Fusenews: I Mean, Wouldn’t the Witch Duck Just Melt Immediately on Contact with Water?

Cybil sibilance is nigh.  The call has gone out to fill the children’s and YA panelists and judges are needed.  The Cybils, in case you hadn’t heard, are the awards given out by the Kidlitosphere community to their picks of the best books of the year.  A mix of official awards and the Quills, essentially.  I think I’ll try to wrangle my way onto the middle grade graphic novel panelist committee this year.  After all, I’ve already read a whole heaping helpful of the pups.  More information is available here.

• What makes you happy?  Today this did the trick for me.

• Monica Edinger of the blog Educating Alice is back from Peru.  She does a great encapsulation of the trip including, and I am not making this up, a picture of herself holding a baby sloth.  A … BABY …. SLOTH.  Are you made of stone?  Go!  Git!  Look at the slothful baby!

• Ouch!  I wander on over to Chasing Ray and see something that pierces mine tender eyeballs like sharp pointy sticks.  As Kelly so eloquently put it, "Blergh."

• This just in: E. Nesbit was hot.  What?  Oh wait… wait… not E. Nesbit the writer (though she may have been very nice, I dunno).  E. Nesbit, as in Evelyn Nesbit, the Girl on the Velvet Swing with the husband that shot Stanford White.  And where was the trial conducted, children?  That’s right!  It was conducted at the Jefferson Market Courthouse, which eventually became the Jefferson Market Branch of New York Public Library where I used to work.  What does this have to do with children’s literature (aside from my name gaff)?  Well Stephany over at Crooked House recently finished reading Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic and discovered that a photograph of Evelyn Nesbit, currently up on the Crooked House site, was used as the model for Anne from Anne of Green Gables.  And around and around it goes.

• I know that Americans do this to, but it sure seems like the Canadians (to continue a theme) are real big these days on adding more books to their posthumous authors’ publications.  First someone goes and writes an Anne of Green Gables prequel and now we hear that there’s going to be a fourth Jacob Two-Two book.  I should probably read these at some point, shouldn’t I?  Thanks to Big A little a for the link.

• 100 Scope Notes calls this the "Most interesting take on what it’s like to write children’s books I’ve heard in a while."  No arguments here.  It’s author/illustrator Lauren Child talking about her career on NPR.

• Liz over at Tea Cozy has some super stand-up points to be made about the recent Washington Post article Drawing Power and its take on the graphic novel industry.  As Liz notes, "It talks about things like distribution and how comic book sales are different from book sales. Unless you’re content to not publish your work, or have a trust fund or well-off spouse, or don’t care about things like insurance and paying rent, it is important to remember that publishing (including comic books and graphic novels) is a business."  Read the rest of her comments in her piece The Business Side of Graphic Novels.

• Now Let Us Praise Fabulous Bloggers: Just a note. Everyone has a different reviewing style.  A different format.  A different take on the genre.  But when it comes to reviews that are exceedingly pleasant to the eye, one of my favorite blogs is The Well-Read Child.  The site does something with its reviews that I would steal if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve never seen it used anywhere else, or half as well.  When a review appears on the blog, there is always an accompanying portion at the bottom that shows quotes from other blogs as pertaining to the book of the day.  It’s always a separate little section and I find it an exceedingly good idea and very… very satisfying to see.  Does that make any sense?  Just my two cents.

• Cool site alerts: There is also the little matter of a blog called Audiobooker.  I would blanch in the face of having to provide continual original content on the subject of children’s and YA audiobooks but middle school teacher librarian Mary Burkey does one heckuva stand up job.  Thanks to BookMoot for the link.  Here’s another one.  We read books all the time but when it comes to actually using them with students… well, we sometimes need some help.  Some additional ideas.  Some thoughts other than our own.  The site Read These Books and Use Them takes a variety of children’s and YA titles and after summarizing them comes up with at least three ideas of how to use them with kids.  Useful for people running bookgroups and teachers, I should think.

• There’s a new edition of Lynda Madaras’ What’s Happening to My Body? with a shiny lovely new cover.  Why is this such good news?  Well head on over to Pink Me and she’ll show you what the old cover used to look like.  "At the public library, I have seen boys actually recoil when I have offered this book to them. Parents have taken one look and winced."  This may be the worst cover I have seen in a very long time and that is saying something, it is.  Wow.

• Laura Lutz at the Queens Library System offers advice on her blog Pinot and Prose on storing cheese, serving white wine, and reviewing for professional journals.  Cheese.  Yum.

• Looks like the 2008 Carter G. Woodson Book Awards were announced this year.  How did I do?  Well, I managed to review at least one title: Middle Level, Grades 5 – 8, 2008 Award: Black and White Airmen: Their True History by John Fleischman.  Otherwise my track record is not good.  Ah well.

• This is called living the librarian dream and getting fired for it.  You write a fictionalized account of your particularly egregious patrons, you do it under a pseudonym, and you STILL get a pink slip when your administration finds out.  Oo-de-lally.

• There be GOLD in them thar posts!  Editorial Anonymous has spilled the beans on exactly what it is that she looks for in an illustrator’s online blog/portfolio.  Want to know what editors seek when they peruse your works online?  We’ve hit the motherlode, boys!  Have at ’em.

• And finally, lawsuit-happy Warner Brothers is mad that there’s an Indian film out there called "Hari Puttar — A Comedy of Terrors."  Oh, let it go, guys.  Just let it go.

• Daily Image:

So surreal it almost doesn’t compute. 

It’s a customized rubber duck site called CelebriDucks.  I’ve been staring at that Alice in Wonderland duck for about four hours now.  It’s not getting any saner.  Explore the site if you like but be aware of the portions that get stranger and stranger and stranger.  Thanks to little sister Kate for the link.

Filed under: Fusenews