Welcome to the 2011 Surrender, Dorothy Blogger Book Gift Guide! This year, I've linked all the books to their spot on the shelf at the Bookstore That Gives (remember that rockstar high school intern?). A portion of your purchase price can be designated to go to the school of your choice.

Some of these authors have more than one book, so I've put my favorite one in this gift guide. *This list is, of course, not complete ... I limited it this year to people I've met via blogging. If I've left you off, please let me know! I'm getting old.

Sleep Is for the Weak

Edited by ... moi! I know, you're shocked. Get the original mommyblogger anthology with 25 bloggers who have gone on to greatness. Buy here.

Let's Panic About Babies

By Alice Bradley and Eden Marriott Kennedy

Eden and Alice have always been hilarious, but this book takes it to a new level. Buy here.

The Beauty of Different

By Karen Walrond

I bought one for me and one for my daughter. May she always feel beautiful. Buy here.

It Sucked and Then I Cried

by Heather B. Armstrong

How her blog readers saved her from postpartum depression. Buy here.

The Pioneer Woman

By Ree Drummond

I read part of Ree's love story on her blog, and that's what made me fall in love with her as a person. Here's the whole thing in book form. Buy here.

PunditMom's Mothers of Intention

by Joanne Bamberger

Mothers and political activism so totally go together. Buy here.

Professional Blogging for Dummies

By Susan Getgood

Susan's really smart about this stuff. Also, she quoted me in her book. HA! Buy here.

The Secret Society of the Pink Crystal Ball

By Risa Green

I've enjoyed all of Risa's books, but my favorite is this young adult mystery. Buy here.

Falling Apart in One Piece

by Stacy Morrison

A heartbreakingly beautiful memoir about what matters in life. Buy here.

What I Would Tell Her

by Andrea N. Richesin

Nicki is the anthologist to end all anthologists -- my favorite is the one with the stories of dads for their daughters. Kleenex alert. Buy here.

Mommy Doesn't Drink Here Anymore

by Rachael Brownell

An honest, raw and well written story of sobriety. Buy here.

Rockabye

by Rebecca Woolf

A baby and a husband and an armful of tattoos so young -- and so right. Buy here.

Make It Fast, Cook It Slow

by Stephanie O'Dea

I have made a bunch of these crockpot recipes. They are good. Buy here.

The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published

by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry

The best book on the publishing business I've read yet, and I've read a lot of them. Buy here.

Insatiable

by Erica Rivera

Erica's first memoir on her struggles with eating disorders -- I couldn't rip my eyes away from the pages. Buy here.

Hollywood Car Wash

by Lori Culwell

Lori self-published this novel and then sold so many copies it was bought by Simon & Schuster. Buy here.

Kirtsy Takes a Bow

Edited by Laura Mayes

Laura's collection is beautiful and insightful. Full disclosure: I also have a piece in it! Buy here.

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

by Judith Warner

I interviewed Judith about her second book for BlogHer, but I really loved her first one best. Buy here.

The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

I met Gretchen when I interviewed her about happiness in marriage for a series on BlogHer. Loved her comments, loved her book. Buy here.

Life From Scratch

by Melissa Ford

A novel about a blogger. What's not to love? Buy here.

The Mominatrix's Guide to Sex

by Kristen Chase

After a few years writing a sex column and four kids -- um, I believe her. Buy here.

As the holiday giving season/tax year draws to a close, please keep in mind you can also give a tax-deductible donation DIRECTLY TO YOUR SCHOOL. Just ask at the school office. 

Reading is awesome. Writing is awesome. Schools teach both. Please support your schools, whether or not you have kids.

I went today to attend a program at my daughter's school. The theme was patriotism, after the 10-year anniversary of 9/11. It's scheduled this week so family members in town for Thanksgiving can attend. 

It was cute and all until they sang about being the generation of the future. And then they sang, "We have the chance to do it right."

