The new project I’m working on, yet unnamed, but the idea behind it is that for every calendar day of the year, I am going to recommend a children’s book tied to that calendar day. So if it’s National Walk On Stilts Day, and there is one by the way, I will write about MT Anderson’s “Whales on Stilts”, alright, so I’ll tie it to a book. If it’s August and the time that Anne Frank was found in, in the Netherlands, obviously I’m going to talk about “The Diary of Anne Frank”.
So it will be tied both historically and to holidays and even July 31st will, for those in the know, that’s course Harry Potter’s birthday. So sometimes it’s a character’s, you know, it’s something in the book or it’s something that it relates to. Now what we’re going to do to sort of tie in the new media with this concept, is that as I write the book and coming in June, it’s going to go up live.
So people will actually see it a day at a time as I write it. So everydaym you’ll be able to go on line to the entry for that day, read the book that I recommend, read a section from the book, read other recommendations, read a list of things that happened on that day, print it out, use it in school, use it in libraries, use it in bookstores, however people want to use it.
And that’s really the idea of wedding the new technology with the old technology because we have a year, we’ll print it for the Almanac or Children’s Book A Day of 2012. So by the end of the year, there will be a book there. So it’s very exciting, it’s terrifying because it means you know I can’t have a, writer’s block, I mean it just has, I just have to keep writing it, hopefully keep up the quality of it.
But it’s been wonderful to play with because I have several thousand books obviously in, in my brain and to be able to choose the best of them and to advocate for the best of them, on a daily basis, is kind of a dream actually, come true. So each day I’ll be giving you a new book.
It will be the best of classics, it’ll be the best of the last 10 years. It will be some other’s books that got some attention when they came out but then people haven’t talked about them enough recently, so I’ll be able to talk about that. And of course then I’ll be able to give those stories behind the book that I love to tell about. So it will be, I think
June 12th, I am writing about Margaret and Hans Rey leaving Paris because that’s the day that they actually peddled out on their bicycle of Paris.
So I’ll be able to tell some of those stories that I love to tell.