It’s been a quieter couple of weeks in the book world, presumably as everyone is gearing up for Book Expo America. Or they’re preparing for the end of school. Or they’re cowering under their desks in anticipation of summer reading club starting. There have been some good things to share, though, so grab a drink and enjoy. (After writing this up I realized that my initial statements of these last couple of weeks being quiet was sort of wrong — there is a LOT here).

• If I may first start by sharing the week’s incredible contributions to the Unconventional Blog Tour? I’m absolutely blown away not only by the posts everyone wrote but also the response we got. I read on one of the blogs that linked up to the tour that they were interested in this since it was blogger-driven and without any goal behind it except to educate and to share. If my experience of reading these posts is any indication, I’d say it was successful. I want to spend a special shout out to Kate Hart’s post, which came in later in the afternoon yesterday — not only is it informative about the importance of citing your sources, the graphical representation is PERFECT. If you’re teaching anything about citation, I think you might have a new tool, courtesy of Kate.

• The ladies at Crunchings and Munchings have shared a post of YA inspired apparel, food, and more. Anyone else remember playing The Baby-Sitters Club board game to death as a kid?

• Andrew Karre explains why the YA doom-and-gloom sorts of articles exist. Of all the blog posts to come out of the profanity non-story, this is the best.  I saw someone on Twitter mention that the YA community is trolled hard, and it’s hard not to believe that.

• I haven’t had a legitimate reason to link to anything related to The Jersey Shore (which I love without shame) but now I do! Guess who is getting a comic book? And not just getting a comic book, but starring as the superhero? No, it’s not Snooki. It’s The Situation. Oh and does it ever look riveting. I am not usually a fan of The Situation (he’s the bottom rung on my ladder of Jersey Shore characters) but I might have to pick this one up. Just….because. Thanks to Matt for giving me the heads up on this one!  

• Stephen King’s forthcoming Joyland looks like it will be the thing of many nightmares to come. Small towns and carnies. Let me tell you where I live and what I fear. 

• Lest you think I only link to articles in The Atlantic when they annoy me, I’d like to link to this week’s edition of YA for Grownups and applaud it for asking current authors to talk about what they’re recommending for summer reading. 

• Blogger/reviewer Wendy Darling finally says something about the really crummy interaction she had with an author and agent that started 2012 off to a rocky start for book reviewers. I really wish she’d broken this up into a couple of posts because there are two big things discussed: the actual interaction and fallout thereafter, and then there’s the discussion of what it is book blogger reviewers DO and should be ABLE to do. I’ve been really burned out on blogging — reviews in particular — lately and have been very open about this. Her post nails a few reasons why I’ve felt that way. For the most part, book blogging is a thankless thing with immense pressure to produce and produce quickly. And when you do put your thoughts out there, sometimes what you get back makes you regret doing it either responses which are completely inappropriate or responses which just…don’t exist at all. Ahem. Anyway, read Wendy’s post. Oh, actually, my other comment about her post is this — while this incident is clearly an instance of an author and agent putting people to task about down voting her review, I think it’s important to remember that what people choose to do is their own prerogative. If an author suggests down voting reviews, for example, the people who do that are choosing to do it themselves. That’s not authorial control.

• Have you ever been charged with creating a classroom or organizational library and have no idea where to start? Check out Sarah’s post about how she built her classroom collection, how she organizes it, and what she does to let her kids have at the books. Sarah has another post you should read if you’re interested in teen perspectives on covers. A couple weeks ago, she shared what her YA Lit students thought of YA covers; this time, she asks her freshmen their thoughts.

• Over at Pub(lishing) Crawl, Mandy Hubbard talks about the backdoor to publishing, which is through working with a packaging company. I have a lot of opinions on book packaging companies. I understand them and think they have a real value to many writers as a means of getting a foot in the door and honing skills. But I always question the passion behind the books and stories themselves. They’re products, rather than art. And something about that makes me sad.  

• Read this one for 2 reasons: gay relationships are called dark and edgy (unintentionally, I’m assuming) and because it doesn’t say YA books are ruining our world. 

• The nearest chain bookstore to me is about an hour drive, but we have a really neat used book store in town I don’t get to check out nearly enough. I went last weekend with my best friend, though, because we’re both huge cookbook nerds, and we spent a good portion of the morning poring over vintage, outdated, and downright disgusting ones. So when I saw this post of 11 Vintage Cookbooks on Mental Floss, I fell in love. I’m a tiny bit disappointed neither of my books my friend ended up buying made the list, because this and this are GEMS.

• YALSA apologized for locking down their award lists without telling anyone. It’s sincere and pretty transparent, which I appreciate, but their arguments are still terrible and illogical. The comparison to a database is terrible — we pay to be members of YALSA and we pay to attend meetings where these lists are created. WE don’t get paid to make them. We PAY to make them. Also, if you gave them your email, now you’re on their campaign mailing list. Congrats.

• Greg Rucka on why he writes strong female characters. I love this because he emphasizes that being a strong female character doesn’t mean they’re not flawed. Quite the opposite. They should be flawed. But because they’re smart and savvy, they know this and work with it, rather than against it. 

• Looking for a book or two to read this summer? Amazon’s Omnivoracious has a roundup of many of the publications who have posted their own list of summer reads. I’m adding the list published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with 99 of their summer picks.

• France apparently has some scary children’s books.  

• I found this article too long to read through, but the point of it is something I’ve thought a lot about: are books getting too long?  I admit to being really turned off by the trend for very long YA books. Most of the time, it feels like too much is being packed into the story when it could be trimmed down so the story actually shines through stronger. We don’t need to know everything. Just give the essentials. For me, the perfect books are those falling in the 250-350 page range. They’re long enough to get the whole story and short enough to not bog me down in minutiae I don’t need to know. Of course, this isn’t always the case because there are many long books I’ve enjoyed, but this trend of length is starting to wear on me.

• When I lived down in Austin, Texas, my favorite place in the city to go to was BookPeople. I can’t express how much I miss that book store. Turns out, they’ve started a blog run by their teen corps, and it is worth keeping an eye on if you have an interest in what teens who read think about books.  

• This is not even book related but I am sharing because I am in shock! What happened to the original Power Rangers? This show was my life when I was younger and may have been the reason my best friend broke her arm with me once. Why the shock, you ask? Well, one of the cast members died in 2001. And I’m just hearing about it now. Is it now insensitive to slide in that I’m hoping a copy of the DVD of the original episodes (due out in August) shows up at my house? Because I do.  

That should cover things for a couple of weeks, I think. And as a note, we’re going to be running our Twitterview a little late this month, to account for taking part in the Summer Blog Blast.

Let’s call this edition of interesting links something to the tune of “everyone’s got covers on the mind” because there are a lot of posts about cover trends lately. Of course, that’s not the only thing that has been talked about. There’s been a lot of good things to read in the last couple of weeks. I’m serious in saying there is a good day’s worth of reading here.

• So let’s start with cover pieces. First, the incredible Kate Hart has a breakdown of the 2011 YA cover trends, which includes everything from the percentage of covers featuring girls drowning to the percentage of covers that feature people of color. There are pie charts and graphs. This is the kind of post you have to read in chunks because there is so much here. 

• Once you spend a little time there, check out this post by Justina Ireland in defense of the girl in the pretty dress and the post by Jennifer Hubbard about extreme cropping and headless models. I know I’ve talked about the messages these book covers send (especially when you look at them all in one place, at once), and I don’t disagree with either Ireland nor Hubbard about how sometimes these covers DO work or ARE done well.

• Here’s a collection of YA covers out this spring, rounded up by the folks at The Enchanted Inkpot and categorized. Not much in terms of reading but take a gander at them.  

• And once you read those posts and look at those covers, you absolutely need to check out Sarah Andersen’s post about what her high school students like and don’t like on YA covers.

• But wait, there’s more! Salon has an article that borders on defending the practice of whitewashing covers. I’ll leave it at that, but I am really fascinated by an experiment that Saundra Mitchell is trying with a book she’s put up on Amazon and Barnes and Noble called Breathkept. Note this was a free download on her blog, so the sales here are from those who didn’t know. The original cover features a girl of color, but now Mitchell’s switched it up to a shadowy couple. She wants to see if there’s a sales difference. Bonus: she has a few more links about whitewashing worth checking out. 

• The Salon piece above talks about a study where people had different perceptions of gay people after reading a novel featuring one (especially when they didn’t know the character was homosexual). It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon called “experience taking.” There’s a longer piece about that over at MSNBC’s website worth reading. I tend to have this happen to me a lot — but most of the time, that change in perception is short lived. I can probably count on one hand the number of books that have truly changed my thinking on a grand level. Not that I don’t think it’s possible. But I wonder how much has to do with the quantity of what you read, too. Are those who don’t absorb literature more likely to be impacted or maybe are those who read a lot less likely to notice as much? 

• Ever wonder how books end up on the New York Times Best Seller list? Veronica Roth will tell you eight things you probably did not know on YA Highway. I didn’t realize how little impact pre-ordering had, and I have to say I now feel a little less like I’m as supportive as I try to be by doing pre-orders. 

• Breakfast at Tiffany’s is going to become an ebook. But that wasn’t really what I was most interested in here. It was the little nugget at the bottom about how there will be a rerelease of Capote’s In Cold Blood. I wonder if they’ll change the cover (which I love so much).

• Speaking of my man Capote, he and I have the same cocktail preference with our mutual love for screwdrivers. Here’s a fun piece on 10 authors and their favorite drinks. I’m, of course, bummed only one woman is represented.  

• I’m really tired of the entire 50 Shades of Grey controversy/phenomenon/obsession/discussion, but I had to post this. Without doubt, Becky’s round up and thoughts on the issue are the best I’ve read and also the most important for any librarian dealing with challenges on this book to consider, too. The last paragraph made me cheer: “My final comments are for those libraries out there who are pulling the book.  You are an embarrassment.  Stick to your guns people.  If you bought the book, you had your reasons.  Don’t pull it off the shelf.  Stand up for yourselves.  If you don’t have enough respect for yourself to do it on your own, use the arguments in my post to help you. And if you are someone who is pulling the book, you might as well quit.  You are not upholding your end of the bargain as a public librarian anymore.”

• The website’s reputation is questionable, but the post was interesting enough to merit a mention. Here are the top 50 most influential books of the last 50 or so years. Note these don’t mean the best, but rather, they were among the most influential for one reason or another. I think I’ve only read six of these titles. 

• Teens are so freaking smart and well spoken, especially when they’re treated with respect by adults, aren’t they? It’s amazing how the second they’re given the chance to say what they’re thinking that sometimes they are way more intelligent than any adult, too. Here’s a great example of a teen blogger talking about books and reading and why he blogs from the Huffington Post.

• Are libraries a feminist issue? I left after reading it wondering if the writers were too limiting in their perspective of the role of libraries, and since this was a piece centered on UK libraries, they didn’t talk about how the bulk of public libraries in the US were founded by women or women’s groups. I thought about those two things for a long time, and I was pleased when I went back to see they’d commented about how this wasn’t an exclusive issue of feminism but one thing feminists should think more about. I’d say then they hit the nail on the head.

• Ever thought about the different types of reviewers there are? Here’s a funny post about book reviewed nomenclature. On a more serious note, another piece that hit the rounds this week was about book reviewers and what value they serve. The claim is that Amazon’s really leveled the playing field for reviews and probably in a good way. Hey, look. The Atlantic also talked about the internet and book reviews. This was a tl;dr for me, but that’s because it’s The Atlantic, so I didn’t try too hard, either. I guess part of me doesn’t CARE about these sorts of things as someone who does write and share book reviews. I do it because I like doing it and not because I feel like I have to prove anything to the industry.

• Separately, I’m going to plug this gem of a blog post from Sarah Moon about what value she gives to the book world through her reviews. I know I write with my experience and knowledge as a librarian at heart, but I have huge respect for so many of the bloggers who aren’t doing this with any professional goals in mind but rather because they simply love books (and I love books too, but I can’t separate my own experiences from what I do, either).    

• It’s possible there’s a lack of religion in YA fiction, and I know I’ve seen this topic pop up a number of times recently. But I’m pointing to this one specifically because it sure seems to make the problem look more troublesome than it is. The issue is this: the challenge of religion and spirituality is in a lot of YA books, but just because it’s not the central force doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I can think of a number of books off the top of my head not on this list that highlight the issue of religion and faith in YA fiction (including one of my all-time favorites). Religion hasn’t and isn’t disappearing in YA. It’s just being explored in much different ways and in ways that work toward showcasing how many Things make up a Character. They’re way more than simply their beliefs in a higher power, even if it is a huge part of who they are. 

• The New Yorker is starting a book blog. I’ve typed and erased commentary a few times, so I’m just leaving it at that.

• Any author trying to pitch to a book blogger needs to read this great post by Steph Su. It’s geared toward self-pubbed authors specifically, but many of the things she lists are things even traditionally published authors do in their pitches that are automatic turn-offs for me. 

• Just how is a book born? The snarktastic infographic here.   

It’s killing me not to sign off this post with “that’ll cover it.”