And I got all gooey watching these kids -- who clearly believed so totally in what they were singing -- dance and sing about America being the land of opportunity, so open to immigrants, the poor, the huddling masses.

It was hard not to think about how we're fighting about immigration and occupying Wall Street and all. It was hard not to realize as they sang about remembering that most of them hadn't been born yet in 2001.

I hope they have the chance to do it right. I hope we educate them well enough. I hope we teach them history -- real history -- so they don't repeat the mistakes of the past. I hope this generation puts the emphasis on compassion more than greed. I hope they don't have to occupy anything but their space in the world. I hope they leave that world better than they found it. 

I hope there's still time for my generation to do the same thing.

So about a week ago, I got the following email:

Hello,

I know, I’m supposed to follow your blog, comment regularly and build a relationship before sending you a note. 

But I’m a high school student interning at a nonprofit, and I’m helping spread the word about a book giveaway for classrooms.  So I hope that you will welcome a good message from a teen as much as you would a note from a regular reader.  In any event, please forgive the lapse of blogger etiquette as I try to help get books into the hands of kids who need them.

Author & TV host Leon Logothetis is giving away books for classrooms (not his book – whatever books the teacher wants). Teachers and parents can enter to win, so I hope you will find this interesting and worth sharing with your readers.

There’s no purchase necessary.  Just visit http://ClassWish.org/FreeBooks

Leon, author of Adventures of a Nobody, is driving the Kindness Cab from New York Times Square to Los Angeles for the start of World Kindness Week, November 14.

Upon his arrival, he will announce the winning classrooms that will receive free books.

Leon is working with http://ClassWish.org, which helps teachers and PTAs get the classroom resources they need, without spending their own money.  

Again, I hope the chance for children to receive free books will win out over me not being a regular reader, and I hope that you will please share this opportunity with the teachers and parents at your child’s school and with your readers.  Again, it’s:  http://ClassWish.org/FreeBooks

Thank you very much!

Best wishes,

Marc 

I was amused by his repetition of the fact he does not read my blog and has never read my blog. However, I checked out the site he was talking about and was so impressed I put a redirect on my Sleep Is for the Weak cover in the right rail of this site so if you click it now, you'll be buying it from this store and helping out educators.

And then I wrote Marc back:

Hi Marc-

I'm choosing to believe you are really a high school student and not a highly paid marketer in disguise. Either way, the site looks great and I just facebooked and tweeted it. Excellent job, you have a bright future in front of you because your voice is better than most of the eight gazillion professional pitches I get for this blog.

Best,

RJBA

Then I got an email from the co-founder:

Hi Rita,

Marc was so thrilled by your note that he passed it on to me (I am the co-founder of ClassWish.org).  He is, indeed, a high school student – one of several interning with us from School of the Future, here in Manhattan.

These students understand why this cause is so urgent; they live with the need every day.

I’m copying him and his faculty advisor, Emily, in on this note.

Rita, thanks for your faith and your help in spreading the word.

Marc, take a bow!

Rita, Marc admitted that he didn’t read your blog, but I just took a look.  Sleep is for the Weak, indeed! 

You might also be interested in this – your book in a new bookstore that supports classrooms.  The site offers a 10% discount plus a donation to classrooms (generally 10% on paperbacks and 20% on hardback trade books):

https://bookstorethatgives.mybooksandmore.com/MBM/actions/searchHandler.do?userType=MLB&tabID=GENERAL&itemNum=ITEM:2&key=0007678415&nextPage=booksDetails&parentNum=12865

Thank you again for your support.

Best wishes,

Robert

The email ended up going to Marc's faculty advisor. I am thrilled to have Sleep Is for the Weak in this store. Sometimes, it's totally worth it to open those emails, and this was one of those times.

I sat in an auditorium last night listening to four adults talk about learning to read ... as adults. I knew the program was going to be a combination of Literacy KC students and featured authors. I thought it would be interesting. I didn't expect that it would make me cry, would make them cry.

