>It occurs to me that now that Robert Langdon has raced around Rome, Paris, and D.C. he ought to go to New York; precisely to Madeleine L’Engle’s current residence, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. His readers would love her; hers, I’m not so sure about.
>Get Your Factoids Straight
September 16, 2009 By 8 Comments
>I’ve got the new Dan Brown (audiobook edition) for our flight this weekend to meet the grandchild. Can’t wait for either! Child_lit has been discussing how books perceived as page turners (like The Hunger Games) don’t get the respect they should, but I figure there’s page-turners and then there’s page-browsers–James Patterson, I’m looking at you. [...]
>From Cape Cod to Christmas
August 19, 2009 By 13 Comments
>My mini-break at the Cape was lovely for all kinds of reasons, most notably the best ice cream I’ve had in a long time, at Four Seas in Centerville. I tried the chocolate, peppermint, peach and butter crunch–all sublime. Closes September 13th for the winter so hurry on down. Richard and I stayed just a [...]
>I’ll Be Seeing You . . .
August 11, 2009 By 15 Comments
>Last Friday we had a very entertaining time of proofreading the Guide, aided by candy and fave tunes from the 80s provided by Miss Touch-Me Pod, whose little speaker recalls the halcyon days of AM transistor radios. There was an ongoing war, too, over the merits of The Time Traveler’s Wife, loved by Elissa and [...]
>Who’s reading YA?
June 23, 2009 By 3 Comments
>A tweet from Chair, Fireplace, etc. led me to this article questioning the link between the health of YA as a publishing category and the assumption that it means teen reading is flourishing. Every time I see The Book Thief on bestseller charts I wonder about this correlation, and I also think the question speaks [...]
>Man Without a Face redux
May 29, 2009 By 9 Comments
>Or Batman and Robin, or maybe it’s simply Twilight for little gay guys, but Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain is quite the adolescent epic of doomed, yet eternal, love. Philip, the half-Chinese son of a wealthy colonialist, is sixteen when he meets Endo-san, an older Japanese man who has rented the small island [...]
>Blurring boundaries
May 22, 2009 By 1 Comment
>Kelly Herold (of Big A, Little a) has a new blog with a very promising premise. Crossover “focuses on a rare breed of book–the adult book teens love, the teen book adults appreciate, and (very, very occasionally) that Middle Grade book adults read. I’m interested in reviewing books that transcend these age boundaries and understanding [...]
My new secret boyfriend
May 15, 2009 By 23 Comments
>Whither YA?
April 24, 2009 By 10 Comments
>Josie has a post up about adults buying young adult books for their own pleasure, citing The Book Thief, Hunger Games and the Stephenie Meyer books as particular favorites among customers at The Flying Pig. I was musing about this topic the other day with the YA class over at Simmons, as we asked the [...]
>What did your 1970s look like?
April 7, 2009 By 1 Comment
>I’m weeding the Horn Book’s collection of professional, scholarly, and other adult books about children’s literature, and damned if I didn’t find a strange little trend. Along with the many out-of-date bibliographies and childhood reading memoirs by the foremothers (don’t worry, I’m keeping those) are lots of coffee table books devoted to the work of [...]
