Fusenews: Things We Are Avoiding – Thank You Notes and Email

A person’s below the radar reading recommendations says more about them than a host of psychoanalytic hours in therapy ever could, I say.  Case in point, the world’s most famous children’s librarian, Nancy Pearl.  She went on NPR during the holiday season and made some Dips Below the Reading Radar.  The two that pertain to my occupation are Alice in Sunderland (no arguments there… that book’s bloody brilliant) and Previously, which I somehow never saw.  Thanks to Shaken and Stirred for the link.

• I’m only just now catching up on my blog reading now that the holidays have ground to a chilly close.  As it stands, I utterly missed the post over at Oz and Ends about Unreliable Narrators in picture books and the like.  I’m a Pale Fire fan, myself.  The kind of person who is still waiting for the picture book version of Pale Fire to appear someday. 

• Blogger and soon-to-be author Gwenda Bond (a name made for covers, don’t you think?) of Shaken and Stirred went and got herself an agent.  Well done, Gwenda!  Or rather, well done Jennifer Laughran of the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

• In other agenty news Stephen Barbara recently posted the following information about his own move:

"After three years as agent and contracts director at the Donald Maass Literary Agency, Stephen Barbara is joining Foundry Literary + Media as full-time agent starting January 5th.

Barbara will be the resident books for young readers at Foundry and is bringing his entire list; his clients include popular YA author Todd Strasser (Give a Boy a Gun), acclaimed middle-grade novelist Lynne Jonell (Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat), debut teen novelist Lauren Oliver (If I Should Fall), and Texas Blue Bonnet finalist Lisa Graff (The Thing About Georgie)."

• Today is steal-all-your-links-from-Gwenda day.  Usually when I find a bunch of great links from a single blogger I’ll stretch them out over a series of days.  Apparently 2009 is the year of no self-control, though, because I can’t help but include ALL of this information.  For example, I have now seen Eye Candy for Bibliophiles and it’s an irresistable treat.  Though it isn’t specifically children’s literature-focused, for the last week or so the site has been uploading British paperback covers of everything from Susan Cooper and Robin McKinley to Alan Garner and Madeleine L’Engle.  Many of these titles are from Puffin paperbacks.  I hope E. Nesbit’s next.  There was a trend in Britain for a while to film children’s books and then to put the covers on the books.  A truly awful Phoenix and the CarpetRailway Children and a pretty decent come to mind.  Apparently it happened to Alan Garner’s books too, though:

• I’ve had some fun recently reading through English prof and children’s literary scholar Philip Nel’s MySpace blog.  Particularly his encapsulation of The Cockney Alphabet.  What can I say?  I’m a sucker for a pun.

• Daily Image:

Over at BoingBoing, one Shawn Bruce linked to his brother and sister-in-law’s homemade house.  A house, what’s more, that was said to contain a "groovy Tolkienesque fireplace".  I thought that would mean that it was round in some way.  Not quite:

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

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