Parenthetical

I’m back! I’ve been back for a couple of weeks, in fact, but then the school year started. Plus there was this hurricane. So the blog posts have rather stacked up. I tried an experiment on this trip: no laptop, just my new Kindle 3, my iPod Touch, a couple of paper books, and a [...]

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Author Carey Wallace‘s website asks you to send her something, anything, handmade, and she’ll send back a copy of her CD Songs About Books. So I sent her a mosaic (well, not one of those specifically), and just got my CD the other day! It has gorgeous songs about Sean Tan’s The Arrival and Ender’s [...]

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Roger Sutton asks, what authors are famous for the wrong book? The Long Winter is better (he says) than the earlier Little House books; Lois Lowry’s Autumn Street (which I haven’t read) is better than The Giver. I don’t actually have examples of my own yet; I’m pondering. But I love the question! Thoughts?

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As we all know, the books are really about Hermione. Or Neville. (Spoilers for both the books and the last movie behind those links, and below.) Even HP haters might want to read that first link, Sady Doyle’s “In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series.” In its alternate universe, “strong female character” Hermione got [...]

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My badass colleague Arianna and her friend Anna, the Wandering Librarians, wandered to the American Library Association conference in New Orleans this week to present on great graphic novels for girls. I hear everything went well; yay! (Insert ALA-attendee envy here. But I’m sitting in my house without A/C and am not a sweaty puddle?) [...]

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YA Highway just posted an interview with my internet friend Noa Wheeler, an editor at the Macmillan imprint Henry Holt. Can’t wait to meet her (and hopefully lots of other people I only know digitally) in 2 1/2 weeks at BEA!

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Nerds Heart YA has announced their shortlist! All books with characters from “under-represented groups” or authors from those groups. Looks like a pretty great roster! Special congrats to: Eighth Grade Superzero – Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich Five Flavors of Dumb – Antony John Last Summer of the Death Warriors – Francisco Stork Tell Us We’re Home – [...]

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My friend Rebecca showed me a lovely essay today: “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re Going to Miss Almost Everything”, by Linda Holmes. It’s about the impossibility of being “well-read” (or well-watched, or well-listened), given the vast quantities of writing, theater, movies, music, and TV that have been and are constantly being produced. It’s sad, [...]

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My colleague the delightful Arianna of Wandering Librarians and I are goofing off this fine Friday afternoon. This Twitter feed is the result: OneSentenceYA. How would you sum up your favorite (or least favorite) novels in a sentence?

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You guys: Sweet Valley High: The Musical. For reals. Written by Francine Pascal herself, with a guy from Bon Jovi. Erin of Forever Young Adult acquired a demo CD and hooks us up with surprisingly catchy songs to download (and a script she made up). One of them appears to be an Elizabeth-Todd duet in [...]

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