Video Sunday: Not For All North Carolina

In other news, Penguin was all happy dappy this week about their new online multimedia site thing (I’m 90% sure they’ve a different name for it than that).  Apparently it is "published seasonally" or something along those lines.  All I care is that it provides me with cool videos, like this interview with National Ambassador of Children’s Literature, Jon Scieszka.  All I will tell you is that disrobing is involved.  It is, unfortunately, not something I can embed here.  Alack.

For the record, I have repeatedly tried and failed to locate the mythical video of 800+ kids giving Ambasador Scieszka the customary "salaam", as instructed to do so by David Shannon.  Jon claims it’s out there on the interwebs somewhere, but I cannot find it.

But let’s go back to professionally made book trailers.  I’m all for low-budget creativity, but there’s also something to be said for trailers that give it their all.  This one‘s less teaser trailer and more actual trailer.  See what you think.

One hot topic of discussion these last few months has been the use of race in Patricia Wrede’s The Thirteenth Child.  But why look at only one book?  What about other titles out there like The Hunger Games?  Author Mitali Perkins has started an interesting series called 12 Seconds, where she gives herself that amount of time to post a question.  In this case, she asks how you see the race of the characters in the book so as to start a discussion.  Thanks to Finding Wonderland for the link.

This last book trailer is a little more typical of the ones you can make yourself.  I do like that since this is historical fiction they’ve worked news clippings and photographs into the text itself.  And thank heavens for public domain music, eh?