Fusenews: Do I Date Myself? Very Well Then, I Date Myself (I Am Old, I Contain Decades).
News for Friday: There was no news for Friday.
Kidding! Barely.
I guess most children’s books turned into movies make it to the silver screen because some important hoo-ha somewhere loved it as a child. That my own personal thought process behind the fact that Lois Duncan’s 1971 book Hotel for Dogs is only NOW being turned into a film. The book was originally a Houghton title but is being rereleased by Scholastic at this moment in time. Looks like my library system didn’t even purchase it back in the day. Additionally, Duncan has written a sequel called News for Dogs. This answers my own personal question; is Lois Duncan still around? Awesome. Well forget the cute animal stories, can she please write us some more scary middle grade novels now? My library’s edition of Down a Dark Hall is getting lonely.
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If any of you are like me then you probably enjoy looking at cool new children’s rooms. And it looks like fellow librarian/blogger Adrienne has just gotten her very own. Beautiful.
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The ALSC Blog continues to update its feature on What I Wasn’t Taught in Library School. This week’s topic? What to wear, what to wear. I am in full agreement. No silk. The sheer amount of sweat a single storytime can crank out is . . . oh, I’m being gross again, aren’t I? Well it’s true! You try doing the hokey-pokey acapella and see how sweatless you are afterwards. And tell me heads and shoulders, knees and toes isn’t a workout of Jane Fonda proportions. But I date myself.
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It’s easy to understand why a children’s novel could go through some major book jacket changes from hardcover to paperback. More mysterious, if not to say baffling, are minor or incidental changes. Jacket Whys examines the weirdness that is the book Lights, Camera, Amalee by Dar Williams. The thought raised is, "The changes are so subtle, it hardly seems worth the alteration – unless there was a glaring faux-pas in matching the cover characterizations to their characters." Check it out for yourself. Seems like a lot of bother for a whole lotta nothing.
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The original Winnie-the-Pooh illustrations garner 1.26 million pounds in auction. If you bought me one of these for Christmas you can send it directly to my library. I do not mind. Be sure you write ORIGINAL WINNIE-THE-POOH PICS on the outside in big block letters too. Thanks to Achockablog for the link.
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The Onion lets us know about a typo in Prop 8 that some may have overlooked. Thanks to Bookninja for making me scare small children with an explosive reference desk laugh.
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Daily Image:
And finally, this sums up my day pretty well.
It is by Marina Carmago. Fabulous. Would make a good poster. Thanks to Swiss Miss for the link.
Filed under: Fusenews
About Betsy Bird
Betsy Bird is currently the Collection Development Manager of the Evanston Public Library system and a former Materials Specialist for New York Public Library. She has served on Newbery, written for Horn Book, and has done other lovely little things that she'd love to tell you about but that she's sure you'd find more interesting to hear of in person. Her opinions are her own and do not reflect those of EPL, SLJ, or any of the other acronyms you might be able to name. Follow her on Twitter: @fuseeight.
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Thanks–going to grab new copies of the Duncan book in anticipation!!
Wow, Thor is becoming the king of Kidlit Movies. Stuart Little 1&2, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Hotel for Dogs.
Too true about the what to wear article! But try telling that to my former boss who wore what she called her “furry legwarmers”– knee-high, real chinchilla fur boots with stiletto heals– to her toddler storytime. (My boss had a rich and very impractical boyfriend who supported her Carrie Bradshaw-like shoe fetish.) Enter a sweet little girl who had to have her snack and see the book up close at the same time, and you have disaster! The little girl came close to see the book, opened her mouth to chew, and accidentally spit up some food on the boots. Right after storytime, my boss went into her office to wipe it off and she was really, really angry. I kid you not. I so wanted to point out how ridiculous she was for wearing the shoes when she was sitting on the floor with children, but I also didn’t want to get fired!
I loved Hotel for Dogs– thanks for the tip on the sequel!