Publications about books for children and young adults
SLJ’s Battle of the Books has begun, with Kenneth Oppel judging Wonder v. Bomb. After Margarita Engle finishes with Code Name Verity v. Titanic tomorrow, I’ll weigh in on who was the better judge. Preliminary cavil: I’m a little bothered by Oppel’s ambiguous use of the word “faultlessly.” I spent most of yesterday at home, [...]
The Morning News has begun its Tournament of Books, and SLJ is slated to begin its Battle of the Books on March 12th. I was pleased to see that the Morning News has already taken the gloves off, with Nathan Bradley calling The Yellow Birds a “slathering of wan cliches,” and I hope the SLJ [...]
Horn Book reviewer Susan Dove Lempke writes about being a proud defender of spoilers who met her Kryptonite in Code Name Verity. I recently listened to the fabulous audio edition of the book, and, despite, knowing how everything would turn out, found myself so taken in by the voice that I kept hoping the book [...]
Simultaneously trying to read, for work, Clare Vanderpool’s forthcoming Navigating Early (about two troubled boys in boarding school), and trying to read, for fun, Denise Mina’s latest The End of the Wasp Season (about two troubled boys in boarding school) has me positively confuzzilated. So far, Mina’s boys are in much bigger trouble, but they [...]
Having loved the original trilogy so much, I had some misgivings about seeing The Bourne Legacy, with Jeremy Renner picking up where Matt Damon left off. Not quite–one of the neatest things about this movie is that for its largest part it takes place at the same time as The Bourne Ultimatum, the last of [...]
The other night, Pam and Richard and I were talking about Anna Karenina, which they had read and I am reading. Richard was making what seemed to me a very cogent point about the novel, that Anna seems less the focus than are the men surrounding her. Pam was partially agreeing, partially not; then as [...]
I’m enjoying PW’s discussion of “The Top Ten Most Difficult Books.” (I’ve read some of most of them but haven’t finished any.) Could we make such a list of children’s books? We’d have to wrestle with the problem that difficulty in a children’s book is grounds for many to not consider it a children’s book, [...]
Lolly has designed a beautiful PDF of our annual summer reading list–please download and distribute as you will. I hasten to add that this is the good kind of s.r.l., one designed for pleasure reading, not to Improve you. I’m currently shuttling between (among?) Anna Karenina, William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone [...]
Startlingly similar blurbs on the ARCs of these upcoming YA titles grabbed my attention. on Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury, August 2012): “perfect for fans of George R.R. Martin and Suzanne Collins” on Falling Kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes (Penguin/Razorbill, December 2012): “ideal for fans of George R.R. Martin and Kristin Cashore” As [...]
We’ve posted our selections, compiled by Katie Bircher, for summer reading–the fun kind, not for school. You can see my at-home mostly-unread piles above: some are as yet untouched and saved for true leisure (The End of the Wasp Season, by Denise Mina, a Scottish crime writer I love) and some half-read and unlikely to [...]
