Guts and Glory

• A Galleycat piece on the recent Katonah Museum of Art panel includes a quote from David Levithan talking about, "the curse of Goodnight Moon." Tell me you wouldn’t read a children’s book with such a title as that. I think I’ll create a series of children’s mysteries and they’ll all have names like The Curse of Goodnight Moon, or The Secret of the Very Hungry Caterpillar or The Strega Nona Connection (which would essentially be The DePaola Code anyway).

• Laura Lutz has your Random House Spring 2008 Preview up and running.

• Eventually I’m just going to have to add The Onion AV Club to my blogroll. Via Shaken and Stirred I learned about a post they had up on fantasy called Flight from Fantasy.

• Illustrated endpapers. Via Children’s Illustration and bookshelves of doom.

• Does bibliotherapy work? If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Steve Barancik at Best Children’s Books describes it as "the use of books to help children experiencing difficult times." Some people live by it. Others abhor it. Librarians out there are all familiar with it. A beloved teacher at a school dies and suddenly you’re swamped with requests from other teachers asking for every single picture book you have dealing with death in its myriad forms. Mr. Barancik believes in it and has posted a listing of books on different topics. My worst bibliotherapy moment, and there have been some doozies, was from a patron who wanted books for her kids that showed that "daddy being mean to them wasn’t their fault." Later it turned out that the woman was recently divorced and was, in fact, attempting to make it very clear that everything they didn’t like about daddy was his fault. I can do without biliotherapy for a very long time, I think. Thanks to Practically Paradise for the link.

• Last year I was very fond of an unassuming little picture book by the name of When You Were Small. It didn’t win many awards here in the U.S. which was a pity. Trust the Canadians to pick me up again, then! When You Were Small has been shortlisted for the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award (worth $10,000). You can see the full listing of the Canadian Award shortlists thanks to the Achocka blog.

• Dang. I didn’t want to get hooked on this, but I think it’s too late for me. Gail Gauthier was recently directing people to KidderLit, a site that gives you the first lines of children’s books for fun. Here’s what they have to say for themselves:

Every morning, while sensible people are sleeping, the folks at KidderLit and its sister site TwitterLit are hard at work, combing through the stacks of the local library. Why? So that when you wake up and rush to your computer, there will be a new literary teaser waiting for you. Every morning we’ll post the first line of a young adult or children’s book here at KidderLit.com. The trick is that we don’t tell you what the book is or who the author is. To find out, you have to click the link to be taken to the book’s page on Amazon."

• And finally, book guts via BookLust (it’s prettier than it sounds).

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