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I still enjoy the illusory promise of a pastel and lovely spring as E.E. Cummings likes to imagine “where the flowers pick themselves.” Enjoy these literary explorations of the other side of a murkier April along with a spring imagined as always bright, always sunny. The Saddest Noise, The Sweetest Noise The saddest noise, the sweetest noise, The maddest noise that grows, The birds, they make it in the spring, At night’s delicious close....

I decided to find out, and spoke to numerous authors and publishers about disabled representation in the children’s book publishing industry. What I discovered is both heartening and worrying. Yes, in many respects, things are improving in terms of disabled representation in children’s books. But there are still many gaps in representation and a lack of both understanding and specific initiatives among some (though not all) publishers. The Stats On Disabled Representation In Children’s Books According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s 2019 study, only 3....

First appearing in 1956, Peyton Place blew the lid off the hypocritical conformity of small-town, postwar America. Considered the nation’s first “blockbuster” book, the novel both shocked and secretly delighted readers with its portrayal of sex, secrets, scandal, and even adultery, incest, and abortion. Selling 100,000 copies in its first month and at least 12 million more later, the book was so popular that it entered The New York Times Best Seller list a week before it was published....

First published in 2005, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld is something of an enigma—at least to me. The plot is like many other young adult dystopian novels: a girl (of course) is born into a society that overly controls and classifies its citizens. Our heroine is in line with the society’s wishes and standards until she discovers the truth behind it all and begins to fight back and work to dismantle the system....

As noted in the previous post, the Panorama Project looks at the books most frequently requested at libraries across the U.S. and breaks down the popularity by region. This snapshot is extremely intriguing, as it not only gives the top-down perspective of the current big books, but it also gives a more micro level look at which books are popular in specific areas of the country. It’s a neat means of seeing if some books are more popular in, say, the midwest than in the southeast, or in California as opposed to the northeast....

Book Riot is obviously not an exception in this matter – we are always down to tell you all about our favourite reads – and you can check out the books we held most dear to our hearts in 2021 here. The 10 Best Books Of The Year as it is currently presented by The New York Times has been going on since pretty much the beginning of the Book Review magazine, back in 1896....

However, one day while I was driving to work, I saw the license plate that made my feelings about personalized plates do a total 180. Are you ready for it? The license plate read “GR8 GTSB.” Isn’t that amazing?! Celebrating books on license plates is personalization I can get behind, and seeing that license plate inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby inspired me to think of other book titles that could be put on a license plate and look so boss with these bookish car accessories!...

The festival, which saw numerous authors also withdraw following Schrefer’s decision, was canceled. The cancelation did not come until after the organizers and host institution pushed back against the accusations of quiet censorship and homophobia. The festival’s Twitter account sought sympathy for the decision, stating they valued the feedback from authors and that they were “sorry for the thousands of children who will not experience this year’s events.” While this was happening in one corner of the state, quiet censorship was also taking hold during discussions to select the 2022–2023 Golden Sower Award nominees....

While we know what school boards do, how do we know the rest of what is necessary to elect qualified, competent individuals for school boards? What if you happen to be a person interested in running for school board? Enter The School Board Project. Thanks to the help of dozens of volunteers and partners, we’re building a massive database of every school board, school board election, and related information for anyone to access....

(Note: Nowhere in this compilation of “The Top Ten Weird Facts About Kurt Vonnegut” is “The Fact That He Wrote All His Weird Books” listed. That goes without saying, natch and natch.) 10.) He Waged War Against the Semicolon: Vonnegut’s vehement ruling on semicolons was “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” This NY Times piece is a great riff on that....

Ever since the last Barnes & Noble closed its doors in New York City’s northernmost borough on December 31, 2016, the nearly 1.5 million residents of the Bronx have been without a single bookstore. That doesn’t just mean an independent bookstore, either. That’s bookstore, full stop. For those three years, there has been no bookstore in the Bronx of any kind. Just take a moment to consider the gravity of that statement....

Yes, it’s because I love music, but it’s more than that. I kind of… think in music? I wake up with songs in my head. I hear songs in my dreams. I sing the end of my sentences (I’m so annoying). I bust out song lyrics at the end of other people’s sentences. A million things a day remind me of a song and then I just have to tell someone about it....

The other side wants more complex representation that explores uncomfortable subject matter and conflict. They want queer characters to be flawed, complicated, and face conflict. This faction wants queer media that pushes the envelope and goes to dark places, including horror stories. They might watch something like Killing Eve, but they likely seek out indie books and TV shows. The problem, of course, is that these are not opposing views at all, and there’s no reason they have to be in conflict....

Mason Trollbridge was a slum kid who came of age during the Depression. Decades later, he came into the Flash/Wally West’s life when Wally was at a particularly low ebb. He’d won millions in the lottery and then lost it in a stock market crash (probably this one), then he lost his powers and his girlfriend, leaving him with a mountain of debts and a clingy, manipulative mother. (To be fair, her husband had just tried to kill her....

If you’re like me, though, that interest was somewhere derailed: you chose English as an interest over science (because focusing on both really is not encouraged), or you heard that college astronomy courses were a misery, so you relegated yourself to a once-a-year peer through someone else’s telescope, sighted and focused by someone more in the know. You should have relished in the science when it sparked your interest, but: maybe on your next go ’round the sun....

Alice Hoffman’s Bible-adjacent (for lack of a better word, since the story of Masada isn’t in the Bible) The Dovekeepers sparked my interest in Biblical retellings and spin-offs, which I find much more compelling. Whose voices don’t we get in the original text that we might get in a retelling? What insights and stories can someone add to the traditional stories? When I was making this list, I did notice that a lot of retellings out there leaned on the religious/inspirational side, rather than the general fiction side, although I’ve tried to keep most of the books on the general fiction end — as in, no proselytizing or overly religious text — with more focus on the storytelling aspect....

Wealth. Power. Murder. Magic. Alex Stern is back and the Ivy League is going straight to hell in the sequel to the smash bestseller Ninth House by #1 New York Times bestselling author and creator of the Grishaverse Leigh Bardugo. This information blew my tiny little mind. I talked my poor mother’s ear off from the time she picked me up from school till bedtime that day, so baffled and amazed by the concept of a place one could go to borrow books!...

Voice Lessons will be available on October 8, 2019. Be sure to check it out if you were a 90s kid! — Voice Chasers (@voicechasers) March 8, 2019