Picture Perfect: Announcing the 2014 Spring Season!

We just couldn't wait until the new year to talk about our spring 2014 title list! Okay, maybe that's just me, but I am ridiculously excited about the great children's lineup we have for all you readers, and I'm betting everyone else in the Scarletta office feels the same way.

The year of 2013 saw some amazing children's and adult books rolled out from our imprints, and the birth of our new brand image at Scarletta. It was a fantastic start to what is sure to be an incredible publishing journey, especially with the titles we'll be buzzing about in 2014! So without further ado...

Start by digging in (pun intended, folks!) on March 20, 2014, with Garden to Table: The Kid's Guide to Planting, Growing, and Preparing Food by Katherine Hengel. Kids will fill their plates with fresh, self-sustained produce that comes straight from the garden. Step-by-step planting, care, and harvesting tips, along with step-by-step photos for over 30 delicious recipes made with basil, carrots, green beans, leaf lettuce, potatoes, and tomatoes. Incorporating unique flavors and easy-to-grow veggies, these simple recipes will have you asking for seconds!

You met Monster in fall 2013, and if you're a normal or abnormal person, immediately fell in love with him. He's giant, blue, hairy, and cavorts around with the energy of a four year old thanks to talented illustrator Wendy Grieb. Well, Paul Czajak's adorable Monster & Me™ series continues on April 8, 2014, with Monster Needs His Sleep. In Czajak and Grieb's second collaboration, it's time for bed, and Monster needs to go to sleep. But he just keeps finding more things to stay awake for! It isn't until Monster admits he is afraid of the dark that he finds a glowing solution to his nightmare problem.

A picture book series not quite your style? Looking for something older? Fan of adventure and fantasy series? Then have we got something for you! That may have been too cheesy of a build up, but seriously, middle-grade readers will love our new Tristan Hunt and the Sea Guardians series by Ellen Prager. The Shark Whisperer, book one, is an action-packed story of adventure, fantasy, and humor that reveals the wonders of the ocean. After falling into a pool of sharks, things for awkward Tristan Hunt begin to look up. Tristan is invited to an ocean-themed summer camp in the Florida Keys where he discovers that he and his fellow campers have very rare talents when it comes to the ocean. After the camp receives a distress call from ocean animals, the Sea Guardians get pulled into a daring rescue in the Bahamas. With the help of sharks, dolphins, a quick-escape artist octopus, and some seabird bombers, the campers must use their talents in an attempt to outwit an evil shark-finning, reef-blasting billionaire.

We'll keep on the animal theme and finish out the spring 2014 season with another adorable picture book, If An Armadillo Went to a Restaurant by Ellen Fischer, and illustrated by Laura Wood. Would an armadillo order spaghetti with meatballs if she went to a restaurant? No way! She would like a plate of ants and worms. Little ones will slurp, munch, and crunch their way through this delightful book about animal diets and habitats. In the end, you might find yourself asking just what you might like to order.


Think these books are awesome? Guess what...they're all available for pre-order from your favorite book vendor! Might we also suggest these books as great for your 2014 book lists? If you love them, tell us about it with a customer review (and tell your bookseller too so they can keep recommending our quality books to other readers!).

Why Don't People Go on Book Diets? What Would It Mean If They Did?

The literary world is full of terms like "devour" or "consume" used to describe how one reads a book. Even the term "bookworm" finds it's roots in the tradition of referring to any insect that may chew through books as "worms" even though damage is typically caused by the Common Paper Louse (Don't google that if you don't like bugs. Or really, even if you do. It's just no fun).

So, if we're good with imagining books as some sort of brain food, then how far can we stretch that? Book restaurants? We've got those in the forms of book stores. Books about how to prepare books? That's an entire genre, and not a small genre at that. There are tons and tons of parallels, mostly because I'm looking for them, but they exist.

And yet, I'm not seeing much by way of book diets. I mean, diet books are everywhere, but there don't seem to be many people writing about selective book consumption for a specific purpose. Why not? Perhaps it's because people generally believe that no books are detrimental. I doubt that because if that were true, banned books week would be blueberry muffin week or something due to lack of banned books. Perhaps people are worried that going on a book diet might limit their worldview, and there may be some merit to that. I feel like the real reason is because nobody else has the right combination of spare time, relevance to work, and penchant for pointless rambling necessary to discuss the future of literary book clubs.

