Tying Candy and Honoring Pooh

• MotherReader has posted the megalist of the Best Books of 2007. Those of you looking for Newbery and Caldecott contenders (to say nothing of the other awards) would do well to consider the books listed here. Just looking at it I could see a couple titles I should have added to my own list. Happily, I love the books that are getting the most votes. In the Picture Book category we have The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County. Hugo Cabret fans will be happy with the 14 (count ’em) 14 nominations, though I was just as pleased to see A Crooked Kind of Perfect end up with 5. The Wednesday Wars got 5 in the YA category (a hard book to put in any age group, I’d argue). And I think I may need to get my hands on the Jane Yolen title Here’s a Little Poem since it got 5 in the poetry section. Kudos to MotherReader for A) compiling the list and B) managing to keep out the mistaken 2006 titles that I’m sure sometimes cropped up by accident here and there. That’s no mean task.

• So I’m trolling through A Year in Reading and I see that Franki and Mary Lee did a recent count of the number of posts put out by different blogs on their backlogged Bloglines. I tied with The Candy Blog, which is awesome. Awesome, that is, because I didn’t even know that there was a blog full o’ candy. I’ve just spent 7 hours going through their posts and it’s all on CANDY CANDY CANDY. Yum. But the really interesting thing about the A Year in Reading post was that the number one poster of items on their blog was …. (drumroll please) …. newbie children’s author Sam Riddleburger. Mr. Riddleburger put out the highly amusing Quikpick Adventure Society this year (review to come) and I even made him a Goodreads friend at one point. Little did I know that the man blogs like ye’ve ne’er seen a man blog before. Plus the top half of his skull appears to have HMOCL possibilities. We shall see…

• In the realm of ideas that are not shabby, a patron of the library recently proposed to Mayor Bloomberg that the street sign on 53rd and 5th Avenue here in Manhattan be named "Pooh Place", in honor of our local resident. I think it’s a swell idea. If you agree, perhaps you could let Mr. Bloomberg know at his useful Contact the Mayor website. As the patron pointed out, it might help tourists find our famous bear with more ease.

• The newest edition of The Edge of the Forest (September edition) is up and running. It includes (and I have stolen this list directly from Bookmoot):

An interview with Phil Bildner, by Camille Powell.
An appreciation of Patrick McDowell’s picture books, by Adrienne Furness.
I discuss Anglo-American versions of Baba Yaga tales in Baba Yaga Heads West
Liz Burns reviews Barry Lyga’s Fanboy and Boy Toy.
Kim Winters talks being on retreat in A Day in the Life
Betsy Bird (A Fuse #8 Production) in the feature What’s in their Backpacks?
Robin Brande is this month’s Blogging Writer
Sounds from the Forest talks with Mary Anne Hoberman and Deborah Freedman (Brought to you by Just One More Book!!)

• The panels for the Cybil Award were just announced. They are:

Poetry
Nonfiction Picture Book
Fiction Picture Book
Nonfiction Middle/YA
Middle Grade Fiction
Young Adult Fiction
Fantasy and Science Fiction
Graphic Novels