Why not try reading it in Turkish? Or Italian! Or French! Or Spanish!

Not that you would. But you could! Just look at these:

You could even read it in British English, which is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE!

Okay, that’s not actually true. The text of the U.K. editions is basically the same, except for a couple of innocent-seeming American words that turn out to be totally filthy in England… But the covers make them look like a whoooole different series: 

Crazy, right? I mean, are these really the same books as these?

But, yeah. They are. Covers are funny things.

Speaking of funny things, if you haven’t seen the Turkish TV ad for Deadweather and Sunrise, it’s worth checking out.

Hello, Nerds! I’m Geoff Rodkey, author of the comedy-adventure-coming-of-age series The Chronicles of Egg and a big fan of the Book Club. When I got the chance to contribute a post, I was thrilled–and immediately spent the next several days meticulously crafting a 2,000-word essay about how Bridge to Terabithia scarred me for life.

I was convinced I’d written something truly special–poignant, heartfelt, existentially profound–until I showed it to my wife, who helpfully pointed out that it was actually turgid, boring, and painfully self-indulgent.

So I added my 2,000-word Bridge to Terabithia reminiscence to the unfortunately long list of Things That Seemed Like A Good Idea Until I Ran Them By My Wife and decided to take a different tack.

This is still a reminiscence, it’s still about books that meant a lot to me as a kid, and even though nobody dies in an emotionally devastating fashion in any of them, it’s still a little poignant–because in a sense, these books are dead themselves.

In other words, they’re out of print. They survive in libraries (I hope), and you can still fish them out of the Internet’s vast ocean of used book stores, but other than that, they’ve passed on. If you can track them down, though, I’d strongly recommend checking them out. They’re worth the effort.

Well, some of them are. Read on and you’ll see what I mean:

THE PUSHCART WAR, by Jean Merrill

I still can’t believe this is out of print. It’s a made-up history of a war on the streets of New York City between a triumvirate of more-or-less-evil trucking companies and an eccentric band of pushcart peddlers who organize themselves to fight back (with pea shooters) when the truckers start trying to run them out of business. It’s got an offbeat, singular, very funny tone, and the plot works on multiple levels–as a comedy, an underdog story, an object lesson in standing up to bullies, and a parable about the vulnerability of conventional military forces to guerrilla tactics.

That last one might be a stretch. But not by much. And The Pushcart War holds up incredibly well, for readers of any age–I sat down with a copy a while back and had as much fun with it as I did when I was ten.

THE MOUSE THAT ROARED, by Leonard Wibberly

This isn’t technically a kid’s book, but I read it when I was a kid, and my twelve-year-old loved it, so I’m counting it. It’s the story of a tiny, Andorra-like European country that decides, for reasons too complicated to get into, to invade the United States…using a small platoon of longbowmen, even though it’s the Atomic Age. And, for reasons that are also too complicated to get into, they win.

If this sounds even vaguely intriguing, hunt this book down. It’s a gem. The Mouse That Roared was also the basis for a Peter Sellers movie that I’ve never seen, because honestly, I don’t know how it could top the book.

 HARRY CAT’S PET PUPPY

One of several sequels to The Cricket in Times Square, this is the story of how Harry Cat and Tucker Mouse adopt a stray puppy, then have to find a home for it when the puppy grows into a sheepdog and no longer fits in the drainpipe where they live. I read it to my 7-year-old last year, and we both had a fine time with it. I’m not sure why it’s out of print when, say, Tucker’s Countryside (another Cricket sequel that, if you ask me, is no better or worse than this one) is still kicking around.

Incidentally, I liked the Cricket series so much as a kid that I wrote fan fiction about it. Rereading it as an adult (the book, not my fan fiction), I started to wonder what the deal was with Tucker and Harry’s relationship. Two confirmed bachelors, one of them highly fastidious, sharing a one-bedroom in the Theater District? Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

THE MCGURK MYSTERIES

If there was any justice in the world, the McGurk Mysteries would be as big as Encyclopedia Brown. The books, of which there were at least a dozen in print at one point, were about a detective agency of 10-year-olds who solved funny, age-appropriate mysteries around their neighborhood. In Ocean’s Eleven fashion, all the kids had a specialty: McGurk was the charismatic, Clooney-esque leader; Willie Sandowsky had a massive schnoz and a correspondingly exquisite sense of smell; Wanda Grieg was the muscle; Brains Bellingham was (big surprise) the brains; and Joey Rockaway didn’t bring all that much to the table other than being the narrator, but he–or, rather, author E.W. Hildick–was very, very good at it.

