it becoming a somewhat selfish act, what with me enjoying thanking people so much, because it’s way better than if, say, I got this  kind of a rise out of spreading honey on subway seats or something.

And, come on, we’re only halfway through March and Jon Stewart is already telling us that this is the worst year this country has seen since way, way, way before most of us were born. (I get all my news from the Daily Show. And Twitter.) Trying a little tenderness can’t hurt. Find someone to say thank you to– preferably in writing–and then pat yourself on the back for it, preferably on the internet. I promise you’ll like it.

Unrelated, But Awesome:If you haven’t already, you’re going to hear a lot from me soon about the book Lowboy by John Wray. I inhaled this over two days, which is EXTREMELY hard for me to do since I usually only read books meant for moody 14 year old girls with crushes on their best friends, and this is most certainly meant for adults. It’s amazing. And it’s (a) set in NYC {almost entirely in the subway system, which is fascinating} (b) written by a Brooklynite and (c) being publicized by said Brooklynite through readings in the aforementioned subway system. This one’s the real deal, people, I think you should all pick it up. If you don’t believe me:

New York Times Review

NPR All Things Considered (with excerpt)

New York Magazine

“Hey, I’ve got a great children’s book, too! It’s called F**k It, We’re All Going To Die.”

… only to find that, at once, an equally validating and horrifying experience.

I hope the shininess of that Newbery sticker distracts you from the knowledge that your industry is dying.

Enjoy the one day when it’s cool to be a librarian.

Congratulations on writing a book with a character that endures a tortured childhood that will go on to torture children on state reading lists for years to come.

Let’s face it, there can only be one Bridge to Terabithia.

After doing this for a few minutes I realized I had to stop before the part of my brain that got stuck doing 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon during college, causing me to fail my criminology midterm senior year, got stuck making children’s publishing someecards and wound up spitting out things like Thank god someone finally wrote a fantasy series about an orphan who’s The Chosen One every time I walk through a B&N teen section.

There was some controversy leading up to the awards this year (or, I should say, “controversy”– they’re still kids’ books. This is the great love of my life, but even I can acknowledge that we are not performing life saving surgery here) when people started questioning the relevance of the award and then other people started questioning the validity of that argument . I tend to side with Team A on this one– granted, I spend all day thinking about disney princess coloring books, so I probably have more of a tendency to Play To The Common Denominator than most do, but I think in recent years the awards committee has kind of turned into Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons (“Last night’s Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world”) in terms of awarding praise to the obscure. In the 90s, they were like the Yankees– they couldn’t lose. Holes, The Giver, Shiloh, Maniac Magee, Number the Stars– that’s just a ridiculous lineup. That’s El Duque, Tino Martinez, Jeter, Paul O’Neill, and Bernie Williams in nerd-speak. There have been books that I’ve loved in the last decade that have gotten well-deserved attention at ALA midwinter–The Wednesday Wars {one of my favorite books of 2007}, Looking For Alaska, A Northern Light, Al Capone Does My Shirts, Kitten’s First Full Moon, The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins {Best dinosaur picture book EVER, and I would know}– but this year, as the crap has been hitting the fan for everyone in print media, I think we could have used a set of winners that had more commercial appeal. I know saying that kind of makes me the devil and it sound like I want them to give Gossip Girl the Nobel Prize for Literature just so we can move some units, but I think these awards could really lift the industry and you don’t have to go obscure to find something that’s quality. The Hunger Games is an UnEffingBelievable book for young adults and should have been named just for that, but aside from that I’m a little sad that we missed a chance to have an award winner with massive commercial appeal.

That said– some of the choices yesterday were just perfect. I love that Savvy and The Underneath got Honors– they seem like the old-school Newbery picks (Savvy reminded me a little of Each Little Bird That Sings, or The Penderwicks)– and I am so, so excited for Neil Gaiman, who has been doing amazing things for children’s books for decades. Also, his twitter feed yesterday was amazing. He posted (I refuse to say “tweeted”) about his assistant calling him at 5:30 in the morning before he knew what it was about and followed up with “Oh. Never mind.” (When you get The Call it’s always very early in the morning and you’re always sworn to secrecy for a few hours. I remember talking to Kevin Henkes after he won for Kitten’s First Full Moon {that’s right– we were totally bros when I was at OldJob} and him saying he asked the Caldecott committee if he was allowed to call his mom and tell her). After the announcement, he was all “About to drink second cup of tea without Marmalade this morning. Also, I just won the Newbury Medal for THE GRAVEYARD BOOK,” immediately followed by “Newbery, not Newbury. Also FUCK!!!! I won the FUCKING NEWBERY THIS IS SO FUCKING AWESOME. I thank you.” How can you not love this man? I totally forgive you for giving me nightmares with Coraline, Neil.

My major beef this year is with the Caldecotts. We Are The Ship got shafted. It got a handful of minor/ minority awards that don’t add up to a Caldecott and I think that’s crap. I haven’t looked closely at the winning books but I don’t think I’ll love a picture book biography of William Carlos Williams any more than I love The Little Yellow Leaf or Old Bear. Fail!

The other big disappointment I faced down this week was being told that there’s a BBYA panel at the conference where they bring in Real Life Teenagers to break it down and having to deal with the knowledge that I didn’t jump in on this action when I was 16 and working in a bookstore and spewing ridiculous thoughts about children’s books to people who don’t care at all while, unbeknownst to me, there was a forum where they would have given me a microphone and appreciated my Keeping It Real. And now I’m too old to qualify. This is worse than when I realized I was too old to be on The Real World. Especially when Jordan sends me emails like this one, subject line “Cristin Stickles, age 16:”

From a young girl talking about Melissa Marr’s Ink Exchange at kids’ day at ALA:

 Once again Melissa Marr entranced me. This book is just short of addictive. I really loved the reappearance of Seth, who is one of my top fictional boyfriends.

How can I find this girl? I need to know where he ranks against Phineas from Separate Peace and Holden from Catcher in the Rye, who were the running nos. 1 and 2 in our “Fictional Characters We’d Bang” game at college.