>My review of President Obama’s new picture book is over at Out of the Box.

>Today I’m over at Out of the Box, opining about a couple of YA classics.

>

>Following last Saturday’s colloquium at Simmons, I had an interesting dinner conversation with Megan Whalen Turner and Virginia Duncan about the Speak debate of a few weeks ago and the more recent challenge to The Hunger Games at a New Hampshire school. Both cases have me in “yes . . . but” overload. Yes, the [...]

> This blog is now located at http://readroger.hbook.com/. You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here. For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to http://readroger.hbook.com/feeds/posts/default.

>The news about Kirkus is very sad. I am friends with several of the children’s editors–Lillian Gerhardt, Barbara Bader (who was also the owner and publisher for a time), Diane Roback, Joanna Rudge Long, Karen Breen and current editor Vicky Smith. And I treasure one issue, published interregnum and written by the adult staff, which [...]

>A couple of weeks ago, in the aftermath of telling Alan Kaufman to do a not very nice thing to himself, I asked him to name names of the “high-tech propagandists” who tell us that we will be better off without books. I found one: . . . the techies in Silicon Valley are giving [...]

>The recent “Battle of the Books” match-up between Shadow Country and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks has caused some debate around the YA blogosphere; see Liz B.’s post and the comments there attached for some enlightening discussion. I won’t vote since I haven’t read Shadow Country but I like the way the debate bares [...]

>On the other, I have wi-fi at home. This concludes this test of blogging from the couch.

>I don’t see it. While I’m having a fine enough time with the Kindle myself, I think its lack of a backlight and color, rudimentary display of pictures, and plethora of steps and button-pushing will cause most anyone under twenty-five to dismiss it as being for The Olds (and the really Olds, like me, who [...]