Why Book Awards Need Shortlists, & Moon Over Manifest
The day the Newbery & Caldecott award winners were announced, two things happened: kidlit lovers grew outraged at the authors, Clare Vanderpool (Moon Over Manifest) and Erin E. Stead (A Sick Day for Amos McGee) getting bumped from The Today Show, and booksellers scrambled to get copies of Moon Over Manifest. So far, the buzz about Moon Over Manifest is excellent–I’ve heard only good things, and I have a copy waiting on my Kindle. Why do I have a copy on my Kindle, rather than a...
Read MoreHow Powerful Are Reading Social Networks?
In 2006, posts about a new reading network starting popping up. Goodreads, a place where readers could go to catalog their reading habits, seemed like a fancy, web 2.0 version of a reading journal. And since I’ve never been good with recording my reads, I gave it a miss. But Goodreads has stuck around–and flourished. I’m now a member, along with over 4,400,000 other people. That’s almost as many people as the entire country of Norway (4, 827,038), Ireland (4,450,446)....
Read MoreCover Notes: Windblowne, by Stephen Messer
Cover Notes is a new series I’ll be running every Monday. Rather than focusing on covers of books I’ve read, I’ll be writing about books I’ve never read and recording my first impressions of their covers. Each book will also have an Embarrasment Factor of between zero & five, with zero meaning “a totally awesome cover I want to write fan mail about” and five meaning “I’m ashamed to be seen with this in public.” Shelved in the young...
Read MoreLauren Oliver’s Before I Fall Takes A Huge Risk–& I Like It
Full disclosure: I kinda-sorta know the author of this book, Lauren Oliver. Since reading Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, I’ve stayed away from most novels with the reliving-the-past-learning-to-accept-death theme. Every now and then, a new title does pique my interest–the buzz around Gayle Forman’s If I Stay landed it in my to be read pile (though I’ve been studiously ignoring it every time it gets close to the top) and a few recommendations for Jay Asher’s...
Read MoreMumbai University Censors Rohinton Mistry @ The NRI
Late last year, I saw Salman Rushdie promoting his new book, Luka and the God of Fire, at, irony of ironies, a church in Cambridge (the same church in Harvard Square once hosted Richard Dawkins). A lady in the audience asked him about the Rohinton Mistry/Mumbai university debacle, which, at that point, I hadn’t heard of. It’s quite a story, depressing and hopeful in turns, complete with politics and charismatic leaders. Here’s the blurb for the newsy piece I wrote for The NRI...
Read MoreSalman Rushdie on Gods in ‘Luka and the Fire of Life’ @ PopMatters
Earlier this month, I saw Booker Prize winning author Salman Rushdie at a discussion with fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar in Cambridge, MA. Asked about his use of gods in literature and Luka, the British novelist—and knight—had a few interesting things to say: “[The] great pantheons were once living religions. The Greek gods were once the religion of Greece, the Roman gods ditto, and the Norse gods the same and the Aztec gods the same and so on. And they had priests and temples and no...
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