Just One of the Guys was on this morning. I'd mostly forgotten that for maybe a month or two in middle school, I was in love with (and slightly scandalized by) this movie. (I think I was scandalized by the language more than anything else.) I hardly remember anything specific about it, and judging by the bit of it I saw this morning, I'd clearly ( Read more... )

I wish that someone had introduced me to the term "time-slip" when I was a child. I would have recognized it as a thing then, not just an accidental feature of some of the books I loved and kept coming back to (Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic, which had a strange hold over me for a book so sad--but it's why I never doubt that children sometimes ( Read more... )

Because I don't actually have time to comment, beyond "waaaaah used bookstores and libraries!"

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/eon0212wo.html

(on the whole "lead in children's books" printed before 1985" thing)

To make up for yesterday's mood ( Read more... )

neadods linked to this Guardian article about the Newbery, and Neil, and how his winning means that the Newbery award is no longer in danger of being thought irrelevant (or something less snarky ( Read more... )

"Anita Silvey, author of “100 Best Books for Children,” wrote an article in School Library Journal last fall in which she criticized the Newbery selections as too difficult for most children. Ms. Silvey has described the 2008 winner, “Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village” by Laura Amy Schlitz, as a book that most children ( Read more... )

Yay! The Graveyard Book won the Newbery! How cool is that?

...I never did write about The Graveyard Book, at least not here--I wrote a couple of pages about it in my writing journal--but basically, I was hooked from the moment Bod used an obsolete word he'd learned from a ghost and had to be corrected. Clearly, my kind of book.

Link from the neilgaiman.com blog:

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6403

On the one hand, I'm happy to see some love for Gary Blackwood's The Shakespeare Stealer (which I love, and I'm actually a hard sell on books with Shakespeare in them) ( Read more... )

The local bookstore had a sale today, and I bought several very yummy books that I've had my eye on for quite a while, including a lavish book on Hadrian, Ad Infinitum (a book on the history of Latin), and a biography of Augustus. (I seem to buy books in thematic groups at these sales.) I also got the new Donne biography by John Stubbes--mostly ( Read more... )

I totally bought a book on Sunday because there was an interview with the author in the back, and she listed some of my favorite books among books that had left a mark on the book she'd written: Possession, Charlotte Sometimes, Emma, and I Capture the Castle. (I mean, clearly I was already interested enough in the book to have flipped through it, ( Read more... )