YES, you are correct! That is ME with Laurie Halse Anderson and YES I met Steven Kellogg and YES I heard J. Patrick Lewis speak. These three great children’s authors all spoke today at the annual Kennesaw State University Conference on Literature for Children and Young Adults. I will get to hear Laurie speak again tomorrow (Wednesday, April 1) and you can hear her, too, from 4:00-5:00 at Cherokee High. All three authors were fabulously inspirational. I can’t wait to hear tomorrow’s authors: Laurie, Bill Konigsberg, and Ned Vizzini, all great young adult authors. We’ll also be the first to hear the winners of this year’s Georgia Peach Book Award. OK, I already know the winner, because the author is a facebook friend, but I don’t know the runners up. I’ll be posting the announcement here ASAP. Don’t miss it!
The Blatant Bibliophiles met on Monday, March 30 to discuss Absolutely, Positively Not by David LaRochelle. We also ate ice cream sundaes, which added to the enjoyment of the book. Almost everyone enjoyed the book, and everyone enjoyed the ice cream. Hope you enjoy the slide show! At our next meeting next month we’ll discuss The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Stay tuned tomorrow when I’ll have the results from this year’s Peach Book Awards from the Kennesaw State University Conference on Literature for Children and Young Adults. Happy reading!
Please bring your gently used children’s and young adult books to the media center for the Blatant Bibliophile book drive for the Canton Family Violence Center. This is a change from our original post–originally we thought we wanted women’s books only, but we now have learned that the center needs books for kids from birth through high school because they are trying to establish a library for the children of the families who seek shelter there. We will give free candy to all students bringing in a book for our drive, and will award a Barnes & Noble gift card to the student bringing in the most books. We will also have a drawing among all students bringing in books for our drive for another Barnes & Noble gift card. Students will be entered into the drawing one time for each book they donate to the drive. Please give your books to Mrs. Fleet or Mrs. Beasley and be sure to add your name to the list for the drawing. The book drive will be held from Monday, March 30 through Friday, April 17.
Operation Teen Book Drop, sponsored by our friends at readergirlz, YALSA, and GuysLit Wire, is being held on Teen Literature Day, April 16, so this is our contribution to the effort. This annual event asks teens to leave a book in a public place. This year, these three groups have worked with teen book publishers to provide over 8,000 new young adult novels, audiobooks, and graphic novels to teens in pediatric hospitals. You can go to the readergirlz site to download book plates to insert in your donated books if you would like.
Have you checked out the HarperTeen book site? HarperTeen publishes lots of the books you’re probably reading, and you can read portions of your favorite books online. In fact, you can often read the entire book online. Right now, for a limited time, you can read 100%, yes, all, of The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening and The Struggle. Collected here in one volume for the first time, volumes one and two of The Vampire Diaries by L. J. Smith, this is the tale of two vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon, and Elena, the beautiful girl torn between them.
You think that’s something? You can also get every single word of Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely. Aislinn has always seen faeries. Powerful and dangerous, they walk hidden in mortal world. Aislinn fears their cruelty—especially if they learn of her Sight—and wishes she were as blind to their presence as other teens. In case you didn’t know, Wicked Lovely is one of the 2009-2010 Georgia Peach Book Award nominees. Don’t be mad at me if you sit around and wait. I don’t know how long this will last; I just know it’s available now, and it’s for a limited time. Oh. And you can also get these cool widgets to post on your social networking site, blog, or other website. You’ve just got to discover HarperTeen!
Have you checked out Google today? As I’m sure you know, Google frequently changes their logo to reflect significant events of the day. Today’s logo celebrates author Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, perhaps the most famous of his many wonderful children’s books. As a Blatant Bibliophile, this may have been one of your first books, or one of the books that inspired your life-long love of reading. According to an article in the London Telegraph, Mr. Carle, who will celebrate his eightieth birthday later this year, was inspired by, of all things, a hole puncher to create his world-famous book. Here’s what he had to say about how he invented his character: “One day I was punching holes with a hole puncher into a stack of paper, and I thought of a bookworm and so I created a story called “A Week with Willi the Worm”. Then my editor suggested a caterpillar instead and I said “Butterfly!” That’s how it began,” he said. Today marks the fortieth anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and elementary schools and public libraries around the world are celebrating. The book is published in 47 languages and has sold over 29 million copies. A copy is sold every thirty seconds somewhere in the world. The Very Hungry Caterpillar is just one of over seventy children’s picture books Mr. Carle has published. If you love Eric Carle and his books, celebrate by reading a book with a child. You may also enjoy visiting his website.
