Wednesday Afternoon Visits: April 22
April 22, 2009
Here are a few doings from around the Kidlitosphere that I think are worth a mention.
First up, many thanks to Sherrie Peterson from Write About Now, who was kind enough to grant my blog a Premio Dardos award, for "transmitting cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values every day." Thanks so much, Sherrie! I'm not actually going to follow the rules of the award by passing it along to 15 people, but Sherrie's kind words did totally make my day.
School Library Journal's Battle of the (Kids') Books has started the second round of competition, with John Green selecting The Hunger Games over We Are the Ship. Yay, Katniss! Liz Burns has been covering SLJBoB thoroughly at Tea Cozy (most recently here), if you'd like more detail.
Tanita reports at Finding Wonderland that Free Comic Book Day is coming up on May 2nd. "This event celebrates the independent comic book specialty shops, thousands of which exist in North America alone."
I learned from Presenting Lenore that this is Body Image Week. Lenore explains: "So what's it all about? The issue of body image and loving the skin that you're in is something that affects everyone in different ways and in different degrees. And there are a lot of books recently or soon-to-be released that address various aspects of the issue."
Cheryl Rainfield reports that "Libba Bray, author of The New York Times bestselling Gemma Doyle Trilogy (A Great and Terrible Beauty
At the Blue Rose Girls, Grace Lin links to a Shelftalker post by Josie Leavit about proper author etiquette when visiting a bookstores (short version: don't be disingenuous). Even though I'm not an author, I found the post and comments fascinating.
Elaine Magliaro rounds up week three of National Poetry Month across the Kidlitosphere at Wild Rose Reader. Speaking of poetry, Gregory K finally includes one of his own poems in the midst of 30 Poets/30 Days. It's about a spaghetti farm, and it's very fun!
Blog angst flu (a recurring epidemic during which various bloggers question their reasons for and methods of blogging) continues across the Kidlitosphere, with posts at Confessions of a Bibliovore, Book Nut, The Reading Zone, the YA YA YAs, and Original Content (and various others linked within those posts). I've been suffering a minor case of this myself lately, and I have to say that I'm impressed by Trisha's decision (at The YA YA YAs) that going forward her reading priority will be books that she personally has borrowed from the library or bought. I have recently reactivated my library card, myself, after a bit of an absence.
In a related vein, Teacherninja shares his recommendations for coping with being "hyperconnected". He breaks them down into specific recommendations for people who are overly connected via social networking-related tools, and people who are trepidatious about such enterprises.
The Portland KidLit group is hosting a fundraiser for one of their own, one of our own, Bridget Zinn, who is battling cancer. You can find details at Check It Out. There are going to be a lot of great signed books auctioned off, to help the lovely Bridget.
Terry has an interesting post at The Reading Tub about balancing letting kids read what interests them and wanting to encourage them to read higher-quality fare. To me, the heart of the post is: "How do you balance feeding a personally-motivated passion for reading with minimizing the impact of people you hope don’t become her “friends”?" As someone who found many of her "friends" in literature, this post really resonated with me.
Kate Coombs has a fun post at Book Aunt about the elements that distinguish British fantasy from American fantasy. She says: "there’s something literary, not to mention clever, about British comedy, and about British fantasy writing. The words that keep coming to mind are wit and whimsy. I realize these tend to be used stereotypically, but then, stereotypes can have their roots in truth. I suppose we can define wit as cleverness and surprising humor." She includes lots of examples.
And that's all for today! Happy reading!