This morning, the supremely classy Lauren Myracle withdrew her novel Shine from consideration for the National Book Award, after being asked to by the National Book Foundation. Why? Because they f’ed up and misheard “Shine” when the judge called in to nominate “Chime”, and the NBF couldn’t bear to stand […]
brouhahas
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As you may have heard, the finalists for the National Book Award were announced yesterday, and for the first time, six finalists were announced as contenders for the Award in the category of Young People’s Literature. That is, FIVE titles were announced during the press conference, with a sixth added […]
The tabs on my browser have flowed over to a second row, so it’s time for another tab-closing session of Linkapalooza! First up: First, the School Library Journal ran one librarian’s “Open Letter to Kids’ Book Publishers.” Then, editor Andrew Karre wrote a rebuttal to her point about the length […]
I came across a couple of interesting blog posts recently that make me think, and I thought I'd see what YOU thought of them! First, John Green comes up with a pretty interesting analysis, using Goodreads, of how teens relate to books. I saw a bit of this at ALA the other weekend, where many teens stepped up to speak about a book they loved from the long list. Over and over. I didn't get a chance to hear the committee discuss the book in detail, but let's just say it wasn't an award-winner. But kids loved it, and they love award-winners, too. There was a ton of controversy before the big ALA awards were announced, as to how the committee often seems to pick books that teens don't read. John looks at the Goodreads numbers for some of those books, and says, "Oh yeah?" Like I said, really interesting.
News from out of the UK that you may have heard already, but it's worth repeating. A long distinguished list of children's authors including Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, Terry Pratchett and many more have founded the site No To Age Banding to protest publishers' decisions to start labeling their children's books with age ranges. There's been loads of coverage, and I encourage you to check out No To Age Banding and read for yourself their reasons for rebelling against the idea.