bookshelves of doom

8-bit cinema: The Hunger Games.

 

Have to do any holiday shopping for a YA lover?

Lizzie Skurnick Books is running a promotion:

If you subscribe to Lizzie Skurnick Books between now and December 15th, you’ll get all the books published so far for the price of one subscription. That’s 14 books for the price of 12, if you subscribe for one year, and 8 books for the price of 6 if you choose the six month subscription option. All subscriptions come with FREE SHIPPING. Among the authors LS Books will be publishing in the next year are Sydney Taylor, Norma Klein, Brenda Wilkinson, M.E. Kerr, Lika Perl, Berthe Amoss, and many more.

Time to leave a tab open in Josh's browser!

On second thought, maybe I should go for a LESS-SUBTLE HINT...

The 2013 Costa shortlists...

...have been announced.

The Children's Book Award list is:

Ross Montgomery for Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door

Sarah Naughton for The Hanged Man Rises

Chris Riddell for Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse

Elizabeth Wein for Rose Under Fire

Click on through to the article for the other lists, and see the Costa website for even more info.

The Globe 100 guide to the year's best books...

...has been released.

Here's the link to the YA list, and here's the link to the masterlist of lists.

Winnie the Pooh, via Soviet Russia.

 

See the other two at Open Culture.

"Silverstein narrowly avoided the world's first cartoon-related court martial over a comic strip that seemed to imply officers were dressing their families in stolen uniforms."

There's a piece on Shel Silverstein up at mental_floss.

The whole thing's worth reading, but I especially got a kick out of this bit about The Giving Tree:

Those who branded Silverstein's work as unfit for children were certainly extremists, but that's not to say Uncle Shelby didn't have a dark side that could be a bit unnerving at times. There are hints of this even in The Giving Tree, which tells the story of a generous tree that repeatedly donates parts of itself to a needy boy until it's nothing more than a stump. Although the book is considered a classic today, after Silverstein finished it in 1960, it took him four years before he found anyone willing to publish it. Apparently, editors found it too depressing for kids and too simple for adults. It wasn't until his other titles started raking in the dough that Harper & Row was confident enough to give it a shot.

Today @KirkusReviews...

...I wrote about Premeditated, which bears a striking resemblance to the last book I wrote about for Kirkus:

Last week, I wrote about Poor Little Dead Girls, a thriller about a middle-class girl who is catapulted into Richie Rich territory via athletic scholarship. (The thriller part involves a secret society! And lots of other crazy stuff, like eugenics and blood diamonds and murrrrrderrrrr!) Totally coincidentally, today’s book, Josin L. McQuein’s Premeditated, is ALSO a thriller about a middle-class girl who enters the world of the very, very privileged. Unlike Sadie, though, Dinah isn’t remotely interested in using the prestige of her school’s name to make her way into the Ivy League. No, Dinah has finagled her way into the Eleanor Lowry School for one reason, and one reason alone: REVENGE.

So weird that I picked them up one right after the other like that!