Welcome to anyone who is new to STACKED, having made their way over from either last week’s piece in the Wisconsin State Journal or today’s feature over at BlogHer or from any other venue in which you may have seen us. We’re so thrilled to have you stop by and we thought we’d give you a little taste of what else you can find around this blog.
While we’re primarily a blog about books and reading, especially of the young adult variety, we’ve been known to talk about book covers, about bigger issues surrounding reading/book/library culture, gender, and more. We’ve been around these parts for almost four years, and we post new content at least five times a week. Both Kimberly and myself work as librarians in public libraries. We met in grad school at the University of Texas in a YA Lit class, and we are both huge believers in Ranganathan’s Laws. It was those very laws around which we structured this blog. This is an advertisement-free blog.
We write critical reviews of books, both those we loved and those we were less enamored with as readers. We always return our focus to who the audience is for a title because even if we don’t like it, that doesn’t mean there is not an audience for the book.
We love interacting with our readers, so please feel free to comment or get in touch with us. We do our best to respond!
To get a sense of what we’ve written about, Kim and I decided to share some of our favorite posts. This is a sampler set to what you can find here:
- On being a woman and speaking your mind (avoiding the need to “be nice”), which kind of leads into another post about gender and the importance of support systems and recognition for the daily grind.
- You can get a sense of my reading tastes via my 2012 favorite reads post.
- I like to talk about book covers and cover trends. Here’s a post I wrote about some of the YA cover trends I’ve seen for 2013 books.
- We like to do series posts at STACKED, including a monthly interview with a YA author done in the style of Twitter interactions (you can see the entire archive here) and we’ve done series about horror, about contemporary YA fiction (twice), and a series about where to start if you’re new to YA fiction called “So You Want to Read YA?” We also do a biweekly roundup of interesting links throughout the internet.
- Kimberly here! While I mainly stick to book reviews, sometimes I notice trends or issues that cry out for further exploration, and I’ll discuss them in a post, such as how the Chemical Garden trilogy portrays rape. I’ve also talked about my personal preferences regarding tense, trilogies that avoid the second-book slump, and childhood favorites that don’t hold up when read as an adult. Sometimes, the best part of the discussion happens in the comments.
- Speaking of my reviews, you’ll notice that I’m a huge genre fiction reader, and I believe its literary merit is too often overlooked or trivialized, despite its recent boom in popularity. You can read about a few of my recent favorite genre reads here, here, here, and here.
- Every once in a while, I just like to have fun, such as the time I wrote a letter to readers who insist on categorizing almost any science fiction novel as a dystopia. And then there’s this cover math post, which is possibly the most fun I’ve ever had with a blog post.
Thank you so much for stopping by and we hope you continue to come back!