A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy is a blog that focuses on teen books, reading, and TV shows like Buffy, Veronica Mars, and Forever Knight. Written by the same librarian that does Pop Goes the Library, this looks to be a blog filled with personality as well as great book recommendations.

Fabulous Fiction opens with “Eye of the Tiger” playing and lots of flashy graphics. The site is for kids who dislike reading, offering suggestions in different genres. Unfortunately, each genre features only two well-known authors, but the message boards are active and filled with additional suggestions. Visitors are also able to write reviews of books.

These bookmarks would offer a warning is an article about a Guilderland Public Library trustee who wants teen materials with racy content to be labeled with a bright orange sticker that says “PG rec.” or Parental Guidance recommended.
For my teen section, I can only imagine how many orange stickers I would need and how few of the books would be left unadorned! I think that the library director in the article makes great points about sexual content not being the only concern people may have as well as the lack of complaints she has gotten about the collection.
This is one of those horrible things that can suddenly happen in a public library when an adult feels that kids need to be protected from their own books. I only hope that the library can stay strong in the face of this and that more sensible board members and community residents will step forward and fight.

Fairies, farting fire Irish author’s imagination – Yahoo! News is a nice look at how Colfer started his Artemis Fowl series and the fame it has brought him.
“Eoin Colfer planned to write a small picture book about a lost leprechaun, but it became a fast-paced adventure about a child criminal mastermind, a fairy police squad and a farting dwarf.”

The Christian Science Monitor also has a well-rounded article on Matching boys with books. It includes a list of recommended books for high school boys as well as an in-depth look at why boys enjoy reading less than girls. Very interesting.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article on teens and blogging: Teens: It’s a diary. Adults: It’s unsafe.
It contains some interesting perspectives on the dangers of blogging for teens as well as some impressive statistics:
“Of the world’s approximately 38 million “blogs,” or self-published Web pages, 52.8 percent belong to those age 19 or younger, according to survey data from the Perseus Co., a maker of Web-surveying software. By year’s end, the firm expects the total number of blogs on the Web to reach 53.4 million.
Meanwhile, Perseus says the typical blogger continues to be a teenage girl who uses the medium primarily to communicate with five to 10 friends.”

The North Shore News has a great article about a new emphasis on early literacy by Vancouver Public Libraries. It focuses on the role of public librarians going beyond that of doing storytimes and more into teaching parents how to expose thier babies to books and language. Sounds wonderful to me!
Here is my favorite paragraph from the article:
“The interest and enthusiasm expressed both by the librarians I interviewed, and others that I have spoken to while visiting libraries, is a testament to the excellent resource we have in our community libraries. In an age where so much information comes at us electronically, it is remarkable that the connection our new babies and preschool aged children are hungry for – talking, rhyming, reading – is being offered to us by highly skilled professionals who are more than eager to help our children succeed in life.”

The BBC announced yesterday that the Children’s laureateship goes to Jacqueline Wilson. Wilson is the most borrowed author in libraries in the United Kingdom and has sold over 20 million copies of her books. She follows Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Michael Morpurgo as children’s laureate.

A profile of Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the Gossip Girl series: Gossip Girl: The New Young Adult Novel – Adolescence Plus Wealth Equals Big Sales. The article offers a look at how Gossip Girl began and as well as the fact that von Ziegesar is looking towards writing books about young mothers and turning away from young adult writing.