Um, awesome.

For anyone in need of a last minute Halloween costume: this, found linked from the Unshelved blog.

Dumbledore

I wasn’t going to weigh in on the whole Dumbledore thing. Mostly, I thought, “That’s nice,” and then went on with my life. The title of this NYT piece made me chuckle, though, so I read the article and enjoyed it. You might, too. Is Dumbledore Gay? Depends on Definitions of “Is” and “Gay.”

Cybils – don’t forget to nominate!

Don’t forget to nominate your favorite books of 2007 for the Cybils! You can only nominate one book per category, so choose wisely. Nominations close November 21.

Official website

 Categories are:

Fantasy/Science Fiction
Fiction Picture Books
Graphic Novels
Middle Grade Fiction
Non-Fiction: Middle Grade and Young Adult
Non-Fiction Picture Books
Poetry
Young Adult Fiction

Robert’s Snow

 

Very cool. I just found out that Jules and Eisha have published a complete list of the authors interviewed in Blogging for a Cure, as well as a full list by date.

Robert’s Snow — Week 3!

 Robert’s Snow Official Website

More wonderful interviews this week!

Monday, October 29

• Dan Santat at Writing and Ruminating
• Joanne Friar at The Longstockings
• Alissa Imra Geis at Wild Rose Reader
• Diane Greenseid at Just One More Book!!
• Sean Qualls at Brooklyn Arden

Tuesday, October 30

• Ann Koffsky at Book Buds
• Bill Carman at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
• Gretel Parker at Finding Wonderland
• Matt Phelan at A Year of Reading
• Stephanie Roth at Writing with a broken tusk

Wednesday, October 31

• Shawna Tenney at Kate’s Book Blog
• Adam Rex at Booktopia and Welcome to my Tweendom
• Mo Willems at MotherReader
• Rolandas Kiaulevicius at a wrung sponge

Thursday, November 1

• Karen Lee at sruble’s world
• Diana Magnuson at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
• Melissa Iwai at Brooklyn Arden
• Victoria Jamieson at AmoXcalli and Cuentecitos
• Molly Idle at The Shady Glade
• Meghan McCarthy at A Fuse #8 Production

Friday, November 2

• Tracy McGuinness-Kelly at Sam Riddleburger’s blog
• Sarah Kahn at Kate’s Book Blog
• Sylvia Long at Whimsy Books
• Jeremy Tankard at the excelsior file
• Holli Conger at Please Come Flying

Saturday, November 3

• Susan Miller at Your Neighborhood Librarian
• Ellen Beier at What Adrienne Thinks About That
• Hideko Takahashi at The Silver Lining
• Judith Moffat at Jo’s Journal
• Wendell Minor at Wild Rose Reader

Sunday, November 4

• Joy Allen at Check It Out
• Robin Brickman at Greetings from Nowhere
• Lauren Stringer at laurasalas
• Nancy Wallace at In the Pages . . .

clubbing

Clubbing by Andi Watson

A lot of people have been saying that they didn’t like Clubbing because of how it ended, but I liked it! I like the whole small-town-with-a-secret thing; it reminded me of Hot Fuzz. Somehow it only seems to work in England, though. Why is that? The main character, Charlotte (though she goes by Lottie – why?? Why voluntarily use an old lady name?) gets in trouble with the law and gets shipped to her grandparents’ house in the country, where she helps her grandmother bake sponge cakes and organize raffles for the her ladies club. She’s pretty spoiled and obnoxious, but not too self-involved to see that there’s more going on in that town than she’d expected. She witnesses a fight between her grandfather and another lady in the WI (Women’s Institute, the one that’s sponsoring all the town events); then that woman turns up dead in a pond on the golf course with a suspicious scar. Lottie and her new friend Howard are on the case, but turn up something much more interesting than an affair gone wrong. Like I said, I liked it. There’s a supernatural element (that’s the part people objected to), but I thought it worked. I thought Lottie was kind of a strange character, though. She makes a big deal about being Goth, but she never really seemed like it to me – she does a lot of “Ah, yes, and these tall black boots were $300 in a Manhattan boutique…” Eh? An all-black wearing Valley girl, maybe… 

graphic novels and manga

So, in April I’m on a conference panel on graphic novels. I’m going to be talking about the library end of things: selection sources, ordering, programming with, etc. I agreed to this thinking, “Yeah, that’s what I do for work, I’m the graphic novel selector, so yeah, I can do that.” Now, though, I’m feeling like I don’t know neeearly enough about all of this. I can talk about what I do, but… yeah.

So, I’m starting a new range-broadening exercise and planning to read at least one graphic novel or manga a week that I wouldn’t normally read. I’ll still read the ones that interest me as I normally would, but I’m working at reading the ones that don’t seem like my kind of thing. (This all sounded like a good idea in my head, but writing it out now, I’m thinking Hoo-ee! One a week! Man, you’re really suffering, eh? Oh, well. It’s better than nothing. And who knows, maybe I’ll really get into it.)