Christina Jones, Greg Ballard, Mona Taylor and Jim Dowler talked about why they enrolled. Greg was diagnosed with cancer and told he had a year to live, so he decided to learn to read. That was two years ago. Christina Jones watched all her kids go to college and finally gave herself permission to finish high school. Mona Taylor came here from Jamaica, learned to read and is at UMKC enrolled in pre-law now. Jim Dowler found himself functionally illiterate when he failed a test for work. He's back in the driver's seat of his semi truck.

---

That all sounds nice typed out like that, doesn't it? Nice little success stories. But listening to them describe what they had gone through to get there, voices trembling, talking about how reading is power, being able to understand newspapers and contracts and signs without help is freedom, how writing is independence ...  I tried to imagine what it would be like to flounder through life never quite getting it, how terrifying and frustrating that would be to not comprehend the world around me in written form.

Christina talked about being a kid: "Now, we call it 'dyslexia.' In the fifties, they called it 'dumb.'" As I do with everything now that I've gone and become a mother, I pictured the little angel in that situation, abandoned as a reader. 

---

There were authors, too. I was particularly struck by Gabriela Lemmons, the founding member of The Latino Writers Collective. Gabriela is the daughter of migrant workers with only a second-grade education. She spoke of growing up reading the side of cereal boxes as her literature, of not discovering Latino writers until college. Of the need to read something by someone who looks and sounds like you.

"Tell me whose company you keep, and I'll tell you who you are," she said. "I am among writers."

I am among writers.

---

There are 225,000 functionally illiterate people in Kansas City. One in five. 

One in five people in this normal, mid-sized American city can't read a newspaper. Can't write well enough to be understood. 

What would it be like if I were one of them? If my daughter couldn't read or write? 

There is a tendancy among the degreed to think everyone has a degree. As of 2008, a mere 27% of the American population had a BA or higher. It blows my mind to think two people in the same city driving the same roads and buying coffee at the same convenience store and pumping the same gas and paying the same taxes could be either a PhD or functionally illiterate.

With the exception of Mona from Jamaica, the Literacy KC adult learners grew up in America. Went to school in America. Couldn't read.

The last author, Natasha Ria El-Scari, talked about her parents buying the World Book Encyclopedia. I remember when my parents bought their encyclopedia. I remember hearing over and over that my father had read the entire encylopedia when he was a kid. I wanted to be like that. Natasha also talked about encouraging children to write, to find their voices, to own their words. Giving ourselves permission to do the same. 

It's hard for me to imagine anyone not wanting to write, though I realize it's because I'm so hard-wired to do so. I don't really comprehend why I need to share my thoughts with the world. I've wished in the past I could not feel this way, because it seems so much easier to keep to yourself. People who don't write don't get people criticizing them all the time publicly for what they think. But on the flip side, what if I couldn't articulate my thoughts at all in writing? My sphere would be limited to who could hear my voice. I would feel tiny.

My daughter is gifted. She was chosen for her school's gifted program in first grade after a test she was flagged to take after kindergarten. I always joked when she was a baby that she was very smart, but who knew if she would actually turn out to be a good learner? It wasn't my stellar parenting, for sure. We read to her, of course, but her brain functions as it functions due to genetics that Beloved and I got from someone else upstream.

She is no more responsible for her giftedness than she would be responsible for a learning disability. But it doesn't cease to exist, either. She is responsible, in my opinion, for using that brain of hers. Responsible as those of us who write are for articulating the world around us, for questioning it, for gathering information and synthesizing it and inviting discussion about it. 

---

Every day I am thankful so far school has been easy for her. I have more friends than I can count whose kids do not have this experience for one reason or another. 

I have never fully appreciated until last night how thankful I should be that she can read and write.

What her life would be like if she got spit out of the system on the other end not able to read her cable bill.

How that would impact her choices in life.

How that would impact her ability to find friends, find a mate.

How small her world would be if she could only communicate with those who could hear her voice.