BOOK DIETS:

The Cleanse: Nothing but children's books, without any trace of sadness, scariness, or really anything that can't be described as "warm and fuzzy" or "super wicked cool". Great for getting you mentally back in shape to see the world as a beautiful place of excitement and adventure. As an adult, you may need to repeat the cleanse multiple times annually for continued effectiveness.

The Doyle Diet: Nothing but sleuth protagonists. Maybe sprinkle in a cheap murder-mystery on cheat days. Ideally a weekly dose of Sherlock Holmes accented by Poirot as necessary. This diet is sure to help you bulk up your intuitiveness, and slim down your cluelessness. Side-effects may include increased paranoia and a penchant for stylish hats.

The ABC Diet: Apocalypses, Battlefields & Catastrophes. This diet consists of steady doses of Disasters of all proportions. End-of-Days and Final Hours stories help keep you thankful that you live in a relatively safe world. Also, all that panicking you do for the characters towards the end will keep your heart rate up, burning real world calories. It's a truly transcendent diet. 

These are just a few of the many diets that I'm sure could one day come to be the driving force behind book clubs the world over. Let these culinary collections of chapter books shape how you read, and watch as your mind becomes truly fit. Or, just keep reading like you always do. That's never a bad thing.

Are To-Read lists still Vogue? Also, why is Vogue still on my To-Read list?

“Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read.” - Virginia Woolf

There are probably as many quotes about books and reading as there are books. It's difficult to find the right quote, because unlike finding a needle in a haystack, I can't just burn all the wrong quotes and wait to dig the right one from the ashes. Not that I've ever contemplated the easiest solution to the old needle/haystack problem or anything. No, instead you wind up reading quote after quote, each good but not quite relevant enough for your purposes until eventually you either stumble across the right one or you just give up and pick the next quote by Mark Twain.

This problem is even worse in books, because most of the wittiest quotes are only a sentence or two but books, well books aren't. So, instead of trying to have a right book for the situation I, like I hope most readers still do, have a to-read list. A special shelf of books that I feel are important enough to isolate and focus on. Well it was a shelf, but now that ebooks are starting to fill my life it's a little more complicated. From books, to ebooks, to magazines, my to-read grows faster than my have-read and I  begin to wonder why I even try to keep up.

Because I really like things, that's why. I really like reading about bears that have emigrated from "Darkest Peru", or murders on uppity liberal arts college campuses. So I read books like the Paddington Bear series, or The Secret History. I also really like looking at photos of stunningly designed dresses or well-tailored blazers. This means Vogue will always hold a place on my shortlist for best in-flight reading. I really like things, and words or pictures printed on paper is a wonderful portal to those things.

Because there really wasn't a ton of purpose to this besides me sharing some thoughts, let's make this meaningful. Tell me your thoughts on reading lists, share with me some of the books, magazines, comics or really anything you feel should be added to my To-Read list, and I'll give it some thought. Just please, no books about quotes.

Crowd-Sourcing My Reading List: A Thank You to Library Patrons That Reserve Books

It's gloomy outside. I'm talking cloudy-skies, but the really sad grey instead of the fearsome black that comes with true storms, slight drizzle that hints at hail occasionally and a sort of chilly gust that doesn't just bite, but gnaws at your nose and ears and fingers until you want to run back inside and curse the skies. Truly awful weather.

And yet, I'm excited. Not for the weather, of course, but rather because of what it means. It means that it's time to go to the library. Now obviously I think it's time to go to the library basically every day, and thanks to good legislation and a well-read society that's an option. But this is different, this is the beginning of reservation season. There is nothing on the internet that I can find to support my claim, but I stand behind it. Late-October/Early-November brings a beautiful upswell of books reserved at my public library. I noticed it several years ago when I volunteered, misguidedly, to help reshelve the books that were never picked up, and it became my weekly duty. 

There's something strangely intimate about seeing the books that people reserve, scanning through the titles that people felt so strongly about reading at some point that they requested they be sequestered from general population. Like the collectibles section in an antique store, these things hold value greater than their peers. But to who? That was always the biggest question I could never answer, since the reserve slips only ever had a library card #, all I could do was make feeble attempts at guessing the age, gender, or interests of the intended recipient. And it was within that mystery that I found the value of the reserve section.

