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Rebecca Stead’s latest book, Liar & Spy, features an entertaining (and educational!) subplot about the sense of taste. Main character Georges’ science class participates in a taste-test experiment that Rebecca, while reminiscing with me for a Talks With Roger interview, remembers from her own school days: Roger: Is that a real thing, that taste test? [...]
I asked for your thoughts on Anna Karenina earlier today but have since discovered that there’s something wrong with the comments feature throughout the website. Comments aren’t posting. We’re working on it. But since I have you on mute, I thought I might share a few thoughts. Team Renesmee. Boy books are usually girl [...]
The other night, Pam and Richard and I were talking about Anna Karenina, which they had read and I am reading. Richard was making what seemed to me a very cogent point about the novel, that Anna seems less the focus than are the men surrounding her. Pam was partially agreeing, partially not; then as [...]
I’m enjoying PW’s discussion of “The Top Ten Most Difficult Books.” (I’ve read some of most of them but haven’t finished any.) Could we make such a list of children’s books? We’d have to wrestle with the problem that difficulty in a children’s book is grounds for many to not consider it a children’s book, [...]
Here I am wandering amidst the wonder that is Diane Landry’s Knight of Infinite Resignation (which made me a lot happier than it did the artist if the title is anything to go by), on display at Mass MoCA as part of their “Oh, Canada” exhibition. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a [...]
Off for some culture in the Berkshires; The Elephant Man and Far from Heaven today and Horn Book cover model Bill T. Jones tomorrow night.
The following books will receive starred reviews in the September/October issue of The Horn Book Magazine. This Not My Hat; by Jon Klassen (Candlewick) Machines Go to Work in the City; by William Low (Holt) Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins) Penny and Her Doll; by Kevin Henkes (Greenwillow) [...]
Veteran YA novelist Caroline B. Cooney is providing the keynote address for School Library Journal‘s upcoming virtual conference, SummerTeen: A Celebration of YA Books, and I thought this would be a good time to ask her about her electronic life–via email, of course. Roger Sutton: Your latest novel The Lost Songs (Delacorte) relies on [...]
Lolly has designed a beautiful PDF of our annual summer reading list–please download and distribute as you will. I hasten to add that this is the good kind of s.r.l., one designed for pleasure reading, not to Improve you. I’m currently shuttling between (among?) Anna Karenina, William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone [...]
I was out for a run the morning of the 4th when a squadron of Blue Angels came zooming across the sky in formation. The contrast between the Olmsted-ordered beauty of my surroundings (see above, near Ward’s Pond in Jamaica Plain) and the high-tech menace above made me feel like I was in The Giver. [...]
Back from ALA (and vacation) and it’s already becoming a blur. In Anaheim, I spent the weekend at the booth five-questioning twelve award winners and honor book recipients, each interview fine but in toto too many; we videotaped them this year thanks to the mad skills of Guy Gonzalez and Mike Berse and will be [...]
Yesterday, Shane Evans had me making music noises like the young people do these days; who knows what’s in store today? Come to the Horn Book booth and see. (By the way, our guys Guy and Mike have been video-recording all of the interviews, and we’ll be posting them to our YouTube channel after the [...]
The Live Five interviews begin at 10:00AM this morning with Thanhha Lai, National Book Award and Newbery Honor winner for Inside Out and Back Again. (The whole schedule can be found here.) I think I’m ready–about fifty-four of the sixty questions I’ll be asking this weekend are completed and I know the missing six will [...]
1. What are the Live Five Questions? Live Five Questions sprang from the “Five Questions for . . . .” feature in Notes from the Horn Book, our monthly e-newsletter. A few ALA’s ago, we took this feature live, conducting brief, five-question interviews with authors and illustrators at the Horn Book booth on the exhibit [...]
Rebecca Stead proved herself a thoroughly good sport in joining me to announce the winners of the 2012 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards last Thursday afternoon at BEA in New York. (More pics here.) This was the first time we attempted to make any kind of a production out of the announcement, and the fact that [...]
If you’re coming to BEA, please join 2010 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Rebecca Stead and me on Thursday as we announce the winners of the 2012 BGHB Awards, live with champagne, in the Librarians’ Lounge (booth #2148), 1:00PM, at the Javits Convention Center. If you can’t be there, we (fingers crossed and prayers sent [...]
Simmons grads Kristin Cashore, Deborah Kaplan, Rebecca Rabinowitz, and Amy Stern recorded their living-room discussion of E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Watch and learn. It’s making me remember the scene–also a living room– in 1978 where I had to present my senior thesis to all the other graduating English majors and our [...]
it was quite a shock when Peter D. Sieruta’s brother John posted Saturday evening on Peter’s Facebook account that Peter had suddenly died the previous night, complications from a fall, it seems. Peter was already a Horn Book legend when I came here in 1996; he was among the first reviewers for Anita Silvey’s new [...]
The following books will receive starred reviews in the July/August issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Jimmy the Greatest!; by Jairo Buitrago; illus. by Rafael Yockteng; trans. from the Spanish by Elisa Amado (Groundwood) Bea at Ballet; written and illustrated by Rachel Isadora (Paulsen/Penguin) A Home for Bird; written and illustrated by Philip C. [...]
The news about Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb squelching Opera News is pretty juicy stuff. While I can sympathize with the man’s wincing at criticisms of his productions in his magazine, surely he must have known that there’s no way the new policy is going to do any favors for him or the Met. [...]
