I’m a Reading Fool is a blog I just discovered. It is done by a teen librarian in Connecticut who rates books according to the VOYA scale for both quality and popularity. Sweet!

The Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) has a great new book list : Never Too Old: Picture Books to Share with Older Children and Teens.
The books are grouped into different categories that make me want to run out and gather up piles to read:
Visualize This: Books about the Arts
Notes on a Page: Books about Music
Into the Past: Books about History
Theories and Revelations: Books about Math and Science
Challenges and Change: Stories of Politics, Identity and Understanding
Seriously Surreal: Tales of (Im)possibility
Over-the-Top: Sly and Sophisticated Humor
All Cracked Up: Fractured Fairy Tales and Fables
Those last three categories really speak to me! They are the ones that have me making lists of new books to try. But I love the depth to the lists, making them useful not only to librarians but to teachers as well.

I have found an incredible resource for reading lists for kids that feature lists by genre, read alikes, recommended read alouds for all ages, themed lists, and much much more. atn-reading-lists simply rocks! They are now a wiki, so that everyone can help contribute to and update the reading lists. This is definitely a place to have bookmarked if you are creating your own lists for your library. What a resource!

A gorgeous website is at the heart of a new online book community, readergirlz.  Starting on March 1st, they will be featuring one book a month with at least one strong female character.  Hurrah! 

The divas behind this are four authors of teen books, Dia Calhoun, Janet Lee Carey, Lorie Ann Grover, and Justina Chen Headley.  Visit their MySpace page and leave comments. 

This is a great idea by a great group of strong females.  My only request is an RSS feed for new content. 

Every Sunday, the great comic strip Unshelved focuses their comic on a specific book. On February 4th, their choice was one of my faves of last year, Kiki Strike! You can see the strip here. Enjoy!

ALSC now has a wiki for children and technology: ALSC ChildTech Wiki. The use of technology with children specifically is vastly more complicated that using it with adults. There is filtering, questioning whether promoting technology moves children further from reading books, questioning whether use of technology is good for developing minds, and much more. To get a better handle on the ongoing discussion, read the wiki. If you have strong opinions of your own, contribute!

I love finding great book lists online, and this is one of them!  Weapons of Mass Instruction is a collection of anti-war books done on a wiki, so you can add any titles that you think should be part of the list.  Browse through titles by age, Spanish and Japanese titles, graphic novels, manga, and links to other online resources. 

Boy, we should be doing this for all sorts of booklists.  I love the wiki idea where we can pool together our knowledge of children’s literature.  Beware, the gears in my head are turning! 

Every Child Ready to Read Wiki is a place for librarians who are using the Every Child Ready to Read program. You can share the difference using the program has made, how to promote and train about it, finding funding, share recommended websites, and much more. Remember, it’s a wiki, so it is YOUR site. Share your thoughts and ideas and it will prosper.

I don’t know if anyone else remembers with a great fondness the Moomin books. The series was a favorite of one of my brothers when we were kids, and I have his boxed set of books and hope to hook my sons on them. Interestingly, they have a delightful website filled with all of the characters, like Little My, Moominpapa, and Moominmama. Brings me right back into childhood – oh, the power of books!
Make sure you click on the British flag at the bottom to get the English version.