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| A scene from Mr. Library Dude’s second installment of Lego libraries. |
Here’s your (semi) regular roundup of interesting book-related posts and news from around the web. I’m keeping it short and sweet — it’s been really quiet around the book internet lately.
- One of the contributors over at Digital Book World looked at a handful of book recommendation sites and ranked them. It’s not as thorough as Leila’s amazing recommendation site testing, and it should be noted that the recommender this writer ranked highest was partially developed by a former employer she worked for. But it’s still interesting to read.
- 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.
- The time to nominate stellar librarians doing stellar things in librarianship for the 2014 Movers & Shakers award is now.
- At Book Riot, I wrote about the reasons that the internet says are why adults read YA books (and then I’ll reveal the real reason, so be prepared).
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.