I heard those four adult learners' voices last night. I heard them shake with frustration at the memory of being illiterate and pride and hope now that they aren't. Two of them learned to read in their fifties -- children raised, a life lived not being able to read the news headlines.

Right here in America. 

Mona said you can move mountains if you can read and write, that nothing can stop you. 

I wiped my eyes and drove home to find Beloved and the little angel reading in bed. I kissed her head and listened to her little voice so confident and animated reading a story about a cat. 

I will tell her later that she can move mountains because she can read and write.

I will tell her how very lucky she is.

And I will demand that she use her words.

This morning, a friend alerted me to an article on NPR's Shots blog. The headline: To Curb Childhood Obesity, Experts Say Keep Fat Babies in Check.

It immediately pissed me off, of course. This formerly disordered eater worried incessantly about my fat baby girl. The girl people stopped me on the street to comment about. I've been watching with interest the comments on a post on BlogHer about fat talk around children. Some people are adamently opposed (as am I) and some people think it's our job as parents to limit kids' eating and make sure they don't gain too much weight.

My daughter has been "normal" weight since she was about two, and she's always been able to stop eating when she's full -- even if she's halfway through a chocolate shake. I've always praised her for stopping when she's full, but I've never stopped her from eating dessert. I don't want her to have a weird relationship with food. I just want her to eat when she's hungry, stop when she's full, and mix in some vegetables.

However, the NPR article was talking about babies and toddlers, and here are some of the tips they gave:

Cut down the time children spend watching TV or using the computer or cell phone.

We are talking about babies and toddlers. My baby was off the charts for her first full year, and I swear to you that she only used the computer or her cell phone for an hour a day.

Make sure kids are getting the right food portions for their age.

I monitored my daughter's milk intake like a hawk for that first six months. I don't care how hungry she was! I pulled that bottle or boob out of her mouth the second she hit her age-appropriate limit.

So parents and child care providers can do small kids a favor by not letting them get too big, even if that means turning off Nickelodeon.

I'm working on a post for BlogHer (I'll share a link here when it goes up) regarding an interview I recently did with a PPD/ED specialist at UNC. We got to talking about body types and how they impact eating disorder recovery. She told me some of her patients have had to eat thousands of calories a day to recover from anorexia. I gained weight very quickly just by returning to 1200 calories a day -- what would be considered dieting for most women. "I'm a very efficient food storer," I told her. "I would do well in a survival situation. I'm just not often in them."

We talked about how every body is different; every body processes food differently. And I am really sick of the media admonishing new mothers and bequeathing upon them personal responsibility for every aspect of their children's health. The degree of personal responsibility is getting ridiculous.

Yes, duh, parents shouldn't give their toddlers a straight Diet Coke, tequila and Spam diet. Yes, of course we should encourage our kids to get outside and play. But hello, world -- some kids are genetically hardwired to be a little bigger. Sometimes they slim down naturally with age, sometimes they don't. It may have everything to do with what they eat and! It may have nothing to do with what they eat. Weighing them and admonishing them and making a big deal about their weight when they are eating the same or less as the stick-skinny kid sitting next to them in the cafeteria is not helpful. In fact, it can be extremely harmful.

And. Telling a nervous new mother that she holds the keys to every aspect of her child's health -- that it is all her fault if the baby is fat -- is a great way to program a weight-watching, harping mother who will ultimately give her child a complex about food.

I really wish the media would take more responsibility for objective reporting when it comes to health news. In politics, we generally get two sides of the story. These health studies are so one-sided, so judgy. Yes, there is a childhood obesity problem in the U.S. -- I acknowledge that wholly. But I look around my racially diverse but economically homogenous neighborhood, and I don't see one obese child. Not one. I go to Midtown Kansas City, where it's racially diverse and economically diverse, and I see tons. In addition to genetics and diet, childhood obesity has a lot to do with economics -- whether kids have access to sports and camps that allow them to run and play, whether they have access to yards and bikes and streets safe to ride bikes on. Whether they have access to fruits and vegetables that don't come out of a very salty can. Whether they have something to do besides watch TV while mom and dad work.

