News & Features

This week, Library Journal/School Library Journal staffers are experiencing beauty, genius, loss, love of mankind, love of New York, and learning how to be good undergraduate researchers. It’s what we’re reading in the last days of September 2013. Ian Chant, Associate News Editor, LJ I just finished Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (Dell), [...]

October is Connected Educator Month (#ce13). The CEM calendar is packed with opportunities for growth and, of course, connection. The Starter Kit, by Sheryl Nussbaum Beach and Powerful Learning Practice, in collaboration with the Connected Educators initiative, is packed with links and videos and takes a 31 days approach for this special month, giving you one simple way to [...]

In September… …we number-crunched the Newbery Medal. I broke out the calculator and learned a few things about John’s Bronze (just a new Newbery Medal nickname I’m trying out). So You Want to Win the Newbery (Part I) So You Want to Win the Newbery (Part II) What Are the Chances You’ll Win Another Newbery? [...]

In order to see what kids are lining up to read, The Bill Clinton of Children’s Literature (John Schumacher) and I host a monthly gallery of hold shelf pictures. This month the gallery (including my Jane Mount-inspired illustrated shelf) is over at John’s blog Watch. Connect. Read. Click here to hear on over and have [...]

Two Boys Kissing, David Levithan Alfred A. Knopf. August 2013 Reviewed from ARC Sometimes a book packs such an emotional whammy that every other aspect becomes irrelevant to 99.9% of the readers. Two Boys Kissing is seriously packing. Before I go any further, a disclaimer: I just read this for the first time last week. [...]

The exciting news this week was that I got to host a couple panels regarding Banned Books (it being the week of ‘em and all).  The first was at the Brooklyn Book Festival with David Levithan, Francesca Lia Block, and Lauren Myracle.  I then cannibalized my own questions and used them in this, a Google+ [...]

In a quick reversal of its position on Kindle lending, Penguin on September 26 loosened the terms of its renewed agreement with OverDrive, announced only the day before. The publisher has agreed to allow library patrons to download ebook titles wirelessly via OverDrive’s “Get for Kindle” function instead of, as initially announced, first downloading titles to a computer, and then side-loading those titles to their Kindle classic or Paperwhite using a USB cord.

Young adult author Patty Blount was inspired to write her debut novel Send after her son was bullied, and was then accused of being a bully himself. Blount has come to realize that "perception is the root of most bullying."

The books come by the hundreds almost daily. Boxes dropped off from yoga clubs, suburban book drives, and schools to be handed out at the Mighty Writers Street Libraries—pop-up libraries recently launched in Philadelphia to offer books to the city’s students and parents who watch as their access to titles diminish.