Read Alert

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? [...]

Shaun Tan’s celebrated book The Arrival has been awarded the Horn Book Special Citation for excellence in graphic storytelling.
The Horn Book is the leading American review journal for young people’s books and is edited by Roger Sutton.

Also worth noting is the Fiction and Poetry category winner. It’s Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of [...]

This is from Boyce’s review of The Knife of Never Letting Go:
If I have one quibble, it is that I think it should be sitting proudly on the shelf next to these books, rather than being hidden away in the “young adult” ghetto. There’s been a lot of fury among authors recently about the proposal [...]

Last night I presented the Older Reader’s section at the Victorian Clayton’s. Here are the five books that I picked as the best of 2008.
The Last Days
The Last Days by Scott Westerfeld is a sequel to Peeps, but not really. It’s set in the same world – New York City, around the same time – [...]

Everyone’s favourite New York Times reviewer, Dave Itzkoff, has done it again.
This, from an allegedly positive review of China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun:

I sometimes wonder how any self-respecting author of speculative fiction can find fulfillment in writing novels for young readers. I suppose J. K. Rowling could give me 1.12 billion reasons in favor of [...]

Roger Sutton, Horn Book editor gets to grips with Jaclyn Moriarty’s lastest book The Spell Book of Listen Taylor in The New York Times. I share many of his thoughts about the Listen Taylor, though ne’er so well expressed…
And Sutton says some important things about trends in YA.
“Young adult literature has been doing some growing [...]

Mike Shuttleworth gives Slam Nick Hornby’s novel for and/or about teenagers the once over in The Age.

Pam Macintyre reviews Right Book, Right Time, Agnes Nieuwenhuizen’s guide to teenage reading. Pam describes the guide as ‘a high-quality, reliable guide in which passion inspires all contributions, a passion that is hopefully contagious across a wide demographic’.
More at The Age website.
Pam Macintyre is a co-editor of Viewpoint magazine.
(Right Book, Right Time may contain traces [...]

This review from (of all places) Entertainment Weekly starts off really well. It says things like “Before I Die gutted me as no work of art has done in recent memory.”
Nice. All good. Then…
WHAM!
Unfortunately, Downham’s publisher has handicapped Before I Die by labeling it a young-adult novel, thus ghettoizing this gem to the back of [...]

Nick Earls (48 Shades of Brown, Monica Bloom) and Rebecca Sparrow have teamed up for a he-said/she-said novel. Frances Atkinson at The Age has been reading the result: Joel and Cat Set the Story Straight.