Fusenews: Soldier Bear. Oh My Little Soldier Bear.

I was a good little pookie and went out and saw Where the Wild Things Are the other day just as I was supposed to.  These days my brain is too muddled to give you a comprehensive review.  Tarzan-speak: Me like. Film good. Me no sure about audience.  Less Tarzan-like are the reactions of better reviewers than I.  Claire Gross at The Horn Book, for one, has a lovely take.  But for answering the real question (whether kids will dig it) why not go to the source?  One of Monica Edinger’s sixth graders wrote up her own review.  Read it here.  The kid makes good points.  Image by Shannon Bonatakis. Found at Terrible Yellow Eyes (which recently had its own gallery show).

• Half the comments on my blog, I’ve noticed, tend to come from kids trying to get a quickie answer to homework questions (it’s particularly amusing when they ask what the setting of such n’ such a book is).  Kids were pretty much Googling their homework the minute Google was invented, so plagiarism software has had to keep up.  Now it’s being used in other ways.  I don’t know about you, but any article that’s called How Plagiarism Software Found a New Shakespeare Play catches the old eyeballs.  Thanks to AL Direct for the link.

• Feeling rejected?  Well, misery loves company.  Or, to be more exactly, misery loves seeing company in the same boat and then eventually went on to be a huge success.  Over at Inkygirl (I’m growing quite attached to that site) there’s a lovely collection of authors and their rejection tales.  Just a question on the notorious number of times A Wrinkle in Time was rejected… wasn’t there some debate about whether that story was exaggerated or not?  I don’t remember very clearly, but I feel like there’s been some speculation about that over the years.  Hrm.  In any case, heartening reading.

• Oh good.  The Monkey See blog over at NPR agrees with me about Stitches appearing in the young person’s category for the National Book Award. Best line: "If Stitches is a kid’s book, expect to see Last Exit to Brooklyn on Reading Rainbow any day now."  Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the link.

• Jacket Knack has a fun post up examining children’s books that prefer to go nameless.  Note to self: If and when The Lion and the Mouse gets a shiny award, place it directly to left of the lion’s eyes so that it looks like he’s checking it out.

• Speaking of jackets, Lee Wind introduces us to the concept of Book Cover Shame.  As he puts it, "The idea that it’s embarrassing walking around with a book whose cover is pretty much the equivalent of you SCREAMING ‘I’m reading a bodice-ripping romance novel because I need more passion in my life!’ " The conclusion?  It’s possible that e-books will be able to get boys reading a wider variety of material because they will do away with the packaging that turns off male readers in the first place.  Lee manages to make a case for e-books that many of us haven’t considered before.  Interesting.  Particularly when Greg in the comments starts discussing future privacy issues.

• Is it silly that I wish that in the event that a book advertises on my site, they use a quote from my review in it?  I’ve got But Who Will Bell the Cats and Cars on Mars here and I loved both those books.  Wish they’d quote me, but I guess these are one size fits all adverts.  Pity.

• Daily Image:

AbeBooks has created a little site called The Weird Book Room.  In it, they place those books that they happen to find particularly peculiar.  There are plenty of children’s books in there as well.  We all have our favorites, I’m sure.  This was mine:

This is all very interesting but it brings up a question of intent that Matt and I have talked about regarding movies.  People look at old films or old jackets and say, "How could they not have realized how funny that was?"  We say, they often did.  On the AbeBooks site, some of the covers are straight up humorless in their intent (and therefore very funny) but others, like Help! A Bear is Eating Me or The Pop-Up Book of Phobias were meant to be funny in the first place and therefore don’t strictly count.  Like I say, it’s all about intent.  Thanks to AL Direct for the link.

Filed under: Fusenews