Great news for Alex Rider fans!  Author Anthony Horowitz says that there will probably be three more books to follow the just-released Snakehead, the seventh book in the series.  However, it looks like there will be no film series, because of earning issues with the first film which Horowitz puts down to distribution issues.

The Horn Book has released its annual list of recommended holiday titles.  This is always a welcome list, helping to wade through the large number of holiday titles each year.  Even better, Horn Book puts it out early enough to make it useful and get the books into the library in time for the holidays.

I have already read a couple of these.  Minerva Louise on Christmas Eve continues the fun of the perpetually bewildered chicken, this time with a holiday theme.  If you loved previous Minerva Louise books, try this one out.  Perfect for quite small children to enjoy.  And I just completed Little Rabbit’s Christmas, another in a series of books, that is charming and cozy.  Perfect for reading with a cup of cocoa and a fire blazing.

The Battle of the Labyrinth will continue the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan!  The fourth in the series, it will be released in May of 2008.  Take a look at that great cover and plan on ordering this for your library!  What fun to have another fantasy series that flies off of the shelves all on its own.  But even better, it’s a great series filled with action and humor, so librarians can be confident putting it into the hands of children and teens.

Madonna’s new English Roses Book series launched yesterday.  The new series is aimed at an older age, tweens.  There is an elaborate website filled with the art of Jeffrey Fulvimari where you can scroll through the different English Rose girls and discover just how cardboard and stereotypical they are.

Now that Harry Potter fans have their hot hands on the latest book and the excitement is still tangible in the air, what should they read next?  NPR has a nice piece on exactly this where two children’s lit experts offer their lists of likely hits with the Potter crowd.  It does my heart good to see so many great fantasy series listed.  I was going to list my favorites included on the lists, but my list got far too long.  Let’s just say that any reader whether they are a Harry Potter fan or not can’t go wrong with the books here.

Oh yes, I did spend a blissful weekend devouring the new Harry Potter.  I am not commenting here because people have to really read it for themselves and I don’t want any spoilers.  Feel free to add comments about your own favorite after-Harry reads, but I won’t publish any comments with spoilers. 

Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, is writing a novel for middle-graders.  The book, George’s Secret Key to the Universe, will be published this fall.  I look forward to handing this one to my son who is fascinated by quantum physics. 

I missed the fact that Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney was published first online!  Very cool!  You can read this Yahoo! article about its success when it launched on Funbrain.com.  The article says that it may be one of the most widely read new children’s books with 40 million reading it on Funbrain!  It is now available in print, and when I took a copy home for my 10-year-old son, he finished it in one sitting.  This is one that definitely belong on a list of books to hand to boys.

Nancy Pearl, the famous model for the Librarian Action Figure and wonderful speaker on behalf of reading, has published a new book.  Previously she had done a couple of books for adults filled with recommended reads.  Now she has written Book Crush, a book filled with over 1,000 recommended reads for children and adults. 

We can all cheer one paragraph in the article about the book:

“There’s no rhyme or reason” why some books become best-sellers while
other, better contenders languish, she said. She prefers to highlight
“books under the radar that if life were fair, would be read.”

Don’t we all have examples of that!