My youngest son would love these books if I could just convince him that the 30-year-old copies I bought on the Internet are okay to pick up even though the paper’s disintegrating and they smell like an elderly person’s closet.

IRVING AND ME

This was late New Yorker cartoonist and Danny and the Dinosaur creator Syd Hoff’s only novel for older kids (I think), and I kind of get why it’s out of print. Which is not to say it wasn’t a pleasure to reread. The story of Artie, a 13-year-old Jewish kid from Brooklyn who moves to Florida and semi-reluctantly befriends big-eared, slightly odd Irving, still holds up reasonably well–Artie’s narration is breezy, likable, and contains a pleasant whiff of Borscht Belt; his problems are entirely relatable; and the ending’s even a little touching.

But it’s very much of its time, by which I mean the 13-year-olds in it occasionally smoke cigarettes, look at dirty magazines, obsess over girls, and generally act in ways that, while true to the lived experience of 13-year-olds both in 1967 and today, tend to get contemporary kid-lit gatekeepers a little bent out of shape.

Speaking of bent of out shape, the last stop on my preteen literary nostalgia tour is…

THE SERGEANT: BLOODY BASTOGNE

Let me be very, very clear: THIS IS NOT A CHILDREN’S BOOK, AND I HAD NO BUSINESS READING IT WHEN I WAS ELEVEN.

But hoo-boy! The Sergeant: Bloody Bastogne was one of a series of pulp novels for adults written under the name Gordon Davis, which must have been a pseudonym, because…hoo-boy! I stumbled on this one at a shopping mall bookstore in Rockford, Illinois when I happened to have $2.25 plus tax in my pocket, and I decided to buy it because at age eleven, I was insatiably interested in World War II.

Whether due to incompetence, apathy, or a loophole in the local blue laws, the checkout clerk sold it to me. And oh, man! Did I get a thrill out of reading this book. Sergeant CJ Mahoney was a US Army Ranger who was expert at two things: slaughtering Nazis in ridiculously graphic ways, and engaging in even more ridiculously graphic behavior with the Belgian farm girls who conveniently wandered into the narrative whenever there was a lull in the combat.

This was like the literary equivalent of playing Grand Theft Auto. You know how some people believe that it doesn’t matter what a kid reads, as long as he’s reading? They’re wrong. But I will say this: The Sergeant: Bloody Bastogne unquestionably opened my eyes to the almost limitless potential of books to expose a reader to new worlds.

Hoo-boy!

Got a favorite book that’s out-of-print? Drop a line in the comments–I’d love to hear about it.

Just ask Kirkus Reviews:

“Occasionally gruesome, often funny and full of suspense, this one is sure to win Egg some new fans.”

Or Examiner.com:

“…fantastic characters and non-stop action…very difficult to put down…like riding a racing locomotive downhill with no brakes…”

Or this review from an actual kid!:

“New Lands is a MUST read book… I don’t want to give away the secret Egg discovers in the Okalu temple, but I didn’t see it coming and it made me so happy…all my friends at school can’t wait to read!

Take it from the kid–get a copy today from…

Your favorite indie book store via Indiebound!

Or Barnes & Noble! Or Amazon!

Or, if you live in NYC, you can drop by the Strand on 12th Street, where last Friday they had two New Lands hardcovers in stock for $8.50. Which is annoying, for like five different reasons. But don’t get me started.

The highlights of the segment are two clips from TV projects I co-wrote that I hadn’t seen in over a decade: the Beavis and Butt-head “Cow Tipping” episode from 1994 and the Politically Incorrect ”Strange Bedfellows” segments from 1996 that featured Al Franken and Arianna Huffington arguing about politics while lying in bed together wearing pajamas (for those of you too young remember, this was back when Arianna was still a Republican).

The clips are pretty great — they’re buried in the interview alongside stories about Eddie Murphy, Rush Limbaugh, the undocumented nanny who cost Arianna’s husband a Senate seat, and a misbegotten road trip involving Harrison Ford and Danny Devito that led to the movie RV. 

It’s fun to watch. At least, it is for me. Your mileage may vary. Since I’m still incompetent to embed any video that’s not from Youtube, you’ll have to click this link to see it.

Incidentally, if you’ve been reading these diary entries and are still totally confused as to what the show was like, click here for a great writeup on Examiner.com from journalist/super-librarian Pam Kramer.

Our last day found us in New Jersey, courtesy of the wonderful folks at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair (thanks again, Marisela and Liane!), where you can get autographed copies of all our books. So go there now! If you live in New Jersey.

The second-to-last show was at Charles H. Bullock Elementary in Montclair, where the kids were fantastic, and so were PTA parents Adriana and Kathleen, who helped organize the whole thing, brought coffee and muffins (which were delicious), and posed for this picture with us before the show:

Then this happened. The photographic record of which I just swiped from Adriana’s Facebook page:

Notice the spiffy new hat Curtis is sporting, which he bought at the Goorin Bros. hat shop on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. If you think you can pull off a look like that (I can’t, probably because I’m not British), they are fine purveyors of quality hats.

After a delicious lunch at the Comfort Food Kitchen next door to Watchung Booksellers (try the eggplant parmesan! It is crazy-good), we headed to the Ridgewood Avenue School in Glen Ridge, home of awesome librarian Joyce Mooney.

We couldn’t have asked for a better crowd of kids to finish the tour, and Peter in particular was in rare form.

Here he is (with many thanks to awesome Penguin sales rep Dawn Zahorik for the photos) threatening to read from my private diary while I try to look dismayed. Over 23 shows, my look of cartoonish dismay definitely improved. Not sure what to do with this skill now that the tour is over:

And here’s Peter cracking up a bunch of the Ridgewood kids:

I think that shot says a lot about how much fun everybody had on this tour.

And now that it’s over, some people need to be thanked:

First, Elyse Marshall and Molly Sardella of Penguin, who worked incredibly hard to make this tour not just happen, but run remarkably smoothly considering all the moving pieces. I am eternally in their debt.

Second, my tour companions Adam Gidwitz, Jacqueline West, Curtis Jobling, and Peter McNerney. I’d never met any of them before the tour, and I liked them all so much that, just 24 hours removed from being stuck in a van with Curtis’s luggage digging into the back of my neck, I get a little choked up just thinking about them.

I feel like I’ve made four lifelong friends.

At least, I think I have. We’ll see if they return my phone calls.

But even if they all secretly hated me, they’re incredibly talented people, and I was very, very fortunate to be paired up with them, because they’re all more successful than I am, and riding on their coattails did a whole lot more for me than I did for them. 

In the unlikely event that you haven’t read them already, please check out A Tale Dark and Grimm, The Books of Elsewhere: The Shadows, Wereworld: Rise of the Wolf, and all their sequels. There’s something for everyone in these books.

And if you live in or near NYC, please check out Peter’s improv show, Trike, on Saturdays at 10:30pm at the Magnet Theater. I’m headed there with my 12-year-old next month, and I know we’re going to have a fantastic time. Even–or perhaps especially–if it’s totally age-inappropriate.

Thanks also to all the phenomenal librarians, language arts teachers, PTA moms, administrators, and everybody else at the 23 schools we visited! We could not have done this without you.

And thanks to the kids! Who should also be thanking their teachers and librarians. Can you believe they let you out of class for such a thing?

Finally, a sincere and heartfelt thanks to the fantastic independent booksellers who hosted the tour along the way, all of whom have autographed copies of all our books in stock:

In Lexington, Kentucky: Joseph-Beth Booksellers

In Decatur, Georgia: Little Shop of Stories

In Fairhope, Alabama: Page and Palette

In Miami, Florida: Books & Books

In Houston, Texas: Blue Willow Bookshop

In Austin, Texas: Perma-bound

In Naperville and Downer’s Grove, Illinois: Anderson’s

In Oak Park, Illinois: The Magic Tree Bookstore

In Winnetka, Illinois: The Book Stall

In Alexandria, Virginia: Hooray for Books

In Madison, Connecticut: R.J. Julia

In Montclair, New Jersey: Watchung Booksellers

Please, please shop at these stores, because they are the beating heart of the book world, and if it weren’t for them, we’d all need day jobs.

Speaking of day jobs… The Chronicles of Egg: New Lands comes out next week… 

It’s good! And I’m not just saying that because I wrote it.

