Trick or Treat for Kidlit Links
As October turns to November, things start to get more end-of-year-ish, don't they? I mean, tonight we Fall Back, which means that tomorrow (at least up here in the northern climes) it will start to get seriously dark in the late afternoons. The trees are transitioning from their glorious technicolor to...well...bare. And you just know that as soon as all the Halloween displays are stripped from the stores, the Christmas/Holiday/New Year's stuff will be going right up.
In the book world, the end of the year means lots of best-of lists. For the second year in a row, Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti is compiling all the "Best Children's/Teen Books of the year" lists in one handy spot. So far there are only two lists on her list-of-lists, but I'm sure there will be lots more soon.
Speaking of best-of lists, the other day I happened upon a really terrific list of the 100 Best Book Blogs for Kids, Tweens and Teens at Online School. Some of my very favorite kidlit blogs are included, as well as several that are new to me and some that I've perused once or twice and always meant to get back to. Just a short time surfing around this list yielded a whole trick-or-treat bag's worth of cool stuff. Here's just a taste of what I found
- In Shen's Books, a blog about multicultural books, I found two posts about books with biracial characters: one on picture books and one covering books for older kids. I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately, and am happy to see such great lists!
- I loved this behind-the-scenes post by Alvina Ling on the Blue Rose Girls blog about what really happens at a publishing house when good news--in this case, the news that Grace Lin's Where The Mountain Meets the Moon was chosen for Al Roker's Book Club--comes down the pike.
- And last but not least, via Bottom Shelf Books, a blog with a delightfully grown-up perspective on picture books, I discovered that the hero of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day has his very own twitter stream.
Off to wait for trick-or-treaters now (and maybe read something good while I'm at it)-- wishing everyone a happy (and not too scary) Halloween!
You mentioned best-of lists. I think a natural for Scholastic would be to start creating best-of lists on Twitter, now that Twitter has rolled out lists to all members as of last week.
Posted by: JD Lasica | November 03, 2009 at 20:07 PM
Hi JD-- that's a neat idea, thanks; I don't write for Scholastic's Twitter stream but I've passed your comment on to my editor.
Posted by: Els Kushner | November 03, 2009 at 20:43 PM