Read Alert

The American trade journal Publishers Weekly have posted their best of 2009. Scroll down their list and see Shaun Tan’s Tales From Outer Suburbia taking its place in a list dominated, unsurprisingly, by North American writers.
The US cover looks like this.

The venerable New Yorker looks at picture books in the ‘confrontation-averse age of parenting‘.
Like the novel or the sitcom, the picture book records shifts in domestic life: newspaper-burrowing fathers have been replaced by eager, if bumbling, diaper-changers. Similarly, the stern disciplinarians of the past—in Robert McCloskey books, parents instruct children not to cry—have largely vanished. [...]

Yesterday Australian poet Les Murray was spied in a Melbourne cafe. (He was reading and drinking a blood orange soft drink.) So I guessed he hadn’t won the Nobel Prize for Literature otherwise he would have been in Stockholm drinking champagne. It is Herta Muller who has won the Nobel Prize this year. Herta, who? [...]

Roger Sutton of the Horn Book (via MT Anderson) points to this article from the New York Times about the improvements in reading test after students were allowed to choose their own books.
The story canvasses many of the conversations we have with teachers and librarians about allowing young people a voice in what they read [...]

Michelle Griffin* in The Age sees Coraline, out soon sees Neil Gaiman’s Coraline , out now as an animated film, as a story for parents as much as for young people.
I don’t think anything will replace the experience of reading this haunting little novel. Which makes me wonder, when will cinema start doing its own [...]

Recent Reading Matters guests John Green and Bernard Beckett talk to Sarah le Strange at Radio National’s The Book Show about writing YA. Good people to take advice from. You can hear the conversation here.

Time is running out if you are planning to attend Reading Matters but have not yet booked. There is currently less than 30 places for the conference.

The conference includes MT Anderson, Mal Peet, John Green, Cathy Cassidy, Bernard Beckett and a special keynote address from scientist and historian Tim Flannery. You can see the full [...]

Tim Pegler is in the doghouse, that is to say, he is writer-in-residence at insideadog this month.
Right now Tim wants to know, what ever happened to the movie of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist?
Tim is the author of the excellent Game as Ned and was a champion contributor to CYL’s Booktalkers session on Tuesday. Subscribers [...]

Stephen King has publicly rubbished Stephenie Meyer, claiming that “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.” Me-ow!
And the claws are also out on the Colbert Show, where Stephen Colbert is bitter that he hasn’t won a Newberry Award.

Colbert Report [...]

We would love to be blogging from a beach somewhere but holidays are over, the Test cricket is almost done and dusted and there are programs, projects and plans to be getting on with.
Three quick things that have come to us over the break.
Firstly, it seems that contrary to popular opinion, YA is alive and [...]