A Window Full of Dragons!
Oh my goodness, everyone. Would you like to see maybe the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen?
!!!!! That is the current window of the largest independent bookstore in France, Le Furet de Lille, which is also clearly THE GREATEST BOOKSTORE IN THE WORLD, with the most brilliant window designers. 🙂 Isn’t it beautiful? So many dragons! Giant wall of dragons! Giant wall of Glory, in fact! Oh, I wish I could fly to France right now so I could just gaze adoringly at this window all day! Really, why don’t all my house windows look like this? I am going to tell my husband that we have clearly not thought through the wonderful possibilities of wallpapering our house with Wings of Fire covers. EEEE SO GENIUS.
(This seems like an excellent time to pause and acknowledge again the actual genius of Joy Ang, the artist behind these amazing covers — I’m so in awe of her, there are no words.)
So if anyone reading this blog is near Lille, France, please stop by this wonderful bookstore and tell them I love them and then buy like four hundred books from them. (They don’t have to be my books! Buying any books from wonderful bookstores is wonderful!) 🙂 And if you’d like to take MORE pictures of this window and send them to me (here or via Facebook), that would be OK by me! 🙂
I know, my goodness, enough about me already. Tomorrow my plan is to tell you all about the Decatur Book Festival and the crazy-amazing authors I met there, so you can go read all their books next!
But one last Tui thing for today — remember Scholastic’s Summer Reading Challenge, which I mentioned a few blogs ago? I realized I never came back to share the story I wrote with you guys, once it was up on the website. So, in case you’re interested in a very short story by me (with wildly adorable art not by me) — remember, all the authors were given the same first sentence and told to imagine whatever we wanted from there! — here it is:
Always Pack a Solar Charger: A Cautionary Tale (edited to add: OK, there isn’t a link that will take you right to the story — you have to click on the little book icons at the top of this page, right above “Power Up & Read”. Mine is the 8th one along, right above the “&”, between Blue Balliet’s and Roland Smith’s.)
You can also read the other authors’ stories, too, by clicking on the other little book icons at the top of the main Summer Reading page. I think they’re all rather spectacular. 🙂 And congratulations to the winning schools and all the awesome participating summer readers!
More soon!
As a break from What We’re Reading, how about a Quote of the Day, since I couldn’t possibly love this one more:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos