Monday Book News: 6 Links For Your Morning Coffee Break (4/4/11)
Good morning, book people! Some more whitewashing discussion on The Hunger Games this morning. This post by author Malinda Lo (Ash) makes some great points–Lo discusses color and class, and reading cues for racial background. Here’s the description of Katniss from early in the book: straight black hair, olive skin [and]… gray eyes That could definitely be taken as ambiguous, though with that, and the fairness of Katniss’ mother and Prim, I’ve always read her as...
Read MoreMonday Book News: 7 Links For Your Morning Coffee Break (Diana Wynne Jones Edition – 3/28/11)
Good morning, book people! I’m wrapping up a big writing project today & Mir & I are properly recovered now (thanks to a series of naps), so I’ll be back to some semblance of normality on the interwebs this week. Sad news this morning–children’s novelist Diana Wynne Jones died early Saturday morning (UK time). If you haven’t read one of her novels, you need to get out your kindle/nook, or head down to the bookstore today. My favorites (so...
Read MoreMonday Book News: 6 Links For Your Morning Coffee Break
Good morning, book people! The snow is back in Cambridge, and we’re holed up with hot coffee and a snuggly kidlet this Presidents’ Day. How about you? So this is not really six links–I think it’s closer to ten. But that’s just because I give value for your blog buck, and also because I feel bad counting anything that doesn’t get it’s own separate paragraph. So, without further ado… Over at SLJ’s A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy Liz...
Read MoreMonday Book News! 7 links for your morning coffee break
Good morning, interwebs! It’s finally warming up in Boston (finally!) but I still need a morning coffee and something to read. Here’s what I’m checking out this morning. Update: Mir just stuck his foot in my coffee (not hot) so it might be tea for me today… 11:58 am: This should probably be 8 links now, because my interview with Scott Westerfeld about the Bitch Media 100 feminist YA books is now up @ PopMatters. From the weekend NYT – More kids are using...
Read MoreNo Such Thing as a Perfect Book
Late last week the YA community dissolved into a firestorm. Bitch Media, a non-profit and the folks who put on Bitch Magazine, posted a list of 100 feminist YA books on their blog. For the most part, it’s an excellent list. But it has behavioral issues: a) when Bitch received a complaint about one of the books on the list, Jackson Pearce’s Sisters Red, they removed it without discussion, and without exploring why the book had been recommended, largely because of this Book Smugglers...
Read MoreEgyptian Youth Save The Library of Alexandria
For me, one of the best parts of my day is reading with my son–already, I can tell he values books by the way he carries them to me and can spend a full 45 minutes reading. Yet books are undervalued in the everyday world—in 2007, The New Yorker published a particularly dispiriting piece, The Twilight of Books. The author, Caleb Crain, cites several studies, almost all of which point to the depressing notion that not only is literacy decreasing, but the appreciation of a good book...
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