We’re gearing up for a week-long series on reader’s advisory this month — not next week, but likely the week after — so I thought I’d share one of my own displays above. It doesn’t really look like that anymore because it’s been picked through (an awesome problem to have) but one thing I love about reader’s advisory is how easy it is to pick up on something small and run with it. So here, authors with ties to Wisconsin or books set in Wisconsin. 

Here’s a roundup of interesting reads from the last couple of weeks. Many of these are longer pieces, so sit back, grab a coffee or two, and enjoy. 

• An interesting piece in the New Yorker about female beauty and literature. I hope someone tackles this subject from a YA perspective, as opposed to an adult literary perspective, at some point because it’s fascinating. 

• What does your favorite Babysitter’s Club character say about you? Not naming mine, but I will say about half of it is right and the other half is not. 

• Malinda Lo wrote a series of posts on LGBTQ in YA this week which are absolutely necessary reading. I particularly liked this post on “Coming out 2.0.”

• Are you a book blogger who has been doing this for a while or a former book blogger who has stopped? Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness has a survey for you to take on blogger burn out and more. 

• NPR had an interesting piece on what it is that’s terrifying teens today, as seen through YA fiction. I wish it had a little more to it and talked a bit more about realistic fiction, but this is a solid and fascinating read. 

• So this isn’t book related at all but it’s too neat not to share. Here’s what the Monopoly properties look like in real life. 

• While this is from a British source, it’s worthwhile reading and thinking. Here’s a discussion and book list for black girls, and why it is we need more books that empower them. 

• The Belle Jar is one of my favorite blogs. Every post she writes knocks it out of the park, and this one on tips for writers is no different. 

• I didn’t know how much I needed a post about literary magazines geared for YA fiction until I read this post over at YA Highway. I knew about YARN, but I did not know about many of the others here. Go check it out — and if you’re not in it for the writing angle, be in it for the fact it’s a resource for YA readers to find more to read. 

• What are the awards and recognitions in librarianship? Here’s a thorough look at it over at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, which refers to the excellent piece Val Forrestal wrote last month. 

• Don’t forget to nominate books for consideration in this year’s Cybils. The nominating period is open through October 15 — and I’m going to try to write up a post before then with titles that you can nominate if you have not done so by that point. Kim is serving this year on the second round of panels for YA Speculative Fiction. 

For some reason, our blog design isn’t playing nice with our giveaway box any more, so I had to take it down. I haven’t figured out a solution yet, but in the mean time, you have a chance to win Trish Doller’s Where the Stars Still Shine through the end of next week and a chance to win Jason Vanhee’s Engines of the Broken World through the end of the month. 

Also, if you’re a YALSA member and can help me out by signing my petition to get on the Printz ballot, I’d be so grateful. 

In addition to my teasing about a reader’s advisory week, I should also tease that I’ve got a contemporary YA week all set up to run in November and I am so excited about it. I took a long look at the ideas you suggested for topics you’d like to see addressed and merged them with some of the ideas I’ve been thinking about — and the slate of guest writers and topics is, I think, really great. There will be something for everyone. 

If you’ve read anything great in the last couple weeks I may have missed, I’d love to know in the comments. 

• Librarian Valerie Forrestal wrote an excellent piece about redefining success in one’s career, particularly in a field like librarianship where honors and recognition can be contentious things. But this isn’t just for librarians. This piece has fantastic advice for anyone who works. 

• Did you watch Daria when it was on TV? Because I did. I love this book list created by someone over at Goodreads which highlights all of the books Daria either read or talked about on the show. 

• Are you reading YA Interrobang? It’s a weekly online magazine started by Nicole of WORD for Teens, and it’s fantastic. New issues are on Sundays — put it on your weekly reading rotation. 

• How about YA authors who write or have written for television? Here’s a roundup of a few! 

• For fun: if you’re listening to Welcome to Night Vale, I hope you’ve seen these incredible maps of what Night Vale might look like. 

• Liz Burns has a great post about sexism and technology and how we possibly introduce girls into both. 

And if you’re in or near Austin, Texas next weekend, you should come out to the Austin Teen Book Festival. I’ll be there, and Kimberly likely will be, too. 

