In between the long working days, Gareth and I have been trying to find an affordable venue for our wedding, which we hope will happen in August or September of next year. This is only step one in a LONG list of things we'll have to accomplish in order to pull off this ritual and already we're starting to understand why people choose to just elope! Nevertheless, we're sticking with it. And not losing any heart over the matter, DESPITE the number of dreary similes and metaphors that crop up whenever someone on the web or in a book mentions the topic of wedding planning. Until earlier this week I thought every person on the planet compared planning a wedding to "working a second job" or "launching a military operation" or "assembling a big puzzle" or [insert cliché here]. 

Gareth, though, recently described things this wa...Read More

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Each year the Association of Booksellers for Children puts together a fantastic full-color catalog of books selected by our group's members as some of our favorites of the year. The front cover sports the bold heading ABC's Best Books for Children and features a book-related illustration from a book published during that particular calendar year. (Click on the photo at right.) This year's cover illustration comes from Ladybug Girl, by Jacky ...Read More

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I find the whole "book trailer" trend pretty interesting. Using a visual media to sell someone on the idea that they'd like to read a (typically) not-so-visual book strikes me as a bit odd, and potentially misleading. If a book trailer is done too well, you want to "see the rest of it" -- in other words, you start wishing you could watch the non-existent "movie" of which you've just been given a clip. If a book trailer is done too poorly you don't want to read the book at all. One of my favorite novels of the year, for example, is one I might never have read if I'd actually believed it was half as clichéd and cheesy as the trailer that was created for it. (Ugh.)

But every now and again I see a book trailer or ad that impresses me. And today that ad was this one, which was c...Read More

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It's time again for another question copied from the walls of our our store's "graffiti stall."

Put yourself in the role of literary matchmaker: What two characters, from two different books, would you pair with one another?

My favorite of the responses currently scrawled on our wall is probably Encyclopedia Brown + Hermione Granger. Or possibly Oskar Schell (of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer) + Matilda (of, of course, Matilda by Roald Dahl).

But I'll bet you can do better.

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Here at the store, my fellow children's booksellers and I have been putting a lot of thought into our holiday gift lists, which we assemble in similar format to our summer reading lists in a big combined booklet for all ages (adults, teenagers, and kids). The high school portion of the list is often the piece that I find hardest to put together. Since the focus is on books that would make good gifts, we try to choose newer books (usually hardcovers) and try also to make the bulk of our selections ones that parents or grandparents or long-distance aunties will think sounds appealing.

This gets tricky with the high school set. Since so many adults are oblivious to the existence of, let alone the quality of, good young adult literature, I feel compelled each y...Read More

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Last month, I posted a write-up by my friend and colleague Janet Potter about her adventures as a bookseller in Dublin, where she recently completed a degree in journalism. Janet has since been working at Atlantis Books on an island in Greece, where, as you'll see, she's having a really, REALLY rough time of it. (Lucky sot.)

...Read More

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As an active member of the New England Children's Booksellers Advisory Council, I can tell you we've had a many a meeting in which the topic of conversation has come around to author events: how to attract the big ones, how to get on publicists' radars, how to remind the book world that there are (believe it or not) a LOT of active bookstores in New England that could draw a sizeable crowd to children's or YA author events.

For a long time our little corner of the country has been bypassed by many publishers when drawing up touring grids for their children's and YA authors and illustrators. When they do send these folks north, they typically send ...Read More

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One of the great pleasures and/or advantages to working in a bookstore is getting to see the New York Times Book Review a week early. This particular week that pleasure was doubled for me, though, as I was SO truly, TRULY pleased with the selections for the New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2008!! Many of them are books I've been raving about for months and it's so gratifying to see them receive this level of recognition.

A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams
illustrated by Melissa Sweet, written by Jen Bryant (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers)
You regular ShelfTalker readers have already heard me state ...Read More

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Earlier this year the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association asked author Jonathan Evison to write a short bookstore-themed fictional piece for their October newsletter, Footnotes. Jonathan is the author of the novel All About Lulu (Soft Skull Press, July 2008) and the founder and moderator of the Fiction Files, an online forum for literary discussion. 

With Jonathan's permission I'm reprinting the piece he wrote for the PNBA he...Read More

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After yesterday's momentous election, we've got a new President heading into office. If you could give Barack Obama ONE BOOK to read before he takes the helm, what would it be?

Think carefully. Choose wisely. Comment here.

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Since everyone has (or should have) politics on the brain today (VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!) I thought I'd go the completely opposite route, topic-wise, and serve up some short, sweet humor, in the form of one really silly sentence that will remain silly no matter who's in the White House. 

This silly sentence comes from the delightfully ridiculous chapter book Sensible Hare and the Case of Carrots (Putnam, February 2008) by Daren King, who also authored the delightfully ridiculous chapter book ...Read More

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In an August post I asked what character you'd most like to see in the White House. While I was visiting Tenacre Country Day School recently, and admiring the students' book-inspired pumpkins, I had the pleasure of seeing which book characters the school's fifth graders would most like to send to Washington. Wonderfully cre...Read More

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