There are countless ways to find books, from bookstore suggestions to review sites, and they all present me with the same general information. Which books are popular, which authors are popular, what genre is hot right now? And that's exactly the information that I want from them, except, sometimes I don't want it and it's still there. And what's worse it updates constantly, so firmly rooted in the present that if you look away for a couple months, you could miss a ton of hidden treasures. But not in the reserves section. Instead it seems to be the antithesis of review sites; no names, no star system, not even thumbs up/down, in most cases the books haven't even been read by the person selecting them. And yet, it has no predilection for the present and it holds no bias, just books that people think should be read. 

It'd be as good as random if I couldn't pick out the patterns, but they're in there, a dash of late-80's wilderness fiction anchored by Gary Paulsen's The Hatchet here, Clyde B. Clason and Charlotte Armstrong providing a smattering of 1940's Fiction there. Something drives these patterns, and as such drives my own exploration. I discovered my love of 1950's science-fiction centering around utopian city planning gone wrong, or how I learned that while the mid-19th century did have more lax rules about punctuation, Charlotte Brontë really was just bad at avoiding run-on sentences (I suffer this habit myself). This is where I find my reading list to fill the gaps between new releases I've been anticipating. This is where I've rounded out my experiences, and grown beyond the genres I would otherwise have trapped myself within.

And so I thank each and every one of you that has reserved a book, I thank you for being the filter that I want but lack the experience to become, and I thank you for your unwitting contribution to my life as a reader. Now please stop reserving a million copies of Infinite Jest, they're getting hard to wade through.

Christmas Advent Calendar—In Books!

We all know the traditional Christmas advent calendars where you get a piece of chocolate every day for the twenty-four days leading up to Christmas. Well this year, we thought we would break that tradition in favor of something a little more bookish . . . and a lot more fun! (Although, if you want, you can still eat the chocolate too.)

In the spirit of the holidays, we put together a list of twenty-four of our favorite children's books—some classics, some new—and made our own advent calendar. You can wrap these up under your tree, and every night before Christmas, your family can read one together. Sounds like the perfect way to get ready for the holidays, no?

Below the image are the links to buy all the books from your favorite bookstore. This Saturday, December 1, just happens to be Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, so grab the kids, head to your local bookstore, and stock up on these holiday favorites!

24. How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Suess
23. Olive, the Other Reindeer by J. Otto Seibold
22. Yes, Virginia There Is a Santa Claus by Chris Plehal
21. The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg
20. Olivia Helps with Christmas by Ian Falconer
19. If You Take a Mouse to the Movies by Laura Joffee Numeroff
18. The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
17. The Nutcracker (this version) by Susan Jeffers
16. Merry Christmas, Splat by Rob Scotton
15. A Charlie Brown Christmas by Charles M. Schulz
14. The  Worst  Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson
13. Dream Snow by Eric Carle
12. The Twelve Days of Christmas (this version) by Laurel Long
11. Fletcher and the Snowflake Christmas by Julia Rawlinson
10. The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett
9. Eloise at Christmastime Kay Thompson
8. Peef the Christmas Bear by Tom Hegg
7. Merry Christmas, Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola
6. Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas by Jane O'Conner
5. Wombat Divine by Mem Fox
4. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (adaptation)
3. Bear Stays Up for Christmas Karma Wilson
2. The Christmas Quiet Book by Deborah Underwood
1. The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Music Education Week

It's National Music Education Week, and to celebrate, we've compiled a list of musically inclined books for your reading pleasure. No matter if you're looking for books by musicians, about musicians, or inspired by musicians, there's something on the list for you. We even added a few children's books in case you want to celebrate music education week with your family!
If you want to find out more about any of the books, or purchase them online, you can follow the links that correspond to each numbered cover. Happy reading!

1. Forever Young by Bob Dylan and illustrated by Paul Rogers
2. High Fidelity by Nick Hornsby
3. Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield
4. One Love Adapted by Cedella Marley - Based on the song by Bob Marley
5. Come As You Are by Michael Azerrad
6. The Ice Castle: An Adventure in Music by Pendred Noyce
7. Hassie Calhoun: A Las Vegas Novel of Innocence by Pamela Cory
8. Just Kids by Patti Smith
9. Spiral Bound by Dessa
10. The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus
11. Mama Don’t Allow by Thacher Hurd
12. Under their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with the Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It) by Bill German
And if we've forgotten one of you're own favorite music books, make sure to add it to the list!