• I haven’t yet read David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing — I brought it home to read soon, though — but I really like this reflection on the 10 year anniversary of Boy Meets Boy and how much has and hasn’t changed in our culture since its publication. 

• Everyone has posted something about YA book to film adaptations lately, but I think the one over at SLJ is really great. I didn’t realize some of the books she mentioned were being adapted (like Trash for instance). Worth the read. 

• Litchfield meets Stoneybrook, otherwise known as how the show Orange is the New Black is similar to The Babysitter’s Club. Not only is this fun, it’s actually pretty spot-on. 

• There is a really interesting two-part series over at The Paris Review about keeping a notebook. Part one is here and part two is here. I’m a rabid notebook keeper, and I have been forever. And it’s not just writing things down in notebooks; I keep those notebooks too. I am much less a narrative notebook keeper and far more a list notebook keeper. 

• For fun, fake book covers in the style of Penguin Classics that are video game cases. 

• What are the top ten books people are embarrassed to admit they have read? There’s a Book Riot poll for that. 

• This piece over at The Millions is really great and is making me think about writing on the topic of quiet books. What are the quiet books in YA? There are a lot, and many of them are among my favorite reads. It’s not about literary pretension; it’s exactly as the author describes here — the quiet space we carve and fall into while reading a particular story. 

• Who dies in a Charles Dickens novel? There’s a chart for that. 

• Frankenstein Day! A reading list! Check it out. As I like to point out, Mary Shelley was a teenager when she wrote and published the classic. 

Over at Book Riot, I wrote up a book list that features YA novels (and non-fiction) set in juvenile detention. It’s a mix of backlist and current or forthcoming titles. 

• This job looks awesome — work for LibraryThing as social media person. You can be located anywhere. It’s so tempting. 

• Rebecca over at Crunchings and Munchings wrote up a nice booklist of “ass-kicking, sporty, competitive” characters in YA fiction. It’s a mix of new books and older titles, as well as athletic prowess and ass-kicking in other senses. 

• In case you missed this piece around the internet, here it is again: I hate Strong Female Characters. I like a lot of the points raised, but I also take issue with a number of them. I see the phrase “strong female character” substituted as an actual description of a character, but I tend to believe — and use it personally — to describe when a character has been well-written. It isn’t a depiction of their strength but instead of the fact it’s actually a full character. I realize that suggests the opposite, that all male characters are therefore strong male characters, but I use it as a means of saying exactly what I mean: the female character is strong in the story. 

• Sarah Dessen admitted in a recent blog post she did drugs in high school. I liked this response over at Bustle about how it makes her even more relatable to her core readers. I liked more, too, that it didn’t raise criticism for her or her work. It made her more real. 

• A brief history of authors who have graced the cover of Time. Ah, the lack of females persists, but to be fair, there haven’t been many authors featured at all. 

• Ever been curious about Jeff Kinney’s (author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid for those of you not already in the know) time management or work style? I hadn’t been but then I read this story and thought it was really neat. 

• How often have cities appeared in different books digitized by Google over the last 200 years? There’s a visual for that. 

• The Life Cycle of a Library Book, brought to you by a Reddit user (it’s amusing and fairly accurate). 

• This week for #readadv, we got to talking about backlist, and Sophie shared this interesting graph about new editions of books that are available from Amazon. Unless the book is very recent or out of copyright and thus new editions can be produced cheaply and easily (think about your new editions of classics), it’s likely there aren’t new copies available for purchase. 

• Why do librarians run summer reading clubs? Surely, you read the story about the Evil Librarian and the boy who reads a lot and the mess of pr that’s going down there. I have Lots of Thoughts about the situation and how it was handled. I have Lots of Thoughts about summer reading clubs more broadly, but instead, go read Liz’s post and see what others have said about the topic. 

• I’m finally going through some older stuff I have saved in a to-read folder and remembered this awesome post at The Book Smugglers about Open Road Media and their innovative approaches to publishing YA. 

On a personal note, I’m going to drop this link to a post Liz wrote about the panel she and I proposed for next year’s ALA conference. If you’d be kind enough to click over, read what we’re hoping to talk about, and then do the quick survey, I’d appreciate it.

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