Battle of the Books, We the People bookshelf grants

It's heating up over at the Battle of the Books. Catch their tweets here. "Judge Partridge" they're calling me. I like the sound of that. It has a certain heft, doesn't it?

Here's the brackets -- a complete list of the contestants and judges and how the books advance.
I'm on for Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson and Washington at Valley Forge by Russell Freedman. My winner goes toe to toe with Meg Rosoff's pick between Here Lies Arthur and Tender Morsels. And the final arbitrator of the whole show is Lois Lowry. Ahem... make that Judge Lowry.

Good news on another book front: National Endowment for the Humanities’ We the People Bookshelf grant program has awarded 4,000 libraries across the United States free hardcover editions of 22 classic books. This year's theme: Picturing America.

Check out the books for grades 9 to 12:

• Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis
  
• Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange by Elizabeth Partridge
  
• Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
  
• Viajes Con Charley - En Busca de America by John Steinbeck (translated by Jose Manuel Alvarez Florez)
  
• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Pretty impressive company I'm keeping! Steinbeck, Tocqueville and Partridge? I know this is really an award for Dorothea Lange and her incredible photography. Still, I'm happy to bask in her glow!

And because I love great images, check out this one below by Julie Paschkis from the front page of the We the People website. Beautiful! And I love image within image within image. Always magical.

Lois Lowry's magical touch, and how fantasy and non-fiction come from the same place

Lois Lowry has a recent wonderful blog post on July 24th. In a short paragraph she pulls together everything I love about writing: transforming the world into a magical place with imagination, a few twigs and stones, and a paper crane. She condense it all into a few beautiful sentences, ending with her acknowledgment of the ephemeral nature of the process.

Really, this isn't just about writing fantasy. It's about any writing. It's what I do when I'm doing non-fiction: take myself back, back, back there, write with emotion and passion, holding tight to the facts, to what people have said they felt, to how it smelled and looked and sounded. When it goes well, I'm not in the present, sitting hunched over my keyboard, a flurry of paper scraps all around me. I am there, as much as I can be there. I come out of those great writing sessions slightly confused and blinking, like an owlet exposed to sudden bright light.

Check out Lois Lowry's post. She's brilliant. Scroll down to her post, "All Kinds of Narrative."