We spent the weekend in Oklahoma for my mother-in-law’s birthday and had a much better time than I’d expected. I’m reading Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me With Apples after listening to and loving the audiobook of her Garlic and Sapphires last week. This one might be even better, though it seems more about her and (slightly) less about food. Good stuff.  It was crazy, I took TWO adult books to read. Two! Adult books!

Robert’s Snow links

 

Week 2: 

Monday, October 22

• Mark Teague at The Miss Rumphius Effect
• Sharon Vargo at Finding Wonderland
• Christopher Demarest at Writing and Ruminating
• Rose Mary Berlin at Charlotte’s Library
• David Macaulay at Here in the Bonny Glen

Tuesday, October 23

• Carin Berger at Chasing Ray
• Marion Eldridge at Chicken Spaghetti
• Sophie Blackall at not your mother’s bookclub
• Erik Brooks at Bildungsroman
• Brian Lies at Greetings from Nowhere

Wednesday, October 24

• Elisa Kleven at Rozzie Land
• Consie Powell at Becky’s Book Reviews
• Jimmy Pickering at Shaken & Stirred
• Frank Dormer at What Adrienne Thinks About That
• Sheila Bailey at Lizjonesbooks

Thursday, October 25

• Julia Denos at Interactive Reader
• Rebecca Doughty at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
• Brian Floca at A Fuse #8 Production
• Margaret Chodos-Irvine at readergirlz

Friday, October 26

• David Ezra Stein at HipWriterMama
• Juli Kangas at Sam Riddleburger’s blog
• Ginger Nielson at Miss O’s School Library
• Margot Apple at Jo’s Journal

Saturday, October 27

• Julie Fromme Fortenberry at Your Neighborhood Librarian
• Sarah Dillard at The Silver Lining
• John Hassett at cynthialord’s Journal
• Abigail Marble at Please Come Flying

Sunday, October 28

• Ashley Wolff at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy
• Barbara Garrison at Brooklyn Arden
• Kelly Murphy at ChatRabbit

Robert’s Snow

OK, I’m pretty late getting to this, but all this week there are tooons of great interviews with illustrators all over the kidlitosphere in support of Robert’s Snow, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for cancer in honor of Grace Lin’s late husband, Robert. Illustrators have donated beautifully painted snowflakes to be auctioned in three groups to raise money for the cure, and these interviews highlight these illustrators, their snowflakes, and the cause. The 2007 auctions begin November 13. More information available here.

 

October 15

Randy Cecil at ChatRabbit
Michelle Chang at The Longstockings
Kevin Hawkes at Cynthia Lord’s Journal
Barbara Lehman at The Excelsior File
Grace Lin at In the Pages
 
Tuesday, October 16

Selina Alko at Brooklyn Arden
Scott Bakal at Wild Rose Reader
Alexandra Boiger at Paradise Found
Paige Keiser at Your Neighborhood Librarian
Janet Stevens at The Miss Rumphius Effect
 
Wednesday, October 17

Rick Chrustowski at laurasalas
Diane DeGroat at Jama Rattigan’s Alphabet Soup
Ilene Richard at Something Different Every Day
Brie Spangler at Lectitans
Don Tate at The Silver Lining
 
Thursday, October 18
Brooke Dyer at Bookshelves of Doom
D.B. Johnson at Lessons from the Tortoise
Erin Eitter Kono at Sam Riddleburger
Sherry Rogers at A Life in Books
Jennifer Thermes at Through the Studio Door
 
Friday, October 19

Graeme Base at Just One More Book
Denise Fleming at MotherReader
Jeff Mack at AmoXcalli
Jeff Newman at A Year of Reading
Ruth Sanderson at Book Moot
 
Saturday, October 20

Linas Alsenas at A Wrung Sponge
Theresa Brandon at The Shady Glade
Karen Katz at Whimsy Books
Judy Schachner at Kate’s Book Blog
Sally Vitsky at Shelf Elf: read, write, rave
 
Sunday, October 21

Matthew Cordell at Just Like the Nut
Maxwell Eaton III at Books and Other Thoughts
Roz Fulcher at Goading the Pen
Susie Jin at sruble’s world
Susan Mitchell at Check It Out

unread books

Swiped from… someone? It was fun, but I think it would be amusing to compare this list to the same list right out of college. Probably all of them that hadn’t been read would have been on my TBR list, just because I’d've felt like I should read them. Now I feel no such sense of obligation. I’m mostly okay with that.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude*
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange (I think?)
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible*
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – this was a few years ago. I’m currently rereading and doing much better.
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything – not because I wasn’t enjoying it, I just got distracted. It’s long, dude!
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers