Taken from ‘The New Yorker’

The children’s author Laura Amy Schlitz , in her 2007 Newbery Medal acceptance speech, explained “I must remind myself that ‘good’ is an approximate term.”

A second-grader once asked me for ‘a really, really good book’ and I asked him, as librarians do, what he considered a good book.

He eyed me with thinly veiled impatience and replied, “Medium-long with poisonous snakes.”