Which seems rather tiny on a map…but is actually enormous. At least, it feels that way when you’re driving through it at rush hour.

We started the day at the Meadowside School in Milford (hi, Carly!), where we met awesome librarian Gail Sostilio and a ton of enthusiastic kids. Thanks to the photographic prowess of Penguin’s Molly Sardella — who, along with Elyse Marshall, has done a superhuman amount of work to get the tour up and running — here’s a shot of the Meadowside crowd with their eyes glued to Jacqueline, just moments before they all burst into laughter at the punch line of her story about an unruly French horn: 

And here’s Adam making his terrified-little-kids-who’ve-just-had-the-real-Grimm’s-Fairy-Tales-read-aloud-to-them-for-the-first-time face, which never fails to get a similarly huge laugh: 

After taking some time to sign stock for Madison, CT’s fantastic R.J. Julia bookstore (hi, Karen!), we headed to the Abraham Pierson School in nearby Clinton. Super-librarian Emily Kelsey’s homemade brownies were delicious! And the kids at Abraham Pierson were all-around awesome.

Especially the little girl who hyperventilated with joy upon meeting Jacqueline.

With the tour winding down, I’ve gotten more reckless about snapping photos from the stage at particularly fun moments — like Peter’s screaming freakout after losing all his hair, which two weeks ago was a five-second bit that, 21 shows later, has stretched out longer than a Jimmy Page guitar solo — and is both every bit as loud and twice as awesome. Here’s a still: 

And here, for entirely self-congratulatory reasons, is the sea of hands that goes up every time I ask how many people in the crowd have seen Daddy Day Care:

Not bad for a movie I wrote before most of these kids were born.

And it takes the sting out of the fact that most of them haven’t read Deadweather and Sunrise.

But they will.

Oh, they will.

Or there will be consequences.

Anyway, great bunch of kids in Clinton. Here we all are post-show:

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of the World’s Longest Book Tour!

But first, the good news: the kids in Alexandria, Virginia are great! We started the day at Hollin Meadows Elementary, where awesome librarian Kelly McKee introduced us to both some delicious breakfast pastries and a fantastic bunch of very enthusiastic kids. Here they are listening with bated breath to Adam’s G.I. Joe story:

After stopping at the wonderful Hooray for Books in Alexandria, where we signed a ton of stock, we had lunch at a restaurant called Table Talk — which turned out to be more than just a clever name when an 86-year-old Freemason dining next to us wound up talking to our table at great and entertaining length.

Then it was on to Mount Vernon Community School, where fantastic librarian Debbie Griffin and the wonderful Mount Vernon PTA had gotten free books in the hands of all the kids in the audience. Which was AWESOME. The Mount Vernon kids couldn’t have been more fun, and everybody had a great time.

Unfortunately, the light level in the auditorium was a bit low for photos, and the flash on my iPhone caused a lot of eye glare. Either that, or some of the Mount Vernon kids are demonically possessed:

All in all, it was a great day.

Except…

This is hard to talk about. Not only because it’s so disturbing, but because I fear my life may be in danger if I discuss it.

But there are two days of the tour left, and if something should happen to one of us…or, heaven forbid, someone in the audience at one of our shows…it’s better to have the information out there so people can take the necessary precautions.

As regular readers of this tour diary know, I have long suspected that Curtis may be a werewolf. It’s not just that his book series, Wereworld, is all about lycanthropes. Or that he lives in the same part of England where David Naughton got the bite in An American Werewolf in London. Or that he has body hair in a quantity most commonly seen in woodland mammals.

It’s his behavior. Which can be a little…off.

Still, after I’d checked the lunar cycle and confirmed that there wouldn’t be a full moon until next Thursday, I’d managed to put it out of my mind.

Then came today.

It all started shortly after we’d arrived in the Mount Vernon auditorium. It was such an attractive, pristine-looking space that I asked Jacqueline to pose for a photo. So she did…

And as I took the shot, I noticed something strange over her shoulder…all the way in the back corner, near the right-hand exit…

Braving the shadows of the darkened auditorium, I stepped closer…

Ten rows back, I heard the sound of a struggle, accompanied by a feral gnashing of teeth…

Then I drew near, and the full horror revealed itself…

With trembling fingers, I raised my camera to snap another photo. This proved my undoing. Enraged, the beast turned on me and attacked:

What followed was brief, violent, and entirely one-sided. I would no longer be alive to write this if it hadn’t been for Peter — or, more accurately, Peter’s leftover roast beef from lunch. He managed to distract Curtis with the meat while I fled to safety, the Mount Vernon nurse patched up my wounds as best she could, and we went on with the show.

