Parenthetical.net

My YA lit professor in grad school, Amy Pattee, has an article in the new issue of Horn Book on Sweet Valley High and its triumphant (?) return to print. My favorite bit:
The new Double Love reads like a time-traveled transliteration of the original novel: the girls ride around in a Jeep Wrangler rather [...]

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Via Green Is the New Red, a British picture book about policemen from 1974 is… made hilariously wrong. (They don’t publish the original for comparison, so we can’t see how wrong it was to start with.*)

*Martini-Corona, this is your cue to scan in I Want to Be a Waitress for the viewing pleasure of [...]

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Voting is over, unfortunately, but you should go watch the finalists of the Gale Cengage Librareo video contest. (If for some reason you can’t get enough amateur music videos about books, all of the entries are available on YouTube.)
My two favorites were “Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse” (whose song is written to the [...]

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Via Stuff White People Like, more on the subject of “checking people out”:
‘Black Guy’ booth livens up Corvallis Saturday market

Sherry Littlefield of Corvallis said the booth was unnecessary. She and friend Ron Naasko said they have black friends, and would be voting for Barack Obama for president.
Also not to be missed:
“Two Wars”, an episode of [...]

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Alison just started an interesting converstation over at Shelftalker about trends in book covers.
I see the photo-of-girl-lying-on-grass thing way more often than I see the silhouette thing (girls’ school, ya know). It does express a message:
Dear potential readers,
This book is about an introspective teenage girl with dreams for her future. She [...]

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Dear internet,
Please, please stop hyping Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. You’re making it sound like you’ve never read YA science fiction before, which seems unlikely since some of you write it. It’s the most inspiring book ever written! I get it! I’ll read it already! But shut up about it before [...]

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When I first read the title of today’s Library Link of the Day, from The Times Online — “The new library fad: borrow a person” — I assumed it was a clever way to structure knowledge sharing sessions. Want to learn to set up an email account or knit a scarf? Borrow one [...]

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The conclusion of Michael Chabon’s essay “Let Me Entertain You”, published today in the L. A. Times:
…[E]ntertainment — as I define it, pleasure and all — remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from [...]

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From the (Environmental Protection) Agency’s Earth Day history page:
EPA was born in 1970 - a time when rivers caught fire and cities were hidden under dense clouds of smoke. We’ve made remarkable progress since then in protecting human health and safeguarding the natural environment.
Remember 40 years ago, when life was like a science fiction movie? [...]

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I wrote recently about the fact that my mental picture of “apocalypse” is stuck in the Cold War — instantaneous disaster, as opposed to the currently more likely slow(-ish) environmental collapse. I mused about what current YA readers of science fiction will picture, which made me wonder: other than Uglies, what’s being written in [...]

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