 |
| One of my recent displays at work, which was completely emptied out just a week later. My teens LOVE mysteries, espionage, and thrillers. |
Since last week I was out of town, I didn’t get a chance to do a proper Links of Note. But I’m going to do my best to cover everything I’ve read recently I think is worth sharing. It’s a little light because I haven’t been around the blog world catching up quite yet, so if there’s something I must see, let me know in the comments.
- Literopathy: it’s like Dear Abby but for people who want their therapy via book lists. I love this idea, and I love book list compilations, period.
- What’s it like being 13 in the year 2013? This feature from Australia is fun and enlightening for anyone who works with or loves teenagers. There is a video, but it’s worth watching.
- Have I talked about my enjoyment of Michael Cart’s pieces covering genre? Here he is talking about “New Adult” books and what might fit the category. I’m really glad to see graphic novels included in his list because I think if “new adult” really is a thing, the graphic novel format — especially graphic memoirs — is where a LOT of books fitting the need are falling.
- Gwenda Bond has a really interesting and thorough post about book packaging, including how it works, who gets involved with it, whether or not it’s evil, and more. Worth reading for anyone who is curious about this side of the book world.
- The Children’s Book Council Diversity blog delves into one of my trigger topics, which is where the fat kids have gone in kid lit. This is a topic I’m considering revisiting here sometime in the near future, but in the mean time, read this post. It’s spot on and important and good thought fodder.
- This isn’t super thorough (and one of the comments points out a huge miss), but Teen.com has a nice little piece on authors who got their starts as teenagers.
- Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s post about gender, the null hypothesis and privilege is out of this world good. I’m not linking to the John Green post that inspired it (you’ve probably read it anyway), but I love Barnes’s examination of what the claims are and her willingness to call out the question she got about her initial post on the topic.
- Peter Gutierrez talks about how shows like BEA contribute to the celebrity status and culture that surround some authors. This post is really interesting.
- The Guardian talks about how and why gendered covers may be doing a disservice to young readers. This stems out of a conversation at Australia’s Reading Matters conference.
- A couple of interesting blog posts recently popped up about the role of friendship in YA fiction. There’s this one and then this one. Both are worthwhile reading. My only comment to really add is that I think there are actually a lot of YA books that tackle friendship head on and do so in really worthwhile ways. But I say this as someone who has been working on a book about contemporary YA and has an entire chapter dedicated to friendship. It’s there. The problem is that it’s not the selling point of many books (which is hit on in those posts) and it’s not as sexy a lead to readers as a romance is. I’m not sure if that’s actual truth or something we’re simply told and led to believe.
- For fun: 12 classic books that define your summer.
- Chuck Wendig talks about 25 things that you should know about young adult fiction. I really like this — I think it’s not only an excellent primer to young adult books, but I think it’s a bigger primer to young adulthood more broadly.
- Author Laura Lam talks about the gray areas of gender and identity.
I found it interesting that neither of those two articles about friendship talked about one of the biggest books of last year, one that centered almost completely on the power of friendship–Code Name Verity. I thought it was an amazing exploration of female friendship, and it was almost completely free of romance. (There was that whiff of crush with Jamie and Maddie, but nothing overt.) Also, I found the phrase "Tamora Pierce-style romances" kind of funny…b/c I see all the romances in her books as the "best friend turning into love" kind of love stories. Even the ones that don't end up in happily ever after start off as friendships. Never mind that I totally don't read Pierce for just the romance–there's WAY more than that going on in all her series.