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Perfect

New blog post!: http://dlvr.it/PdBbxs

Turkish Delight

http://dlvr.it/PckZnX

jacdurac

tinabgibby

I learned to drive in a Plymouth Valiant station wagon with this push button transmission.

#bluey

colchrishadfield

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I’d close my eyes too! Woodpeckers’ heads withstand 1000 Gs. Here’s why they don’t get brain injury: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026490

tinabgibby

@douglasbgibson

trumpisaliar

1 share = 1 vote to kick Renee out of the country.

hannahhillam

Time to get out of bed and straight into second bed

harperperennial

William H. Macy shares his pick for the One Book One New York program: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.

Bonus: lots of shameless puns.

Vote for your pick here.

nprbooks

Ahhhh we LOVE A Tree Grows in Brooklyn! I personally can’t remember who gave me my copy – probably my mom – but I read it over and over again (and now I know what a fascinator is). Tree is an outlier among the YA lit of its time – “earthy” is a good way to describe its approach to sexuality and its rich, unflinching portrait of pre-WWI Brooklyn – long before the first artisanal mayonnaise shop was a glimmer in anyone’s Warby Parkers.

The great Lois Lowry (author of The Giver) wrote an essay for our old PG-13: Risky Reads series about her childhood love of the book:

It was raw and real and, to me at 13, often shocking. But I never confided in my friends with a giggle that I had found a new dirty book — it wasn’t. It was a book about life that revealed more to me than my earlier loved books ever had.

She’s not the only one – Peggy Orenstein (author of, most recently, Girls & Sex) wrote a piece for our series You Must Read This:

Unlike the reassuring books of early childhood, this one confirmed what, as a nearly teenaged girl, I’d come to suspect: Life’s not fair, but you can survive it anyway.

So what I’m saying is, if you haven’t read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn yet, hop on over to the library and pick it up! Even if you don’t live in New York.

– Petra

lolliblog

So Much Happiness

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing, and disappears when it wants to. You are happy either way. Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own, it too could wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches, and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and scratched records.

Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it, and in that way, be known.

This poem by Naomi Shihab Nye is exactly (happily!) how I feel today.