Here’s a slide show of the new 2009-2010 Georgia Peach Book Award Nominees. There’s no word yet on the winner for the 2008-2009 Georgia Peach Book Award. But I can tell you who won at Creekview, if it’s any comfort to you. In first place with the most votes and the most overall points was Impulse by Ellen Hopkins. Absolutely, Positively Not by David LaRochelle finished second in points and votes, and Uglies by Scott Westerfeld finished third in both points and votes. Will the state totals turn out the same as the Creekview totals? It’s my opinion that Impulse and Uglies will turn up in the top three. I’m guessing that Absolutely, Positively Not probably got more votes here because we are reading it this month, but it is one of my favorites–maybe my very favorite. I don’t know–I liked all of the ones I have read, which is about half of them. It is easy to see why they were nominated!
Don’t forget! Today, Friday, March 13, is the LAST day to vote for your favorite 2009-2010 Peach Book Award nominee. Who’s winning so far? Well, we have votes for every nominee except one, so they’ve (almost) all been popular with our readers. I’ve read about half of them so far, and I’ve loved every one of them–these are some great books people! I’m sure we’ll get some more votes in during lunch, and our Creekview winner may not come close to being the state winner, but, so far, Impulse by Ellen Hopkins, a Creekview favorite author, has a slight lead over our Blatant Bibliophile read for this month, Absolutely, Positively Not by David LaRochelle. What else has gotten a lot of votes so far? Boot Camp by Todd Strasser, a popular “boy” author, Uglies by Scott Westerfield, another Creekview fave, and Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt.
So here’s the update on our book drive. We have offers of help from several of our Bibliophile members and from my other book club which is composed primarily of librarians. One of my librarian friends is a volunteer at the Cartersville library, and they are having a used book sale tomorrow. She is going to bring us some donations from their sale! Also exciting: one of our readers is author Melissa Walker, author of the Violet series: Violet on the Runway, Violet by Design, and Violet in Private. Her new book, Lovestruck Summer, will be coming out on May 5, just in time for summer beach reading! After Melissa’s generous offer, I challenged my other facebook author friends, so maybe when I get home tonight we will have more offers! Meghan F., who inspired our project, is going to the Women’s Crisis Center to volunteer tomorrow, so we will have more details of exactly what they need. In the meantime, Meghan says they can also use children’s books. Any books which would appeal to women–aka “chick lit”–would be great. It also looks like we’re going to need some members to volunteer to get books packaged up and delivered to the center. And I know some of you can still use some hours for National Honor Society! Thanks, everyone, for your generous offers!
In case you haven’t checked your email lately, Bibliophiles, we had a request from Meghan F. (a media center patron, but not a Bibliophile member) for donations of used books for the Women’s Crisis Center. I thought this might be a worthy project for us, and several of you have responded positively to my email already. I have asked my adult book club if they would like to contribute to this cause also and one of them has already responded with offers of books–I’m sure the rest just haven’t had a chance to check their email and respond yet. I know that they all have many books that they will contribute to this cause, and most of the books would be books that would be of interest to women, because, duh, they are all women. The women in the shelter have a good bit of time on their hands in which they could read books. Emilie Ko. also suggested that we might want to collect children’s books as well, since many of the women in the shelter have children with them. Please email me or reply to the blog if you would like to help with this project. The main thing we would need to do is to put up some signs around school in case other people want to donate, bring any books that we could donate ourselves, and I will also email the staff to ask them to donate. If you have suggestions of other ways we could help, please let me know this also. We might consider putting signs up in places like Kroger if they would let us and if it is OK with Dr. Eddy. Please let me know if you have suggestions about this project.
This month’s readergirlz featured author is Mary E. Pearson. Her featured book? The Adoration of Jenna Fox. What’s it about? It’s about Jenna’s search for her own identity after she wakes up from a coma and can’t remember who she is. She can’t even remember the people who say they are her parents. Are they, or aren’t they? They seem very bizarre, as does everything else about her life. Join Jenna as she tries desperately to unlock the secrets of who she was and who she has become.