Childhood obesity isn't necessarily something we can blame on personal responsibility of the parents. We, as a nation, owe kids safe streets and bikes and subsidized, exercise-and-fresh-air-oriented childcare and camps. We as a nation put everything on working parents -- we don't help out with childcare, we don't help out with healthy food, we don't help out with transportation to camps and sports for kids whose parents don't have cars or can't get off work to take them.

There are two sides to every story. One side of this story is personal responsibility of the parents to not let their toddlers exist on a steady diet of Ho-Hos. The other side of the story is access. We like to ignore that side, because it's a much harder thing to face. The media needs to start covering that side of the story, because until we acknowledge it, we won't do anything about it.

Today the little angel and I and two of our dear friends ventured down I-70 to Heins Farms, a working dairy farm about an hour outside Kansas City. They supply Roberts. We had a grand old time, extended NY subway version to follow, but please to enjoy this cow video for now.

Here's a link to all the cow pics and videos that I took while on the Heins farm.

And!

• Why Vampires Make Bad Boyfriends -- my review of Deborah Harkness' debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, for BlogHer Book Club
• Like Jane Austen? The folks at Penguin and BlogHer are giving away five sets of two awesome books: A Jane Austen Education and Jane Austen: The Complete Novels (yes, it's all of them in one book). Comment to win!
• There's still time to sign up for my author/blogger workshop this Saturday at The Writers Place. Hope to see you there!
• Tonight Jill Miller Zimon and EM Zamotti will be live blogging the Republican debate at BlogHer. You can feed your tweetstream into the live blog or just read Jill from the left and EM from the right. Should be entertaining, to say the least!

I was reading my friend Liz's blog yesterday. She wrote about how her daughter's teacher told her daughter that "poop" is a bad word, causing Liz and her partner to abandon their poop jokes.

I, lover of the English language, consider no words to be bad. Just sometimes inappropriately used.

I will not be winning any parenting awards when I say that I have a sailor's mouth, sometimes even around my daughter. I don't set out to say "fuck," it just occasionally happens. Still, it does make me somehow proud that she chastises me on my use of the word "stupid" but lets "fuck" sail right on by. Also, she never uses any of the Big Seven herself. We told her a while ago there are certain words that really sound horrible coming out of a child's mouth, and she must be old enough to drive in order to use them. Because only then can they truly be used properly.

This "stupid" thing, though -- I'm going through what Liz is going through with "poop." I've resulted to consulting The Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate, which I keep sitting on my desk at work to frighten off IT people. Bring it on, kindergarten teacher.

Synonyms for "stupid" include:

• Asinine*
• Blockish
• Doltish
• Fatuitous
• Fatuous
• Witless

*One of my all-time favorite put-downs, because people can't tell if you've just called them an ass in polite company or not.

"Poop" alternatives:

• Feces
• Defecation
• Stercoraceous, stercorus (pertaining to feces)
• fecaloid (resembling feces)
• Feculent (fecal matter, full of) = WINNER, WINNER, CHICKEN DINNER!

So thank you, teachers of America, for forcing us parents to elevate our grammar to say the exact same thing in a way our kids don't understand.

Today I spent some time at Johnson County Community College talking to ninth graders from the Olathe school district about being a writer.

One of the first kids who came up to me asked me if spelling was important. I considered it for a while, then said YES, BY GOD, IT IS. Then he asked if I write things out longhand, and I said, "No," then heard myself uttering, "Although I did when I was your age. We didn't really use computers then."

This kid looked at me as though I were fossilizing before his very eyes.

A series of flat-ironed blond girls streamed past. "What's the demand for your field?" one asked, popping her gum.

"Well," I said, "By the time you're out of college, I think we'll have that all figured out. Right now, it's pretty bad, actually." I paused. "But writing will never be outsourced to another country. Think about that. And corporations aren't really as evil as you'd think." Gah gah gah gah gah

At this point, I looked at the arborist sitting next to me with a giant chainsaw and asked for some of his Purell. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears.

