Hey! Wait! I’m Not Finished With You Yet!

• I justify letting you know that Stephen Fry has a blog by pointing out that he reads the Harry Potter audio books in England.  A slim but sufficient connection.
  

• Oz and Ends speculates that So You Want to be a Wizard by Diane Duane should really be filmed by Robert Rodriguez. He offers some convincing evidence (though I would think the third Spy Kids film throws Rodriguez into sketchy territory). I agree that the series should be filmed. A bit odd that it hasn’t, when you come to think about it. American wizard stories that are halfway decent? Few and far between.

• I’d forgotten all about the handy dandy Author Name Pronunciation Guide until Kids Lit linked to it recently. She went to check out Jon Scieszka. I went to check out Jarrett J. Krosoczka. Infinitely useful. Educating Alice

• Philip Pullman is a very smart man. He knows that in writing another His Dark Materials story it should really feature a character near and dear to readers’ hearts. So who does he chose to shine the spotlight upon? Lee Scoresby! Woo-hoo! Educating Alice has the press release and the details.

• Leila Roy has discovered evidence via The Guardian that may put into question everything we’ve ever known or believed about Enid Blyton. I got four words for you. The first two are "secret code" and the second two are "first husband". Go wild.

• According to Publishers Weekly, Harper Collins recently rolled out a new site for their authors’ web pages. Harper Collins says that it’s, "a way for authors to have a strong presence on the Web without forcing them to create and host their own site. " It’s an alternative to MySpace, I guess, though HC said it was "less a MySpace redux than a way of matching up author-generated content with marketing know-how." The index to the authors is easy to use but it doesn’t look as if many authors have put up their own pages quite yet.  I’ll be watching this with interest over the next few months.
  

• Caving in to peer pressure I finally took the plunge and read a little YA. A little Stephanie Meyers YA, if you get my drift. For those of you unaware of the phenomenon that is Twilight and its sequels (is there an actual terms for this series, by the way?) there was a great article in cbc.ca about the books and their widespread appeal. For me, I could see why teenage girls would go gaga over it, but Meyer’s prose weighs a bit heavy at times. He’s a pretty vampire? Really? How pretty? Oh, he sparkles like diamonds in the sun? Uh… really? Huh. Meyer is apparently writing a book about a mermaid next. My bet is that it may also be a pretty pretty mermaid, but that’s just a hunch.

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