Curtis claims to remember nothing of the incident, which he blames on jet lag. And to be fair, he’s been very apologetic.

But the puncture marks on my arm are a feverish red, the hair on my knuckles has turned thick and coarse…

And day by day, the moon grows full.

It was a little bittersweet–kind of like the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, if the Fellowship had been torn asunder because Boromir’s wife was getting resentful at being stuck home with the kids, Aragorn was tired of eating dinner with the same people every night, and Frodo needed to get back to the Shire to do his laundry.

Speaking of laundry, I am very grateful to be home, because it means I can stop looking like Peter’s balding twin.

With so much traveling on the tour itinerary, we all had to pack light — so the only clothes I brought were jeans, T-shirts, a gray hoodie, and a pair of New Balance sneakers.

Peter packed the same things. EXACTLY the same. While he was in costume during the shows, evenings were a little weird. Here we are headed to dinner in Georgia:

And returning home from dinner in Alabama:

Definitely looking forward to digging my blue hoodie out of the closet. Not that we don’t look adorable.

Speaking of adorable… Here’s what happened when Tracie, the Mills Elementary assistant librarian in Austin, asked everybody to make a silly face… and both Kaye from Permabound and Mills librarian Jan Higgs inexplicably decided the request did not apply to them:

Tomorrow begins the last leg of the tour: Virginia, Connecticut, and New Jersey. See you there! I’ll be the one in the blue hoodie.

Really, Chicago? Really?

But what Second City lacks in amenable weather, it more than makes up for in enthusiastic elementary school crowds. Courtesy of the good people at The Book Stall (hi, Robert!), we started the day at Lincolnwood Elementary in Evanston, where awesome librarian Jan Troy treated us to some crazy-delicious homemade muffins before unleashing a very excited crowd of sign-waving kids.

How excited were the Lincolnwood kids? THIS EXCITED: 

Many thanks again to our media escort Paul Buchbinder, who shot another round of very artfully composed photos for the blog. Like this one!

It was a great show, and the kids had so much fun that after it was over, they showed their appreciation by nearly trampling us:

Then it was on to Oak Terrace Elementary in Highwood, where we had lunch with uber-librarians Kara Smith and Pam Kramer and then met another fantastic crowd of kids from both Oak Terrace and surrounding schools.

Curtis performed his usual crowd-pleasing trick of drawing his brainchild Bob the Builder, then turning him into a werewolf:

But the real stars of the day were Oak Terrace’s homegrown artists:

It was a great day, and a fine ending to a wonderful week.

By the way, I learned something new today: if you mention in a tweet that you ate a deep-dish pizza with such reckless abandon that it sent you into a food coma…and you happened to eat that pizza at a restaurant that’s as on top of its social media game as Gino’s East…they will send you a sympathy tweet:

@geoffrodkey This too shall pass…

— Gino’s East (@ginoseast) April 19, 2013

Either way, that happened.

Chicago is currently being ravaged by Rainpocalypse 2013. Sounds harmless enough, right? CHECK OUT THE CAR-SWALLOWING SINKHOLE:

Full disclosure: I did not take that picture. But it is actually from this morning in Chicago.

Anyway, the governor declared a state of emergency, the roads are a mess, and Hester Junior High in Franklin Park was among the many Chicago-area schools that were closed due to flooding today.

Which is very sad. Hester Junior High kids: if you want a signed book plate, please email me.

Fortunately, we were able to make it (just barely) to Heritage Middle School in Berwyn for a show this morning. Even more fortunately, our media escort was Paul Buchbinder, who’s a MUCH better photographer than I am. Here’s a wide-angle shot of the positively enormous crowd of awesome Heritage middle schoolers:

And here’s a very artfully composed shot that makes me wonder why I have such weird posture:

The kids from Berwyn were awesome, and after the show we headed over to the extremely cute Magic Tree Bookstore in Oak Park to sign books.

Then, despondent over the cancellation of the Hester Junior High Show, we retired to Gino’s East and drowned our sorrows in the chunky tomato sauce of these: 

I think I speak for all of us when I say we ate WAY too much. Now everybody needs a nap.