bookshelves of doom

Vacation bound.

We're heading out to various spots in the Midwest this weekend. 

We decided on our destination(s) because Josh has family and old friends out there, and because I've never been to The Middle.

I'll post if I can, but otherwise, I'll be back in a little over a week.

Have a fab holiday weekend!

2007 Guardian Children's longlist.

The Falconer's Knot??  Really? 

The Falconer's Knot is one of the best of the best?

I didn't hate it, but I never would have put it on a Best of 2007 list.  I mean, come on -- MOONBEAM??

(link via Fuse)

Under the Radar Recommendations: Friday.

If you've missed anything this week, check out the master list.

Friday's links are:

A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy: The Vietnam books by Ellen Emerson White

Big A, little a: The Deep by Helen Dunmore

Bildungsroman: The May Bird Trilogy by Jodi Lynn Anderson

Finding Wonderland: The Avion My Uncle Flew by Cyrus Fisher

Not Your Mother's Bookclub: A look at some recently revised classics

Fuse Number 8: Stoneflight by George McHarque

lectitans: Gentle's Holler and Louisiana Song both by Kerry Madden

Chasing Ray: Kipling's Choice by Geert Spillebeen

Interactive Reader: A Plague of Sorcerers by Mary Frances Zambreno

The YA YA YAs: Resurrection Men by TK Welsh

7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Such a Pretty Face: Short Stories About Beauty edited by Ann Angel

LitRock.

Lyrics here.

Edwin Arlington Robinson poem here.

Kate DiCamillo wins Tulsa's Anne V. Zarrow Award.

From Tulsa World:

"As a kid, books were like a light in the wilderness for me. I can't pick just one person that was a hero for me," DiCamillo said.

"But in every library that I went into, some librarian could tell that I desperately needed extra attention, and they would give it to me. And I was allowed to check out as many books as I wanted to. . . . I know what it's like to live in a small town. I know what it's like to live in a single-parent home. I also know what it's like to find solace at a library," she said.

More here.  I don't know if I'd call Edward Tulane "delightful" -- more brutal and devastating until the happy ending -- but to each their own, I suppose.  (I say that as someone who came away from the book loving it, by the way.  But wow, was it rough.)

The right age for reading.

From the Guardian:

Try as I might, the Cooper books just didn't do it for me. It might have been the writing (clumsy* and portentous); it might have been the fact that any "Dark" that can be beaten back by an 11-year-old just isn't that chilling ... Or perhaps I'm just too old, and the Cooper sequence is of the non-crossover variety that only works for (i) children, or (ii) adults who read them when they were little and use them as a portal back into their own childhood.

I've run across this phenomenon quite often with the Cooper books -- that people who grew up with them adore them as adults, but that people who read them for the first time as adults don't take to them at all.

I've noticed something similar with Catcher in the Rye.  Others?

*SHOCKING!!  Just... shocking! 

LitRock.

I prefer the first version, but it's only a snippet.

Lyrics here.