MORE 'BEST-BOOKS-OF-2016' POSTS
Fun Fact: The American Library Association does not currently give an award specifically to great works of children’s book poetry. Is not that strange? When I first discovered this to be true, I was perplexed. I’ve always been a bit of a rube when it comes to the poetic form. Placing stresses on syllables and […]
Okay! I’ve been looking forward to this particular list for a while. But first, a quick note on what we’re calling these things. Not too long ago the very funny Glen Weldon wrote a piece for an NPR blog about whether or not we should be calling these books “comics” or “graphic novels”. Weldon is […]
Alongside yesterday’s easy book list, this is the other list that could have been a little beefier this year. Not a lot of racial diversity to be found, to be frank. That fault lies with me, not the books published in 2016. Still, with that in mind, this list is a collection of great books […]
I first came up with the idea for a 31 Days, 31 Lists series in late September. Having kept track of a number of books over the year, it made a logical kind of sense. But as we got closer to the actual lists I realized that in some categories I’m going to be seriously […]
Time to define my terms again! This is undoubtedly the most subjective of all my lists. Basically, what I’m saying with it, is that picture books are far more wide-ranging than many people suspect. If you say “picture book” they’ll imagine something for a 4-year-old. Nothing wrong with picture books for 4-year-olds, of course, but […]
Back in August of this year Travis Jonker wrote a great post on 100 Scope Notes called The Most Astonishingly Unconventional Children’s Books of 2016. It was an excellent post, really getting into the nitty gritty of what it is that makes a book “unconventional”. My list is a little different from Travis’s, though there’s […]
Credit where credit is due, there’s no way I could keep up this 31 Days, 31 Lists series if I hadn’t put in my time with New York Public Library. It was there that I learned how to read, track, remember, and call forth the books I read in a single year. The 100 Books […]
When I was in college I temporarily rejected my natural inclinations to be a librarian (an occupation I dismissed as boring and nightmarishly appealing) and decided I would become a photographer. So got a B.A. with a concentration in Fine Arts – Photography. And what I learned from my stint as an architectural/portrait/sports photographer was […]
Hm. Awkward title on today’s post. “Books With a Message”. Be a lot cleaner if I just said “Didactic Books” or “Books That Try to Teach You Something.” No . . . no . . . that’s worse. I think you get the general gist of what I’m going for, though. Today we’re highlighting books […]
I wish I had the numbers in front of me. I wish I could tell you how many bilingual books for kids have been published in the past and how that number compares to today. If we’re going to speak to my experience as a children’s librarian over the past decade, all I can say […]