DON'T TOUCH YOUR FACE. DON'T TOUCH YOUR FACE.

As I waited for more kids to approach, I heard one large boy ask the arborist, "Why would you need a chainsaw that big?"

An alert-looking girl ambled over. She skipped the questions on the preprepared form and went straight for the blogging. "How do you build your following?" she asked. "How long did it take to get one?"

I thought back to 2004, when I had a good day with 30 hits. "It took a long time," I said.

"I have a huge following on DNL," she said. I think that's what she said. I have no idea what DNL is. It must be something the kids are doing these days.

"I push a lot from Twitter," I replied. One of the other girls flipped her hair.

"I don't know how to make Twitter work," said the other girl.

You and most of America.

A teenaged boy came up. "I'm sorry," he said, before he'd said anything. Then he looked nervously at my sign, which said "writer."

"I like to write," he said, "but I don't think I'm very good at it."

"You know what? Nobody's very good at it in ninth grade. If you like it, you're probably better at it than you think. Keep going."

I got into a conversation about Ray Bradbury with an earnest-looking wanna-be reporter. Most of the kids looked through me at the window beyond.

The organizer kept getting on the loudspeaker.

THERE'S NO WAITING AT GARMIN!

The crowd began to rustle.

THERE'S NO WAITING AT THE EDUCATION BOOTH!

No shit. They're in ninth grade. Educators are still "other."

I sat back and listened to my thoughts:

• I had those same elf boots when I was in ninth grade.
• These girls are so lucky they won't regret their high school hair later in life, unlike us unlucky schmucks who came of age in the eighties.
• DON'T TOUCH FACE! DON'T TOUCH FACE!
• Why is your field not in demand? Why don't more people pay you to write?
• Their feet look so BIG.
• Why are these girls so good at liquid eyeliner? Could I learn?

Another girl approached my table. "So, um, how many things have you written?" she asked, looking bored. She scanned my portfolio, flipping the tear sheets and the Sleep Is for the Weak coverage.

My computer hard drive flashed before my eyes -- thousands of individual pieces. How many posts are in this blog? 1,296. I just checked.

How can I tell her the volume of words it takes to get better?

It's overwhelming how much work it takes to get good at something. What should I say?

So I said nothing. I smiled and signed her Career Fair form.

"Hey," I called as she walked away. "Go to school for what you want. There are a lot of great-paying jobs that'll kill your soul."

She smiled, flipped her hair. "Thanks," she said.

And then I flipped back through my portfolio, remembering every single piece.

And the theme is school kids who can't afford stuff.

I'm doing publicity for a local performance of The Nutcracker. One of my jobs is to call metro schools and ask if they'd be interested in bringing their kids in for field trips (some of the performances are designated for schools and held during the school day). When I called the KCMO school district a few weeks ago, the very nice woman there told me so many of the kids are on the reduced or free lunch program they probably couldn't afford the $4 ticket price. Considering I had to send $5 to school with the little angel last week so she could eat a doughnut, this statement almost made my head pop off with the injustice of it all.

I'd been rolling the whole Nutcracker thing around in my head for some time when I saw Kelly Wickham's post about her kids (she's a vice principal of a school) not being able to carry big purses or backpacks but not being able to afford yet another purse for their lady things.

I'm going to sort through my closet to find a few small purses to send Kelly's girls so they can carry their tampons with dignity through the halls of their big-purse-and-backpack-banning school. If you're decluttering this year, please think about throwing a few tiny purses in a box and mailing them to Kelly. The P.O. box is in the link above.

And I'm going to ask you to consider approaching your employers or yourselves or your families about sponsoring a few KCMO school kids to see a very inexpensive ballet production this holiday season.  If you donate above $50, your name will appear in the program (I have details about levels of sponsorship for companies and individuals), but also, if you donate anything, we can designate it for KCMO kids if we get enough to bus in a few classes.