Today is Monday, and I have had a lovely gentle weekend of biking around Kent, enjoying the Farmers' Market, the river pathway, and I even found a yoga class to attend. Heaven really.
I got through
another heap of beautiful books on Friday, and wanted to share some of the books
which stood out for me. Two were illustrated by an artist called Domi. The one which stood out for me is based on
her own life as part of a Mazateca village (South Mexico) forced to move to a new location with very poor soil because of the building of a dam. In the blurb of the book (Napi
funda un pueblo/Napi makes a village, House of Anansi Press, 2010), Domi is
described as “one of the most important indigenous book artists in the Americas.
The stories from her childhood offer North American children a view into the
lives of people whose spirit and courage in the face of loss of land, political
repression and exploitation do not dim their
joy of living and their deep engagement in their physical and moral
universe”. You can see the gorgeous cover of the book here, and those of you who
know how much I love colour will smileJ
Another was the
story of the first Puerto Rican librarian in the New York Public library
system. Her name was Pura Belpre, and she created a space within the New York
Public library where Spanish speakers were welcome and could borrow resources.
I knew her name previously only for the award named after her which is awarded
by the Association for Library Services for Children annually to a Latino or
Latina author and illustrator whose work best represents Latino cultural
experience.
You can see this
year’s winners here:
I’m aiming to get
the Spanish-English books complete by the middle of Wednesday at the latest, so
I will have time to look at the other dual language books featured in the
collection, but we’ll see how we go. Sometimes I spend a lot longer on a book
than is strictly necessary for data collection purposesJ but I am very happy to be taken away; that’s what good books do.
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